And so we lift our gaze, not to what stands between us, but what stands before us.
We close the divide because we know to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside.
We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another.
We seek harm to none and harmony for all.
Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true.
That even as we grieved, we grew.
That even as we hurt, we hoped.
That even as we tired, we tried.
That we’ll forever be tied together, victorious. Not because we will never again know defeat, but because we will never again sow division.
Coming to This Inquiry
I came to write this book about the literate lives of Black immigrant students during my experience as a faculty advisor with responsibility for Caribbean students in a Caribbean student organization. As a Black-immigrant-transnational-single-parent-mother-scholar-educator in a large public predominantly white institution in the southwest US where I worked, I had assumed the role of guiding students in this Caribbean student organization. When I first entered the university, the organization had been dormant and therefore, Caribbean students had no formal space on the campus within which to create or find affinity. Upon realizing this challenge, I worked with the appropriate university division, with a co-advisor, and with designated Caribbean youth to revive the then-dormant organization. Focusing on revising the constitution, developing a system for governance, instituting structures for monthly meetings, and registering the organization, the youth and I got the organization ‘back up and running.’ Functioning initially as co-advisor for the organization, I met with the designated student leadership monthly to plan ongoing meetings, organize functions that were often culturally focused, and to discuss the ways in which they were engaging with other organizations on the campus and in the community to advance the mission of the organization.
I developed a close connection with the Caribbean students and over time, recognized they were challenged without a physical space that they could call their own. Up until the end of our first year together, they had provided very insightful comments about how the university might work to better facilitate students of Color, given the limited numbers currently in attendance. I thought then about how useful it would be to use the ongoing insights from their recommendations about how they wished to be supported as Black youth, to enhance the spaces in which they functioned within and beyond the university. It was during this time that the Caribbean youth, many of them newcomers to the US, accepted my invitation to be part of a research project designed to better understand their cultural, linguistic, and social challenges within and beyond the university setting as immigrant students of Color. Upon receiving approval of IRB2016-88, I invited students to voluntarily consent if they were willing to be a part of the study. Many of the students already had a rapport with me as co-advisor of the organization at the time of the study, and therefore, they felt comfortable letting me know if they were unable to join. I reassured them that there was no requirement on their part and enlisted only students who were willing and enthusiastic about becoming part of the research. Those who signed up initially but were unable or unwilling to continue the study were allowed to discontinue and reassured that there were no repercussions.
By the time the study ended, I had become the advisor for this Caribbean student organization, supporting students with monthly meetings and cultural functions, providing guidance on an individual basis, and facilitating their progression towards program completion and graduation. My role as an advisor and researcher in this space was therefore one where I drew from my experiences as a Black immigrant, transnational mother, and as a scholar-educator to provide cultural support, academic advice, and advocacy.
Insider Knowledge and Experience
As a Black immigrant literacy educator, I bring to this work my experience with immigrant and transnational as well as American students and educators in the US, and my experience as a former teacher in the Eastern Caribbean. My shared understandings of the ways in which racial, linguistic, and cultural expectations are imposed on Black immigrants to the US as well as my evolving understanding of these phenomena through my research on Black languaging in the Caribbean are also brought to bear on this work. My focus on the racialized language and on tensions arising from various expectations regarding the literacies of Black immigrant youth is informed anecdotally by a phenomenon with which certain members the Black immigrant community are familiar – the tendency to prioritize exceptional academic performance at the expense of what are often perceived as non-academic experiences – but, which, as shown in the literature, has not been sufficiently explored to date (see Ukpokodu, Reference Ukpokodu2018). At the same time, my illuminated understandings of who Black immigrants are as Black peoples have largely come to be clarified in large part as contextualized by the relationships between Black immigrants and African Americans, Africans, as well as other Black peoples and peoples of Color in and beyond the US.
As a “well-meaning” former Caribbean teacher in Trinidad and Tobago and in St. Lucia, I was all too familiar with how this tendency manifested itself in West Indian classrooms. After all, I had spent much of my time in the West Indies, after being trained in my early years of teaching to view the “[non-standardized] language of the Black child … as something to eradicate” in schools (Alim, Reference Alim, Kiesling and Paulston2005, p. 187) even while being taught its value as a cultural exercise. Like the high school teacher with whom Alim (Reference Alim, Kiesling and Paulston2005) worked ethnographically in Philadelphia’s schools, after years of teaching multilingual, multiracial, and multicultural children in the Caribbean, I was led to a similar conclusion with my students as the one she presents: “I have to say it’s kind of disheartening because despite all that time that’s been spent focusing on grammar [with my students], like, I don’t really see it having helped enormously” (Alim, Reference Alim, Kiesling and Paulston2005, p. 187). Like this teacher, I was “disheartened” and “saddened” by the “lack of results” that I had hoped for in my efforts to somehow “improve” the language of Black and other Caribbean children (Alim, Reference Alim, Kiesling and Paulston2005, p. 187). And as Alim (Reference Alim, Kiesling and Paulston2005) observes when he states, “what teachers like this one are probably not aware of is how they are enacting whiteness and subscribing to an ideology of linguistic supremacy within a system of daily cultural combat” (p. 187), I was completely oblivious then to how my intention to uphold what I believed was “Standard English” as the “Holy Grail of Language” represented my complicity in preserving linguistic hegemony. Much like Alim (Reference Alim, Kiesling and Paulston2005) described the language of Black students at this school as “the thing that teachers at Haven High ‘combat the most’ and the project of ‘eradicat[ing] the language pattern’ of Black students as ‘one of the few goals’” that this teacher had had for multiple years (p. 187), I too held similar perspectives as a Black Caribbean teacher in the predominantly Black schools of the Eastern Caribbean. In fact, it was my dissonance surrounding the significant effort to improve languaging and its stark misalignment with the test results of many of my Caribbean students that led me on the journey beyond the West Indian shores in search of answers.
