The Parental Perspectives: Black Anglophone Caribbean Students Negotiation of Race and Language in K-12 Schools

Black Anglophone Caribbean immigrant students are among the thousands of immigrants who enter United State schools every year (Passel & Cohn, 2012). Even as the representation of Black immigrants from the Anglophone Caribbean increases in US schools, scholarly research is lacking regarding their educational experiences and the negotiation of race and language in K-12 educational spaces. Author (2014) asserted that racism is an inescapable marker of the Black experience in the United States and one that Black immigrants cannot and do not escape. Yet, As Black Anglophone Caribbean [other]mothers our experiences with and analysis of -isms in and outside of schools vary, and often shape if and how we help our children navigate experiences with xenophobia, language discrimination, and racism, to name a few. The reality is, the impacts of racism do not exist in a vacuum and are often intimately connected to other vectors of oppression in school (Kohli et al., 2017). Language is one such vector. Critical race theory (CRT), in which this study was grounded, pays attention to the intersectionality of race and other repressive forces related to gender, class, sexuality, and religion; however, language tends to be neglected, especially in conversations about Black people. Nevertheless, applied linguistic scholars have begun to examine how race and language are interconnected (e.g., Alim et al., 2016; Flores & Rosa, 2015; Kubota & Lin, 2009). Hence, in the context of this study, the experiences of racism and language of Black Anglophone Caribbean students served as the primary emphasis. This study employed the narratives of Black Anglophone Caribbean parents to illuminate their children's experiences in K-12 educational spaces in the United States. I conducted a total of eight (8) individual in-depth interviews to explore multiple dimensions of the parents’ narratives through counter storytelling. Counterstorytelling seeks to reveal the stories of minoritized populations who have common experiences that often go untold (Harper, 2009). As Black women transnational scholars, our identities informed the interpretation of these data. Data were analyzed through the lens of CRT and the raciolinguistic framework. CRT provided a suitable framework for this study because it not only centers race at the core of its analysis, but it also recognizes other forms of oppression, which had important implications for Black Anglophone Caribbean students (Parker, 1998). Additionally, this study drew on the raciolinguistic framework to analyze language negotiation. Using a raciolinguistic lens to examine both racial and linguistic positioning allowed us to explore how language and race come to be perceived and experienced in relation to one another (Rosa & Flores, 2015). Themes that emerged from the study challenge the notion that educational institutions are colorblind, progressive, and multicultural spaces. The parents relayed uncomfortable recollections of their children being subjected to unequal treatment, policed and criminalized, surveilled and singled out, sentenced, and silenced. They also experienced occurrences of segregation, acts of racial discrimination and microaggressions, cultural incongruence, and language discrimination. For example, one parent recounted a teacher telling her son, “Why [do you] even bother to come to school…[I] hardly have a Black boy pass through the class that turn out good.” These narratives bring voice to Black Anglophone Caribbean parents’ unheard stories and reflect a need to better support Black immigrant parents and students in addressing racial and linguistic discrimination in schools. References Alim, S., Rickford, J. R., & Ball A. F. (2016). Raciolinguistics: How language shapes our ideas about race. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Author. (2014). Flores, N. & Rosa, J. (2015). Undoing appropriateness: Raciolinguistic ideologies and language diversity in education. Harvard Educational Review, 85(2), 149-171. Harper, S. R. (2009). Niggers no more: A critical race counternarrative on Black male student achievement at predominantly White colleges and universities. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 22(6), 697-712. Kohli, R., Pizarro, M., & Nevárez, A. (2017). The “New Racism” of K–12 Schools: Centering Critical Research on Racism. Review of Research in Education. 41. 182-202. Kubota, R. & Lin, A. (2009). Race, Culture, and Identities in Second Language Education: Exploring Critically Engaged Practice. New York, NY: Routledge. Passel, J. & Cohn, D. (2012) US foreign-born population: How much change from 2009 to 2010? Washington DC: Pew Hispanic Research Center.