Category Archives: Black and Brown Literacies

Kynard – From Candy Girls to Cyber Sista-Cypher: Narrating Black Females’ Color-Consciousness and Counterstories in and Out of School

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Kynard, Carmen. “From Candy Girls to Cyber Sista-Cipher: Narrating Black Females’ Color-Consciousness and Counterstories in and Out of School.” Harvard Educational Review 80.1 (2010): 30-53. Print.

In her article, “From Candy Girls to Cyber Sista-Cipher: Narrating Black Females Color-Consciousness and Counterstories in and Out of School,” Carmen Kynard, assistant professor of English at St. John’s University, takes the reader on a journey through time, place, and space. Kynard’s stated goal is to use multiple narratives that explore how digital technologies offer hush harbors for Black female college students’ social and literacy practices in what she describes as “digitized Candy Girls” (33). The phrase Candy Girls, originally adopted from the popular 80s New Edition song, described Kynard’s clique of African American girls that she attended school with and navigated various issues of Black girlhood with.

Kynard described her approach as an “unhushing narrative methodology” (48), rather than an ethnographic one, in her research because she was an active agent in the cipher’s (group’s) sense making, decision making, and survival making” (48). Kynard used narrative to “unhush” and disclose the ways in which the “hidey spaces,” or hush harbors that she and the Black female students in the cipher formed. These spaces contradicted and challenged traditional notions of literacy where the purpose of literacy is understood solely as a means to achieve money and power.

Kynard argued that her use of groups or ciphers also worked against “isolationism of Black women, and unhushing methodology works against the isolating of researcher and participant” (48). The unhushing narrative methodology “(re)values black radical female subjectivity” (48).

These methods serve a rhetorical purpose because by strategically making the private public, Kynard sought to move a deeper understanding of their hush harbor as a site for “new political lenses into, and therefore struggles against, schooling’s processes of ethnic cleansing” (48). This is no doubt necessary in light of the fact that the rest of the institution failed to “recognized” the cipher members or their activity. Kynard defined the urban, youth term “recognize” as being about “publicly acknowledging what is going on and who the central perpetrators are” (48).

“It is worth saying again: no one in the department where I met the sistas in the cyber cipher noticed their displacement or talent; nobody recognized. It didn’t have to be that way, and it can’t be that way if we intend to really dismantle the race, gender, and class hierarchies of educational institutions.” (48)

Through her unhushing narrative, Kynard shows the various ways that Black women in postsecondary educational settings assess their contexts and their positioning within them and seek to employ and/ or develop community literacy skills in order to survive and potentially thrive in in-school contexts.

Power Carter – “She Would’ve Still Made That Face Expression”: The Use of Multiple Literacies by Two African American Young Women

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Power Carter, Stephanie. “”She Would’ve Still made that Face Expression”: The use of Multiple Literacies by Two African American Women.” Theory into Practice 45.4 (2006): 352-8. Print.

In this article Stephanie Power Carter advocates for a multiple literacies approach in education. She argues that teachers who use a more traditional (autonomous) literacy approach are more likely to view underrepresented students as “powerless, failing, struggling, and/ or having low literacy abilities,” whereas teachers using multiple literacy approach were more likely to interrogate power relations, understand students of color’s use of multiple socio-cultural frame and create spaces of agency within the classroom. While Carter Power does not present any evidence to prove that the use of a multiple literacies approach could achieve these outcomes, she does present enough evidence to show the detrimental outcomes for Black girls in her study when an autonomous literacy approach was used.

Power Carter uses two examples of classroom interactions between two African American students in a High School British literature class. Through Power Carter’s examples we can see that Pam and Natonya use nonverbal communication such as “eye squinting” and eye contact in their British literature classroom to combat its hostile and oppressive environment, and to support one another. Power Carter argues that because the teacher is focused on autonomous literacy, reading and writing in particular ways that typically favor Eurocentric, male, upper-class ways of knowing, she is unaware of the multiple literacies that the girls use, misunderstands them as “passive”, uninterested in learning and succeeding, and at times disruptive. These Black girls are stripped of their power inthis scenario:

“A traditional view of literacy also fails to take into consideration that Pam and Natonya are not powerless, sitting and waiting passively. They are acting, interacting, and reacting to their environment in ways that protect them and affirm their cultural ways of knowing and meaning making.” (356)

