BlackCrit Foundations & Theorists
He is considered one of the founding figures of Critical Race Theory and introduced the idea of “interest convergence.”
Who is Derrick Bell?
This common school practice disproportionately targets Black students, contributing to the school-to-prison pipeline.
What is suspension (or disciplinary action)?
According to Coles (2020), this storytelling method allows Black youth to author themselves beyond the limits of anti-Blackness by drawing from lived experiences.
What is Black Storywork?
This concept, central to the Fugitive Literacies Collective, frames resistance as both an awareness of systemic oppression and a purposeful departure from it.
What is fugitivity?
Inspired by Robin D.G. Kelley, this concept envisions a radical future beyond current systems of oppression.
What are freedom dreams?
This scholar coined the term “intersectionality” to describe overlapping systems of oppression.
Who is Kimberlé Crenshaw?
Michael Dumas described this U.S. institution as a site of Black suffering, not just inequity.
What is schooling?
Coles (2020) explains that Black youth resist harmful school narratives by using this often-dismissed mode of expression in urban education spaces.
What is oral literacy or oral storytelling?
Fugitivity is not just about escape but also about building new ways of being together, often guided by this principle.
What is love and radical care?
According to the Collective, the act of rejecting settler colonial logics and creating new liberatory paths with youth is known as this.
What is existing beyond the entanglement of whiteness?
BlackCrit emerged as a critique of this broader legal and academic movement for failing to center anti-Blackness.
What is Critical Race Theory?
Dumas and Ross (2016) argue that even culturally “celebratory” discourses in schools can enact this force, which marks Blackness as inherently problematic.
What is anti-Blackness?
The Fugitive Literacies Collective emphasizes this principle of knowledge-sharing that values all contributions equally and resists academic hierarchy.
What is horizontal collaboration?
The Fugitive Literacies Collective argues that youth of color enact fugitivity by doing this within oppressive school systems.
What is creating counterspaces of learning and resistance?
This genre-defying form of futurist thought uses speculative practices, such as music, storytelling, and imagination, to challenge anti-Black educational systems.
What is Black futurism?
Jared Sexton’s concept of “social death” draws from this sociologist’s work on slavery.
Who is Orlando Patterson?
In Dumas’s 2016 piece Against the Dark, he critiques how policy is written to maintain this group’s comfort.
What is white comfort?
This term, described by the Fugitive Literacies Collective, refers to literacy practices that resist white supremacist norms by sustaining the languages, histories, and knowledges of racially marginalized communities.
What are fugitive literacies?
In “Enacting Educational Fugitivity,” this type of optimism allows youth and educators to imagine liberation without relying solely on resistance to whiteness.
What is grounded optimism?
Michael Dumas argues that this term describes a cultural and systemic disdain for Blackness beyond mere racism.
What is anti-Blackness?
This concept describes the ongoing impacts of slavery and the social death of Black people even after emancipation.
What is the afterlife of slavery?
This seating policy at County High School, described in Damien Sojoyner’s work, placed Black students at the back based on test scores.
What is tracked or ability-based seating?
This term describes the practice of refusing oppressive educational structures and instead creating liberatory spaces for learning.
What is educational fugitivity?
In the context of educational fugitivity, dreaming beyond the present constraints of schooling is seen as a political act tied to this concept.
What is radical imagination?
Coles (2020) argues that urban schools must do this with Black youth’s lived realities if they hope to be liberatory rather than complicit in systemic harm.
What is center Black lived experience in education?