As the mother of a first-generation Black immigrant adolescent at the time of this study, and as a friend of many mothers whose children are also first-generation Black immigrants or Black nationals of/from the English-speaking Caribbean and Africa, I had seen the premium placed on the “academic” literacies of youth. This caused me to wonder about the ways in which the authentic literacies of these youth, steeped in languaging based on their Englishes, via what Alim (Reference Alim, Kiesling and Paulston2005) has presented as their Black raciolinguistic styleshifting (see Baugh, Reference Baugh1983; Labov, Reference Labov1972; Rickford & McNair-Knox, Reference Rickford, McNair-Knox, Biber and Finegan1994, for earlier discussions undergirding this construct), can also be foregrounded in schools. My emphasis on translational research that addresses the cultural and linguistic responsiveness of teachers, many of whom work with Black immigrant youth, had revealed anecdotally and in research studies that many still struggle to determine how to respond to the literacies of Black immigrant youth and to the nuances presented by the unique experiences they bring to literacy classrooms. My learning also about Blackness as a person and as a scholar exploring racialization in literacy and language, though arguably much more recently, had been informed largely by my constant engagement with African American, African, Caribbean, Latinx, Asian American, and other sister scholars concerning Black Liberation Theology (Calhoun-Brown, Reference Calhoun-Brown1999; Lincoln & Mamiya, Reference Lincoln and Mamiya1990; Phelps, Reference Phelps2000; Willis et al., Reference Willis2022), Black Feminism (Collins, Reference Collins2000; Crenshaw, Reference Crenshaw1991), Critical Race Theory (Bell, Reference Bell, Crenshaw, Gotanda, Peller and Thomas1995; Crenshaw et al., Reference Crenshaw, Gotanda, Peller, Thomas, Crenshaw, Gotanda, Peller and Thomas1995; Delgado & Stefancic, Reference Delgado and Stefancic2001), and the Black Radical Tradition (Robinson, Reference Robinson2000). Immersed in this learning, I came to be more cognizant of why and how Black immigrants were racialized as Black peoples in the US in ways that informed institutional and individual responses to their literacies. Wishing to understand this dynamic better, I saw this undertaking as a way to further provide clarity about this dynamic for myself, teachers, and for researchers (see Ibrahim, Reference Ibrahim1999, Reference Ibrahima and Mattaini2019, Reference Ibrahim, Alim, Reyes and Kroskrity2020, for previous discussions). Doing this, I thought, could potentially extend pathways that support stakeholders as well as administrators, educators, and policymakers who work with Black immigrants in US schools.
Beyond the above, my decision to write this book is also inspired by my deeply personal experience as a “foreign-born,” “international,” and “immigrant” student and scholar as defined by the nation-state via the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). As an ‘immigrant’ to the US, I was first considered by the USCIS as an “alien,” that is, “not a U.S. citizen or U.S. national.” I was designated a “nonimmigrant,” “granted the right to reside temporarily in the United States” (Mattix, Reference Mattix2018). Functioning as an “alien” and “nonimmigrant” student, I followed the necessary rules and guidelines required to avoid “violating my status” as I did not want to fall “out of status” (Mattix, Reference Mattix2018). To transcend beyond my “alien” status, I, like so many others, had to be “granted the right by the USCIS to reside permanently in the United States and to work without restrictions in the United States” (Mattix, Reference Mattix2018). This right was determined based on my “job skills,” because, as per the USCIS, “an alien who has the right combination of skills, education, and/or work experience, and is otherwise eligible, may be able to live permanently in the United States” (Mattix, Reference Mattix2018). Remaining “in status” as an alien and “nonimmigrant,” as well as being able to prove that I had the aforementioned skills as an “immigrant,” would translate into my eligibility to become a “Lawful Permanent Resident (LPR)” (Mattix, Reference Mattix2018).
Looking back now, it is easy to see how my transition through the system based on the descriptors above, and as a student and educator moving from ‘alien’ and ‘nonimmigrant’ status to ‘immigrant’ and ‘lawful permanent resident,’ depended largely on what many might view as the meritocratic elements of being a ‘new model minority.’ As the chair of my dissertation, Dr. Jenifer Jasinski Schneider, will attest, being one who held an unfailing and long-standing belief in my Black semiolingual innocence as an emerging Black immigrant scholar (discussed later), reinforced by her insistence on advocating unapologetically for preservation of my semiolingual transgressiveness – with care despite raciolinguistic norms in the academy – I came to learn a lot about the raciolinguistic ideologies embedded in immigration laws used in the US and even more so, about how to avoid breaking these laws. In doing so, as one of Alim’s (Reference Alim, Kiesling and Paulston2005) research informants discussed earlier rightly observed, I operated then from the perspective that, “If you livin in the White man’s world, you gotta play by the White man’s rules. At least as long as they runnin shit” (p. 195).
Thus, every time my student visa neared expiration, I experienced tremendous anxiety about what would happen if my daughter and I were deported, and for the duration of my studies in the US, I avoided traveling back home because of the fear of not being able to return. Yes, many of my non-immigrant peers at the time indicated that they had nonetheless done this with little challenge, but others had stories that caused me to privilege caution over the desire to be with my family, all of whom had remained in the Caribbean with the exception of my daughter. In fact, my decision not to travel back home during my studies was in large part based on the fact that I knew I would need to improve my life to provide my daughter with economic, social, educational, and global opportunities that I did not have as a child and had struggled to secure as an adult – as my Gen Z daughter would say, securing that bag. If I went home and could not get back to the US so that I could complete my studies, I knew I would spend a lot of time trying to ‘make ends meet’ for the rest of my life and thus my persistence as an immigrant was tied to an imagined economic freedom. I therefore made the difficult choice to avoid any situation where I might jeopardize my “nonimmigrant status” even while sacrificing the visits to my family. I determined that providing my daughter with a future better than mine would have to be a priority. Now that I think back on it, I was also too poor at the time to purchase a ticket to the Caribbean and refused to ask my parents who had already sacrificed so much to try to send me one.
