Dr. Jessica S. Samuel

Dr. Jessica S. Samuel is a Black Caribbean woman who hails from the U.S. Virgin Islands with roots all throughout the wider Caribbean. She is a scholar-activist who studies race, education, colonialism and the environment, including where they all might converge, in the United States and abroad. Prior to obtaining her PhD in American Studies from Boston University, she taught high school English and Writing as a Teach for America corps member in St. Louis, Missouri. She is an alumna of the Institute for the Recruitment of Teachers Fellowship program and the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship. In 2018, after serving as an education policy fellow, she was appointed to the Racial Imbalance Advisory Council of the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. Currently, Dr. Samuel resides in the Caribbean and consults on education curriculum and social justice policy throughout the region.

 

Disrupting Whiteness: Jonin’ and the Fugitivity of Black Speech in American Public Schools

 

Introduction

A brown-skinned, teenage boy suited in a navy-blue polo and khaki pants sits at the back of a 12th grade English classroom in a St. Louis city high school. His glasses rest at the bridge of his nose while his pen tucks snugly between his newly-faded temple and right ear. “Nigga, why yo’ hands so crispy? Lil’ donut-hands-lookin’ a—,” he pipes at the young man two rows in front of him. Surprised faces resound in “awww” and erect the invisible ring wherein this battle is meant to occur. “Oh, you tryna’ go? I know yo big ‘ol peanut head ass ain’ talkin’,” the boy two rows up retorts, confirming his participation in the competition. “Naw, naw! Dem beady eyes you got behind dem binoculars look like some peanuts,” the uniformed boy insists. “Shut yo funky breath a— up. You stays neva brushin’ yo damn teeth.” The class erupts into laughter and the teenage boy with the new fade bows his head in defeat. Both young men’s scrutinization of the other’s physical anatomy and hygiene in the presence of an onlooking audience outlines the general structure of a jone. That this particular jone session transpires in the classroom rather than at a lunch table or park outside school testifies to jonin’s diverse social uses and transformative implications for instruction in an urban educational environment. Tracing its historical roots as a primarily Afro-cultural practice helps delineate its political significance in education. More specifically, to recognize jonin’ as an emancipatory tool, as this paper aims to do, further elucidates what scholars have identified as the anti-Black violence, suffering and spiritual death that plague Black youth in urban classrooms of the United States. [1]

While more widely-recognized anti-slavery efforts appeared in the form of organized insurrections and uprisings, the majority of enslaved Blacks in the U.S. subverted plantation economies in more quotidian fashion. Running away, stopping work, intentionally eavesdropping, feigning illness, poisoning food, creating art, and most importantly, stealing every available opportunity to read, write, and speak within and outside the limits of whiteness all constituted routine forms of protest and resistance to the institution of American slavery. [2]  Attention to the broad range of anti-slavery efforts in the United States allows us to reconsider both the evolution of Black liberation projects and the ubiquity of white supremacist machinations. By seriously regarding the various forms anti-slavery efforts took in the past, we can better perceive their continuities into the present. Yet, to see anti-slavery projects in the contemporary frame necessitates that we engage a framework of fugitivity. To identify African American people’s persistent refusal to remain bound by racialized oppression is to locate the project of escape to which Black people have long committed themselves and the many forms of captivity to which they’ve been subjected. 

Though the legal end to American chattel slavery occurred at the ratification of the 13th Amendment in 1865, no sooner was this enacted than proxy schemes—such as the systematic underfunding of Black educational initiatives—arise to perpetuate the oppression of Black Americans. [3] At every chance over the course of American history, white Americans have attempted to control the manner, material, and mode by which Black people have learned. Whether by neglect or derogation, Black students discover that by virtue of their heritage they hold an inferior position in U.S. society and, therefore, are unworthy of comprehensive, quality, and representative educational experiences. [4] When contextualized by American education’s civilizing origins, the development of Black education in the U.S. characterizes half measures toward equality, at best, and an insidious plot to undermine Black liberation and progress, at worst. Making matters worse, the consistent demonization of Black learners in state-sponsored classroom settings paints their justified responses to a colonial, Eurocentric education project as disruptive, unconstructive and deviant. Yet, when framed by a model of resistance, self-determination, and fugitivity, Black students’ attitudes and behaviors to educational violence can be understood as their capacities for critical cognitive engagement or what Lamar Johnson, Nathaniel Bryan and Gloria Boutte refer to as critical race discernment. [5]