Power Carter points out that these epistemological differences have serious consequences for underrepresented students, such as Pam and Natonya. The negative perceptions of Black girls’ literacies, such as speaking with increased volume and passion, results in othering and can foster inequitable treatment and low expectations for Black girls (353). These nondemocratic and colonial pedagogical practices leave students like Pam and Natonya more vulnerable than other students and more susceptible to failure:

“When educators do not take into consideration the multiple literacies that ultimately influence how students make meaning of the world around them and are part of their everyday lives and experiences, we run the risk of dismissing their academic potential and relegating them to a dismal future that labels them as struglling, low performing, and unmotivated… it is important that educators value alternative interpretations within the classroom context and include multiple perspectives and multiple voices in curriculum planning.” (357)

Power Carter’s study elucidates the ways in which the use of multiple literacies of students and a multiple literacies approach on the part of teachers is rhetorical.

Richardson – Hiphop Literacies

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Elaine Richardson’s Hiphop Literacies examines African American Hip-hop past, present and future and clearly locates Hip-hop discourse within the Black discourse trajectory and secondary oral contexts within the United States and abroad. Richardson’s placement of Hip-hop discourse in these contexts is significant because it highlights the fact that although Black culture and discourse are enlisted at best and hijacked at worse through increasing globalization, the people and culture that they represent continue to be vilified and manipulated for profit both in the United States and abroad. Richardson sets the stage for the complex space that Hip-hop occupies by juxtaposing two quotes at the beginning of chapter 5: AAL in German Hiphop.

“The absorption of [African American Language] into Eurocentric culture masks its true origin and reason for being … a way of talking that has taken surviving African language elements as the base for the creation of self-expression in an alien tongue” (Smitherman, 1998: 216).
“Hip-hop and rap cannot be viewed simply as an expression of African American culture; it has become a vehicle for global youth affiliations and a tool for reworking local identity all over the world” (Mitchell, 2001:2).

This dual-reality that Hip-hop occupies is fairly harmless when, as Richardson points out, terms such as “chill” and “fresh” cross over into the mainstream and are appropriated by German hiphoppas. After all, Richardson also points out in Chapter 2, Cultural Vibrations, that language borrowing occurs quite frequently between African American Hip-hop and Jamaican Dancehall. However, when a term such as “nigger” which is “a controversial term stemming from the history of slavery, racism and White supremacy” (85) is used by German hiphoppa Kool Savas, the globalization of this homegrown  discourse can become problematic. “Though he (Kool Savas) might get a pass from the German rap crowd, intimate African American rappers, and perhaps American rap fans if/ when he is collaborating … currently his usage would be problematic with unfamiliar Blacks or a Black non-rap audience,” (86). Kool Savas’ staying power on MTV’s Hitlist Germany shows that German hiphoppas are “feelin his Germanized AAL/ Hiphop flow” (86), which translates into profit/ benjamins/ scrilla. This would not present a problem if in fact the examination of the global reach of Black youth culture resiliency and creativity resulted in us doubling up our effort to nurture and elevate the culture as Richardson proposes it ought to, but that is not the case.

Richardson presents another example of the rape of Hiphop flava. She calls the merging of Hip-hop and the video game industry a double-edged sword. While the gaming industry allows young people of color to profit off of their intimate knowledge of Hip-hop, it also distorts the culture and projects a narrow view of Black people that has historically had the effect of essentializing them. Richardson sites Adam Banks (2006) and others that argue that the video game design itself is rhetorical and “Blacks have been designed into positions of exclusion” (102).

In essence, to take comedian Paul Mooney’s famous line, “Everybody wants to be a nigger, but nobody wants to be a nigger,” a step further, it can be said that everyone wants to perform Blackness in order to get paid, but nobody wants real “niggers” to get the high score on screen or in reality as also shown in chapter 4 – Lil’ Kim and Women’s AAL Practices. Nigger, in this context, meaning “Rebellious, fearless, unconventional, in-yo-face Black man (or woman)” (Smitherman 2006).

In conclusion, Richardson gives an overview of the rhetorical language and literacy practices of Hip-hop and the tremendous impact it continues to have on language in the United States and around the globe. Gonzalo Frasca (2004) argues that “the game,” should be designed so players can explore complex societal problems, and question the values and assumptions of the games (104). Richardson’s Hiphop Literacies shows that the commercial Hip-hop “Game” and the way we as a society approach it could also use a makeover.