While I am now aware of the repercussions of the sacrifices I made then, and though it is easy to wonder about what life would have been like had I remained with my family, I have accepted that it is easier for scholars to theorize about the importance of remaining with family in reality than it is to constantly wonder, as a person, in the full range of the world's reality, about the source of ‘one’s daily bread.’ And so, my story as an ‘immigrant’ to the US was one that evolved through sacrifice, compassion with self, and a constant self-monitoring of my actions through the lens of the USCIS, understanding fully why parents often want their children to ‘learn English for success’ even while I also recognize why children need to flourish beyond simply ‘doing school well’ much like I did as a Black Caribbean child and as I eventually encouraged my Black Caribbean immigrant daughter to do as a parent in the US. For me, in keeping with a both-and approach and functioning on multiple levels of reality, these seemingly opposing viewpoints could both be true at the same time.
Until I emerged out of my ‘nonimmigrant status,’ with a solid spiritual conviction that managed to sustain me throughout this time, I did not realize just how much being an ‘immigrant’ had cost me, socially, emotionally, and culturally. And so, my ‘immigrant’ story that emerged out of self-determination borne out through the decision to persist against all odds towards an elusive ‘success’ as an “alien” is one that, to me, seems central to this work. While I am not every ‘immigrant’ – no two Black immigrants share the exact experiences – there are some common realities that we face, as I have come to learn anecdotally and through my research over the years. Just as I thought daily of the future of my daughter, and of the futures of my nieces and nephews that it took me years to be able to see (I didn’t visit when they were young), other (Black) immigrants too persist in the US and elsewhere against insurmountable odds. And their immigrant children and youth make choices daily about how they will craft their “immigrant of Color literacies” (Smith, Reference Smith2020b, p. 12).
As a scholar and educator of literacy, the story that I often tell in my research about how I come to my scholarship does not often include the nuanced, heartfelt, and personal confessions presented above. In fact, my many initial attempts to tell any story were largely unaccepted, overtly rejected, and misunderstood for years post-dissertation even while being gleaned for their innovations in the US academy (Smith, Reference Smith2013a, Reference Smith2013b, Reference Smith2016). Much of this gleaning, of course, went unnoticed on my part due to my Black ‘semiolingual innocence’ (discussed later). Attempts to include my international and immigrant story via what seemed to be unrecognized and transgressive Black languaging, just a decade ago – before autoethnographies, the telling of self, and the invitation of migrant Blackness from what is often lauded and referred to as the “Global South” (see Khan et al., Reference Khan, Abimbola, Kyobutungi and Pai2022, for a problematization of this term) became what appears to now be the norm – were met largely with derision, scorn, and ‘white gaze’ rejection. This ‘raciolinguicism’ steeped largely in overt justification undergirded by the subtlety of moral licensing (Warrican, Reference Warrican2020) was leveraged at large by many editors and reviewers of seemingly legitimate journals in the academy. Looking back now, I can see how my personal stories, told via Black languaging, were perhaps novel to the ‘white listening subject’ (Rosa & Flores, Reference Rosa and Flores2017) in the US. It was no wonder then that they were often disregarded in my proposed ‘scholarship’ because they seemed too ‘grand,’ ‘far-reaching,’ ‘personal,’ or because they were considered as having no supporting ‘evidence.’ Yet, they were integral then, as they remain now, to painting a portrait of how my transnational Blackness functions integrally to my research, even as I operate in close proximity to whiteness and its privilege as a largely light-brown skinned immigrant professor transgressing English and language norms in the US. Despite my entanglement, these stories have allowed me to pose a significant challenge to long-standing Eurocentric dominance intertwined with American nationalism that has for so long been endemic to the fields of languaging and literacy.
It was no surprise that it took a Black scholar who himself was a Caribbean national to initially advocate for an explicit reinscribing of my Black semiolingual innocence – an innocence that the US academy repeatedly threatened to strip from my personhood as I ‘became Black’ (Ibrahim, Reference Ibrahim1999), ‘became immigrant,’ and ‘became a “non-native English speaker”’ (Smith, Reference Smith2022a; see Cook, Reference Cook2015, for a complication of the term “native speaker”). Contrary to the long-standing belief by the chair of my dissertation to whom I referred earlier – a white woman – that there was nothing wrong with my languaging, written or spoken, I had been repeatedly told by white as well as Black and other scholars of Color that these personal insights were not ‘academic enough’ to be included as part of my writing, never mind what a few described as my adept weaving of the emotional through the intellectual enterprise. My writing was also too bold, too complex, lacking nuance, or insufficiently organized for the white and otherwise American audience. I have come to understand now that it is the “semiolingual transgressiveness” (discussed later) of transcendent literacy (Willis, Reference Willis2022) that operates sans attention to “white gaze” (Morrison, Reference Morrison2020) which creates such a terror for receiving languaging that dares to operate in its inherent human innocence. In other words, this is what it looks like when Black languaging dares to function with zero attention to white gaze. Much like Black Panther and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and the advocacy of the Black Panther political movement, this Black semiolingual innocence that I presented, much to my dismay, was one that the academy wished to obscure, make invisible, and erase. I saw it often when professors who were white attempted to make me believe my languaging or personhood as a Black immigrant was better than that of Black Americans while at the same time felt threatened by its power. I saw it when professors who were people of Color failed to acknowledge it, to legitimize it, to advocate for it. And I saw it when colleagues who were people of Color adamantly and unapologetically gave voice to it, unafraid enough of its consequences to propel me to free it.
I chose a decolonizing lens in this study to allow me to reinscribe my Black semiolingual innocence in much the same way that it formed the basis for elucidating the notion of innocence linguistic as a fixture in Black immigrant and all Black lives. I choose here, deliberately, to stand for a moment, with my truth, and to retrieve, relieve, and retrace those nuances in my past as an ‘immigrant,’ transnational, and as Black, because this process is critical to reconciling my ‘selves’ through my scholarship, something that I do not often get to do. I thus brought to the current study and to the associated analyses my past personal experiences as well as my thoughts about diversity, language, and race based on the ways in which I understood these concepts to first work in isolation, and later, in tandem. For instance, much like the literature that points to Black immigrants’ recognition of how linguicism also serves to sideline Englishes only upon arrival to the US (Nero, Reference Nero2006), I too was initially oblivious to the idea of what it truly meant to be Black and to dare to have such a skin color in a white world until I migrated to America.
In contrast, I had previously been well-aware of the ways in which (standardized) English as well as English and French dialects (e.g., non- and standardized Englishes often unaccepted formally in and beyond US academia and schools) were positioned alongside each other as they wrestled for power and privilege in my home country (see Milson-Whyte, Reference Milson-Whyte, Horner and Kopelson2014). And I had been aware of the effects of colorism instantiated by the tendency of individuals in the Caribbean to reflect a phenotypical preference for my ‘light skin’ and the ‘light skin’ of others over our ‘darker-skinned’ counterparts, a distinction that I have also seen in the US considering the tone of my dark-skinned daughter in comparison to mine. Yet, this did not change the fact that I was startled and continue to grapple with the ways in which others respond to my standardized English in the US. Moreover, it has taken me a while, and I mean, years, to realize that much of the negative reaction that I faced during my initial stay in the US, as well as much of what I continue to battle with in terms of a questioning of my capacity to be as “productive” and “legitimate” as a Black scholar – whatever that means – had and continues to have a lot to do with the color of my Black skin. In doing so, I acknowledge too that the challenges I have faced in learning about how whiteness (Alim, Reference Alim, Kiesling and Paulston2005) is used to construct me despite my clear and inherent legitimacy for architectural languaging and literacies as a Black speaker, educator, and scholar – semiolingual innocence – while they are perspectives from which I can never completely detach, have repeatedly been transcended as I repeatedly and unapologetically transgress academic norms. I will admit that I have faced some disillusionment, at times, because I often realize that I cannot somehow return to the days before I ‘ate the fruit,’ as it were, when I was but a ‘mere’ educator in the Caribbean and during my early days in the US (whatever this means). Nonetheless, while I have come to terms with the fact that what others will always see and hear first when they encounter me in the US is this – ‘a Black immigrant’– I am now also aware that my life in the US, and prior, in the Caribbean as a human, much like many of my Black sisters, brothers, others, has repeatedly included moments where I am transported through imajinè inosan (discussed later) that portend the creativity inherent in the possibilities made visible by transcendent literacy (Willis, Reference Willis2022).
As a human and as a scholar undertaking this work who brought these imaginaries of innocence to bear on my interactions, I was interested in broadly understanding how Black immigrant students reflected literacies as inherent to them and not in comparison to their white counterparts (see Smith et al., Reference Smith, Kumi-Yeboah, Chang, Lee and Frazier2019). Given the tendency of qualitative research to provide understandings that are unique, complex, multilayered, and nuanced, I decided to also use a qualitative approach to this examination. For me, insights from the qualitative study presented would provide a more holistic understanding of the literacies of Black immigrant youth. Besides, my previous and collaborative analyses of Black youth’s literacies using quantitative methods pointed to the need for qualitative insights that could extend findings from this recent scholarship. I anticipated that drawing from a qualitative paradigm via a decolonizing interpretive lens with which to consider Black immigrant literacies and Black immigrant youth as individuals could provide the field with additional clarity surrounding the ways in which students’ needs can be better addressed. For me, being able to support Black immigrant youth, their peers, parents, their teachers, administrators, and educators, in ways that I wish my daughter and I had been supported when we grappled with the novelty of the US, represented a critical avenue for advocacy. Even so, I have now evolved further in my understanding that what is needed within a decolonizing perspective is a dismantling of long-standing dichotomies that separate approaches used to understand local, global, and complex realities (Alim, Reference Alim, Kiesling and Paulston2005; Freire, 1970/Reference Freire2000; Smith, Reference Smith2013), and which allow for a transgressiveness (see hooks, Reference hooks1994) with methods such as the “critical dialectical pluralism” approach as advocated by Onwuegbuzie and Frels (Reference Onwuegbuzie and Frels2013). For me, this evolution has allowed for impartial intentionality in my working in solidarity with all Black peoples across the globe, no matter who they might be.
A Decolonizing Interpretive Approach for Examining Black Immigrant Literacies
Methodologically, I draw partially from a “decolonizing interpretive research design” (see Darder, Reference Darder2015; Dei, Reference Dei2000) that functions as a “deeply subaltern form of qualitative research practice; one which seeks to formidably challenge and disrupt the one-dimensional Eurocentric epistemicides prevalent in traditional theories of schooling and society” (Darder, Reference Darder2015, p. 64; Paraskeva, Reference Paraskeva2011). As proposed in my call for “raciolinguistic epistemologies” that allow for the emergence of the Majority World’s knowledges as a project of racialized language, I suggest that the long-standing epistemological question “When and what is knowledge?” (Crotty, Reference Crotty1998, p. 46) might now become, “When and what is literacy knowledge as considered by whom?” (Smith, Reference Smith2023a).
Aware of Westernized individualistic notions regarding knowledge that often remain unchallenged in an interpretive design (Cohen et al., Reference Cohen, Manion and Morrison2011), I embraced the philosophy of Ubuntu – “I am because we are; we are because I am” (Chilisa & Ntseane, Reference Chilisa and Ntseane2010, p. 619) – to adopt a humanist approach that reflects respect and compassion while emphasizing human dignity and support for community (Lituchy & Michaud, Reference Lituchy, Michaud, Lituchy, Galperin and Punnett2016). In doing so, I give precedence to the collective social (i.e., Indigenous) while honoring the individual (i.e., Western European) (Getty, Reference Getty2010; Ibrahima & Mattaini, Reference Ibrahima and Mattaini2019). Acknowledging that most of my scholarship thus far and the scholarship on which my work is premised utilizes ‘Western’ methodologies where evidence of knowledge is gained from hearing, sight, smell, taste, and touch, I challenge the notion that ‘non-Western’ ways of knowing, rooted in the contextual and historical or in aesthetics, revelation, and spirituality such as those that come to us by the gods or spirits, should be disregarded in my legitimate understandings of how I, as Black woman, come to know the world and how Black children and youth read it (Ibrahima & Mattaini, Reference Ibrahima and Mattaini2019; Matsinhe, Reference Matsinhe2007; see also Willis et al., Reference Willis2022). After all, I credit the revelatory Spirit of God with an understanding of how to craft the truths here revealed.
At the same time, my goal in centering non-Western ways of knowing does not dismantle the insights of Eurocentric ways of knowing that I have come to rely upon for most of my scholarly and formerly student life. In fact, as I observed recently (Smith, Reference Smith2022e), I am entangled with them racially and they with me – “racialized entanglements” – and therefore they are intricately intertwined with my personhood. Thus, in line with Dei (Reference Dei2000), I am interested in what a “hybridity of knowledges” (p. 113) can bring to the proverbial table when allowing “different bodies of knowledge” to “continually influence each other” by reflecting the “dynamism of all knowledge systems” (p. 113). For me, this dynamic is visible in my supposed mastery of standardized English steeped in Eurocentric norms that now permit me to interrogate how these ‘Western’ norms inadvertently create and rely on monolithic perspectives of knowledge in my privileged position of proximity to whiteness.
This dialectical perspective to knowledge via a decolonizing approach acknowledges the following key principles, all of which undergird my analytical framework (discussed later): (a) reflecting a search for knowledge framed by ideologies that are never neutral; (b) understanding that research practices tend to operate in ways that protect the status quo and create hegemonies; (c) critiquing and recreating reality by naming and addressing norms of power that create asymmetry; (d) using research practices that challenge hegemonic practices and create possibilities based on evolving ways of reading the world; (e) using research undertaken to influence change in practice for those who are most vulnerable; (f) promoting a humanizing dialectical process that extends beyond subject/object framings in research, critical to engaging researchers and the people with whom they work in constant and democratic dialogue (Darder, Reference Darder2015). The dialectical perspective on which I rely in part has been further advanced through constructs such as “critical dialectical pluralism” that advocate conducting “research wherein an egalitarian society is promoted and sustained for the purpose of advancing both universalistic theoretical knowledge and local practical knowledge, and to conduct culturally progressive research” (Onwuegbuzie & Frels, Reference Onwuegbuzie and Frels2013, p. 9). Specifically, drawing from certain elements of this critical dialectical pluralistic approach, the research study undergirding this book emerged through interaction with participants, as guided by Onwuegbuzie and Frels (Reference Onwuegbuzie and Frels2013), allowing the latter to have a
co-equal say in what phenomenon should be studied; how research should be conducted to study this phenomenon; which methods should be used; which findings are valid, acceptable, and meaningful.
I agree with Dei (Reference Dei2000) when he states that the “‘Indigenous’ is never lost” as I have maintained a reliance on ‘non-Western’ ways of knowing even while laboring daily as a Black immigrant researcher and educator within and across transnational ‘Westernized’ contexts and frameworks (p. 113). My work within this dynamic that has emphasized epistemologies, ontologies, and axiologies, often at odds with what my spirit tells me is morally right, human, and humanely acceptable, as well as aesthetically appropriate for Black youth, is what has brought me to this point: one where I feel morally compelled to allow for an interplay between these Westernized philosophies of professional worlds and the non-Western ways of knowing and doing grounded in ancestral spirit, revelation, and soul (Dillard, Reference Dillard2012b) that have consistently been a part of my personal life. Williams (Reference Williams2016) acknowledges this interplay when he describes how postcolonial literatures of the Caribbean “reduce the scope of indigenous knowledge and oral tradition … [and] at the same time” allow for “the development of [a] ‘critique of colonial rule’” (p. 107). Much like the notion of Freire’s (1970/Reference Freire2000) dialectic where the wish is for the human to emerge as neither oppressed nor as oppressor, and Alim’s (Reference Alim, Alim, Rickford and Ball2016) notion of transracialization as one where racial categorization simultaneously requires subversion and maintenance, Williams (Reference Williams2016) shows how Caribbean writers thematically worked in the 1930s to interweave “their unique and composite identity in and through literary and non-literary writings” as a pathway to “self-consciousness and an awareness of colonial exploitation” even while “positivist ideas … from Europe enter[ed] the cultural and intellectual discourses of island societies of the Caribbean region through colonial schools and … [and religious] organizations” (p. 107). Aware of the long-standing potential for power and coercion to minimize the developing double consciousness of immigrants becoming Black and minorized in such a dialectic interplay (Du Bois, 1903/1999), my inescapable immersion in these processes as a being and scholar often inadvertently co-opted by colonized intellectualism (Fanon, 1961/Reference Fanon1991) nonethelewss symbolized my epistemological entry to this work.
Questions Guiding the Inquiry
Acknowledging gaps in the field as well as operating through problematization (Alvesson & Sandberg, 2011) of literacies and translanguaging for Black immigrant youth as discussed earlier, I asked three questions to guide this study of youth’s literacies:
(1) How do Black Caribbean English-speaking immigrant youth describe their literacies as represented in their historical trajectories across in- and out-of-school settings?
(2) How do Black Caribbean English-speaking immigrant youth describe their translanguaging, accompanied by their broader transsemiotic practices, as represented in their historical trajectories across in- and out-of-school settings?
(3) In what ways are contested ideologies surrounding race, language, and migration reflected in Black Caribbean English-speaking immigrant youth’s descriptions of their literacies through translanguaging, as accompanied by their broader transsemiotic practices?
Towards a (Decolonizing) Interpretive Analytical Framework
Guided by the questions above and informed, in part, by a decolonizing interpretive research design (Darder, Reference Darder2015; Dei, Reference Dei2000), I move towards a “(decolonizing) interpretive analytical framework,” to recreate the futures of Black immigrant youth. I place the word decolonizing in parentheses to signal my partial reliance on this perspective while also inadvertently drawing from Westernized frames. This integrated framework reflective of Westernized and non-Western lenses foregrounds the dialectic critical to acknowledging the interplay between decolonizing methods that highlight non-Western Eurocentric epistemologies about Black youth and hegemonic Westernized perspectives that consistently pit ‘ill-equipped,’ ‘inadequate,’ ‘incapable,’ and ‘underperforming’ Black American youth against their ‘academically successful,’ ‘new model minority’ Black immigrant counterparts. I use this “(decolonizing) interpretive analytical framework” to accomplish that goal by examining socially constructed Westernized realities, epistemologies, and axiologies steeped in hegemonic Westernized ways of viewing Black youth while simultaneously interrogating these notions through the contextual knowledge, historical values (i.e., past, present, future), and insider realities of non-Westernized thought (Smith et al., Reference Smith, Lee and Chang2022). In turn, I identify strategies useful for Black youth’s self-determination by focusing on efforts leveraged by these youth to overcome obstacles with literacies, as well as strategies [that can be] deployed by institutions, or not, to support them. Table 5.1 (available at www.cambridge.org/LiteraciesofMigration) presents an overview and an example of the analytical framework used to examine the literacies of six Black immigrant youth in this book.
Participants
Eight students signed the consent forms as part of the broader study (IRB2016-88) undertaken while I worked in the Caribbean student organization at a southwestern university in the US. Six youth were purposefully selected who became part of this work. Data sources as part of this broader study included demographic questionnaires about students’ backgrounds, in-depth semi-structured individual interviews (Seidman, Reference Seidman2012), personal journaling (Tuckett & Stewart, Reference Tuckett and Stewart2004), and focus-group interviews (Krueger & Casey, Reference Krueger and Casey2009) on the part of the students about their experiences. I chose to focus here on the in-depth semi-structured individual interviews as these data were primarily concerned with students’ descriptions about their Englishes, literacies, and linguistic practices for the duration of the study.
As part of the interpretive approach used in this work, the six purposefully sampled youth – Asha, Earsline, Fred, Jermaine, Melody, and Nickler (pseudonyms) – from the English-speaking Caribbean functioned as primary participants. They originated from the Bahamas and Jamaica and all spoke the non-standardized as well as standardized Englishes of those countries.
To align with the decolonizing interpretive approach employed, twelve educators functioned as secondary informants in this study. The educators involved six US immigrants from Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, the Bahamas, and St. Lucia, and six educators who functioned as literacy educators, administrators, nationals and residents of Barbados, Jamaica, St. Lucia, and Trinidad and Tobago in the English-speaking Caribbean.
Focal
Focal participants were purposefully selected as immigrants to the US who had lived in the US for at least zero to five years at the time of the study. The participants were all nineteen-year-old Bahamian immigrant youth who spoke non-standardized and standardized Englishes. With the exception of Melody, all students originated from the Bahamas in the English-speaking Caribbean. Asha had lived the US as a student for the duration of one year at the time of the study. She had previously visited the US numerous times since she was six weeks old and had spent three weeks in Washington, DC, as part of a global youth leadership program before she migrated to the US. During her first year in the US, she spent her entire summer in the Bahamas. Asha indicated that she spoke Bahamian Creolized English and Bahamian Standard English. Earsline had spent one semester in the US as a student at the time of the study. She had previously visited Florida multiple times before she migrated to the US. Earsline was soft-spoken but a member of several student organizations and vice president on the executive board of the Caribbean student organization of which we were a part. She indicated that she spoke Bahamian Creolized English and Bahamian Standard English.
Fred was confident, vocal, energetic, an athlete, a member of several student organizations, and president of the executive board of the Caribbean student organization of which we were a part. Fred indicated that he spoke Jamaican Creolized English and Standard American English. Jermaine was a Bahamian student who had lived in the US for two years at the time of the study. He was calm, confident, and shared that he spoke Bahamian Creolized English and Bahamian Standard English. Melody was a female Jamaican American who had moved back and forth between Jamaica and the US until middle schools, and since middle school had assumed primary residence in the US. She was soft-spoken yet firm and confident. Melody served as the secretary of the student organization of which we were a part, studying business management and Spanish, and explained that she spoke Jamaican Creolized English and Standard American English. Nickler was a vivacious and energetic female who had lived in the US for one year at the time of the study. She had close friendships with Melody, Asha, and Earsline, and was supportive of the initiatives that they organized as part of the Caribbean student organization. She shared that she spoke Bahamian Creolized English and Bahamian Standard English.
Non-focal
Non-focal or secondary participants functioning as informants were educators who had been purposefully selected for two studies that I had previously conducted.
In ones of these studies, I had focused on participants who were Black foreign-born nationals (i.e., first-generation) and who had migrated to the US from the Bahamas, Ghana, Jamaica, St. Lucia, and Trinidad, or who had lived in the English-speaking Caribbean. The immigrant educators who were part of this group had also been selected previously based on their experiences visiting, living, and teaching in colleges of education in the US for at least two years and given their use of at least one standardized (e.g., Jamaican Standard) and one non-standardized (e.g., Jamaican Creolized) English. Participants had each completed bachelor’s and master’s degrees by the time of this study. They had also been either enrolled in or had completed doctoral degrees in the areas of mathematics, early childhood, counseling, higher education, social studies, and literacy education. Each participant had taught at the primary (i.e., elementary), high school, and/or university level before assuming positions as educators in their colleges within US higher education. Overall, the participants had each taught for a total of at least ten years, and at the time of the study, three of them served as Graduate Teaching Associates, three others as Assistant Professors, and one as a newly tenured Associate Professor. Selecting participants from a range of countries with varied standardized and non-standardized Englishes, across areas of expertise, and who functioned at multiple levels (i.e., Graduate Teaching Associate, Assistant Professor, Associate Professor) in higher education allowed for a representation of results that considered a myriad of factors.
In the other study that I had previously conducted, the data from which also served as a basis for informing insider knowledge in the current work, the participants were Caribbean nationals who had been selected based on their experiences living as residents in the Caribbean with leadership and administrative roles as literacy teacher educators at teacher-preparation institutions and universities in St. Lucia, Barbados, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago. They were all focused on literacy or English language arts in their practice, were responsible for teacher candidates, had oversight as varying administrators in the tertiary system of education in the Caribbean, and were purposefully selected because five of them held administrative roles. In large part, they helped to determine if and how teacher candidates matriculated through the educational system as a function of the Englishes and literacies that they had been able to master.
Data Sources
To analyze data from the current study that emerged from students in the Caribbean student organization, and in line with the interpretive design partially relied upon here, I drew from in-depth semi-structured interviews of primary participants and also from those of informants who served as secondary participants.
The use of interviews for this study is based primarily on the notion that in-depth phenomenological interviews function as a superior mechanism for gathering data about people in society (Becker & Geer, Reference Becker and Geer1957; Trow, Reference Trow1957) and the indication that interviews prove to be by far the most reasonable means to gather information about participants’ “subjective understandings” (Schutz, Reference Schutz1967) and perceptions (van Manen, Reference van Manen1990). Interviews with primary participants were designed to elicit information about Black Caribbean immigrant youth’s literacy practices and Englishes in their life’s trajectories across their home countries in the Caribbean and the US. In line with the decolonizing interpretive design partially relied upon in this work, in-depth semi-structured interviews previously conducted with secondary participants were also used to understand the uses of Englishes and the ideologies underlying them as used by Black educators who had migrated to the US and as Black educators using Englishes in the English-speaking Caribbean.
Primary
The initial interview protocol used with primary participants contained twenty-one questions. Each interview lasted approximately one hour. Questions elicited information concerning acculturation (Carola Suárez-Orozco, personal communication, February 20, 2015); intra-linguistic discrimination within language, speech (Wee, Reference Wee2005), and ethnic (Schwartz et al., Reference Schwartz, Unger, Zamboanga and Szapocznik2010) communities; intra-linguistic discrimination as an interpersonal (between individuals or groups) construct (Wright & Bougie, Reference Wright and Bougie2007); and language as a proxy for discrimination based on race (Johnson, Reference Johnson2005). Examples of prompts in this protocol included: Tell me all about when you first came to the US; Tell me about the languages and dialects you use in your home country and the US. How do you use these languages and dialects?; What languages do you use in the US?; How do others respond when you speak your English vernacular or dialect in your home country and the US?; and How do you feel about communicating verbally and in writing here in the US and in your home country? The second interview protocol was developed after all initial interviews had been completed and was designed to probe further the information provided by participants in the first round of interviews.
Secondary
As alluded to earlier, I relied secondarily on the data of two additional studies in which I had previously focused on the Englishes of Black educators in the Caribbean and Black immigrant educators in the US. These studies, approved via IRB #2019–599 at a southwestern university and IRB #PRO6857 at a midwestern university, were selected as a means of obtaining secondary data because of the focus on decolonizing methods deployed in this work. In the decolonizing interpretive analytical framework chosen for the current analysis, there is a need to draw upon the historical values (i.e., past, present, future), contextual knowledges, and insider realities that frame the responses gathered in data collected from Black immigrant student participants (see Table 5.1; see Smith et al., Reference Smith, Lee and Chang2022; and also Darder, Reference Darder2015). By choosing to draw secondarily from these studies, I provide an opportunity to use ‘non-Westernized’ decolonizing methods as a basis for interrogating ‘Westernized’ ways of knowing in the responses of Black immigrant youth.
For each of the aforementioned studies, individual in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with each participant face-to-face, via phone conference, or via Zoom conference. Interviews were based on protocols, each containing twenty-one questions that ranged from broad educational experiences in the home country for Caribbean nationals, to specific experiences with language and Englishes across home and US contexts and classrooms for immigrants residing in the US. Artifacts enabled the participants to remember certain events and were thus encouraged for their interviews. Questions guiding these interviews were developed carefully based on findings from previous research concerning the standardized and non-standardized Englishes of immigrant educators with an intent to understand how these educators used their standardized Englishes as well as challenges faced. Examples of questions posed included: What was the first time (if any) that you noticed a unique difference in the way you spoke English and the way Americans speak English in the US? Describe an experience of this kind; Describe the challenges you faced with English as well as the parts of your experience that you have enjoyed (if any); and How important is it for you to sound like a British or American speaker of English in interactions with colleagues/students/others?
Relying on these data allowed for a holistic understanding of participants’ experiences as steeped in their backgrounds as individuals, teachers, students, scholars, and educators. Since certain secondary participants served as educators in their colleges while enrolled as doctoral students in the US before eventually obtaining their doctoral degrees, several referred, in their interviews, to experiences that they had as doctoral students, but which also coincided with their then roles as educators. Moreover, given that discussions in the interviews of these educators sometimes focused on the experience of being an immigrant in general, in some cases participants made reference to their uses of Englishes prior to becoming educators in their colleges that were central to how they constructed their understandings about the overall experience of being an immigrant educator in the US.
Procedures
I relied on an adapted version of Seidman’s (Reference Seidman2012) three-interview series to conduct individual interviews with participants.
Primary Data
Each participant engaged in two in-depth semi-structured phenomenological interviews with me face-to-face in my office at the university where I worked. The first interview was focused on (i) participants’ life histories and (ii) details of the experience of using Englishes including affordances as well as language discrimination faced by the Black immigrant youth. Given the requirements of Seidman’s interview model, interview protocols for the second interview were based on participants’ responses in the first interview; drafted after participant responses to the first interview had been obtained; and forwarded (after an IRB amendment) to participants prior to the subsequent round of interviews. Each interview session lasted approximately one hour. The second interview was conducted four weeks after the first to allow for transcription and for drafting of the questions for the second interview. This process was required because the second interview protocol was dependent on the findings derived from the first. This second interview focused on participants’ reflection on the meaning of the experience (Seidman, Reference Seidman2012) of using Englishes, language discrimination, and cultural adjustment through Englishes, and lasted for a total of approximately one hour.
Secondary Data
Each participant engaged in individual in-depth semi-structured interviews with me, face-to-face, via phone conference, or via Zoom conference. I followed the same procedures for these interviews conducted with primary participants as described above.
Analysis
I engaged in a two-dimensional level of analysis. First, in line with the “(decolonizing) analytical framework” (see Table 5.1) developed and based on a “decolonizing interpretive research” design (Darder, Reference Darder2015; Dei, Reference Dei2000), I engaged first in interpretive analysis of primary participant data, which were transcribed and prepared for analysis after interviews had all been completed. Through this process, I came to understand the realities, knowledge, and values attached to the primary participants’ ways of viewing and using Englishes and literacies, the ideologies affecting their perceptions and use of these Englishes and broader semiotics, and the affordances that enabled them to persist towards a sense of agency and self-determination (Fanon, 1961/Reference Fanon1991). I relied upon the theoretical framework in which multiliteracies, raciolinguistic, and translanguaging intersected to inform my inductive and deductive analysis of primary participant data.
Using Table 5.1, I engaged in inductive analyses via open coding (Charmaz, Reference Charmaz2006) of these data through the iterative process of identifying in vivo codes, aligning them with excerpts from the data. Through constant-comparative analysis (Charmaz, Reference Charmaz2006), I revisited codes and then identified and described constructs across each theoretical framework related to a given code (see Table 5.1 for an example of this process). Also using Table 5.1, I engaged in deductive analysis of the data by seeking to determine which elements of multiliteracies, raciolinguistic, and translanguaging frameworks were being reflected in the data. To address multiliteracies in this process, I focused on identifying the ways in which youth described their literacies as premised on traditional reading and writing (i.e., linguistic mode) as well as multimodality more broadly (i.e., by drawing from broader semiotic resources). To address translanguaging in this process, I used Figure 5.1 as a basis for identifying when youth alluded to E-languages and I-languages as a basis for their languaging (see Smith, Reference Smith2020c). To address raciolinguistic ideologies in this process, I used Figure 5.2 as a basis for demonstrating how the youth used meta-understandings while they positioned themselves and were positioned by others who functioned as listening subjects (Smith, Reference Smith2019a), careful to indicate how white supremacy, through the white gaze and white audit, influenced the immigrant and transnational students as they leveraged their Englishes while forced to reconcile with expectations of white supremacy in their translanguaging and transsemiotizing. Subsequently, I revisited codes and then identified and described constructs across each theoretical framework related to a given code (see Table 5.1, rows 5, 6, 7, etc., for an example of this process).
As a Black immigrant-educator-scholar with insider knowledge about the use of Englishes in an English-speaking Caribbean context as well as in the US, I honored my ability to bring both an etic and emic lens (Charmaz, Reference Charmaz2006) to this process as part of a (decolonizing) interpretive framework. In the final step of this process, I grouped similar codes into categories and labeled these categories in ways that would highlight the nuances evident across interpretive and (decolonizing) interpretive insights. When there was similarity across three or more categories, I grouped these and presented them in the findings as a theme.
My second step, in line with the “(decolonizing) analytical framework” (see Table 5.1), involved engaging in decolonizing interpretive analysis of secondary participant (i.e., informant) data. Through this process, I identified the broader contextual knowledges, historical values, and insider realities from secondary participants’ responses about using Englishes in the US and the Caribbean that suggested how and why raciolinguistic and monoglossic ideologies framed responses presented by the Black immigrant youth. In this way, I engaged the dialectic between interpretive analysis premised on Westernized ways of knowing while also giving credence to decolonizing interpretive analysis based on non-Western approaches to finding “truth.” That notwithstanding, I was curtailed in my capacity to present full descriptions of informant insider accounts due to space limitations and thus, provide only brief insights of the vast and broad knowledges of the secondary participants in this book. See Table 5.1 for an overview of this process.
Credibility, Verisimilitude, Transferability
Through member-checking, participants reviewed my narration of the findings (Lincoln & Guba, Reference Lincoln and Guba1985) and concurred that they were comfortable with my representations of their thoughts and feelings (Merriam, Reference Merriam2009). In presenting detailed reports concerning how the study was conducted (Maxwell, Reference Maxwell2013), maintaining reflexivity (Janesick, Reference Janesick2010), and through the use of multiple data sources (Merriam, Reference Merriam2009), I preserved credibility of the study. Credibility and trustworthiness were further addressed by ensuring that epistemological perspectives – such as knowledge as social construction – undergirded analysis, interpretation, and presentation of data through narratives, both from an interpretive and a (decolonizing) interpretive perspective (Darder, Reference Darder2015; Dei, Reference Dei2000). Member-checking with participants ensured that I was true to their narratives, helping to preserve visibility of the process of analysis, and supported credibility through the use of “thick” and “rich description” via participant voices. This process, in turn, contributed to external validity and to transferability to similar individuals and contexts, helping to foster representativeness (Charmaz, Reference Charmaz2006) as I make my process visible (Table 5.1) to those who may wish to gauge transferability or to replicate the study.
Aware of the multiple perspectives within both Westernized and non-Westernized approaches to research, wary of essentialization, and wishing to maintain trustworthiness as well as credibility of the analyses in this overall work (Charmaz, Reference Charmaz2006), I solicited the feedback of five external reviewers who also functioned as scholars and educators at “research intensive” universities to listen to my arguments about the conceptual, theoretical, and methodological perspectives being presented as well as assumptions undergirding my research. They were each invited to orally share their insights as I made notations to the evolving interpretations. One of these colleagues was a Black Caribbean linguistically diverse scholar in language and literacy studies, and the other, a Black Caribbean scholar in higher education. The third was a Black linguistically diverse American scholar with expertise in literacy studies and the fourth, a Latinx scholar, who held expertise in applied linguistics. The fifth was a white monolingual American scholar in literacy and language studies. These reviewers examined my descriptions of my process of data analysis from an etic as well as an emic perspective to determine whether they agreed with my designations as I transitioned from raw data to themes and provided feedback concerning coherence of the overall manuscript based on their understanding of questions guiding this work. Their insights allowed for revisitation of analyses to be more representative of the data and to reflect the dialectic ingrained in participant stories, creating opportunities, as Amanda Gorman observes, for lifting the gaze, “not to what stands between us, but what stands before us.” They served as a mechanism to close “the divide because we know to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside” (Gorman, Reference Gorman2021). Through an invitation of the voices of populations functioning as ‘insiders’ as well as ‘outsiders’ to the “authentic narratives” (Smith, Reference Smith2023a) presented of Black immigrant and transnational youth, provision was thus made for the symbolic laying “down” of “arms” so peoples across races, nationalities, ethnicities, and so on, “can reach out” their “arms to one another,” seeking “harm to none and harmony for all” and recognizing we can “forever be tied together, victorious.”
Notwithstanding measures taken as described above, I acknowledge a limitation such that certain participants’ voices, for example, that of Asha and Fanus, tended to be represented more forcefully and more often across the findings than that of other youth given space limitations as well as the salience of their data excerpts to the cross-cutting categories’ themes.