Black students from urban settings burdened by various forms of state-sponsored violence and neglect engage in anti-slavery language acts as an attempt to subvert oppressive instructional standards that aim to delegitimize their non-European epistemologies and condemn their African-descended ontologies. [6] Engaging in what American folklorist Paddy Bowman describes as “overlooked traditional ways of knowing,” Black public school students find themselves in a paradigmatic conflict wherein they employ language as both a means for ignoring and responding to white supremacist notions of being “educated.” [7] By jonin’—dissing—on one another and on instructors, Black students exercise agency and cultural autonomy within an educational environment that consistently undervalues their Blackness. In particular, Black students’ engagement with marginalized speech acts within formal institutions of learning operates as an extended strategy of Black liberation from a system whose primary function has been to suppress Black brilliance and undermine Black freedom. 

In this paper, I argue that jonin’ is Black students’ attempt at taking a space as violent as the American public school classroom and reorganizing it as a place where learning can be redefined on their own terms, rather than those of white America’s. I draw on ethnographic material gathered from the classroom while I was an English teacher at a St. Louis high school. Using my lived experience as data, I create composite narratives to help frame the practice and implications of the act. By combining this method with the historiography of the field, I am able to offer a theoretical framework of fugitivity to describe the practice among urban youth of color. In particular, this essay means to expand and expound upon the ways that Black enslavement persists beyond the formal years of colonialism. Necessarily, it argues that institutions beyond the system of chattel slavery enact similar types of captive violence. How contemporary Black students respond to that violence joins a legacy of fugitivity that frames their very existence in the United States. Jonin’ in urban schools is one of many ways students respond to a compulsory education that fundamentally diminishes the experiences and contributions of people of color, especially where those contributions are cultural. Rather than completely check out of educational spaces and the entire project of schooling (as many have done and continue to do in response to its inadequacies), Black students perfect a version of citizenship that may lie outside of the boundaries of conventional schooling in order to reconfigure a new American citizenship based on a fugitive existence. That is, for Black students, fugitive speech is one tactic for engaging anti-slavery and decolonial work in the classroom and creating what education theorist Leigh Patel calls “learning maroons.” [8]

I. Inheriting a Legacy of Fugitive Speech

The name of this game of insults may vary by region, state or city, but the rules stay mostly the same. Known as Flamin’, Doggin’, Dissin’, Snappin’, Choppin’, Roastin’, Goin’, Cappin’, Soundin’, and even Siggin’, Jonin’ is a verbal contest. The person best able to verbally defeat the other by employing a host of social tools and popular knowledge wins. Dexterity of tongue is just as important as wit when jonin’. Primarily done by African American school-aged youth, jonin’ is a performance known for its participatory audience. Scholars of jonin’ have varying ideas about the origins of the word and place it as having emerged sometime between the 1940s and 1960s. In his book, Talking ‘Bout Your Mama, Elijah Wald notes that the term was recorded to have first appeared in literature in 1940. [9] The author who remains undescribed in Wald’s reference is said to have used the term in the context within which it is presently used: as a synonym for dissing. Yet, in a 1987 interview with the Washington Post, American linguist J.L. Dillard described the term “jonin’” as principally appearing in the Black community of Washington D.C. in the 1960s. He depicts it as “a quasi-ritualized game of verbal insult, with recognized rules for excelling and status rewards.” [10] In addition, Dillard’s article mentions how participants in the game often speculated that its name may have derived from the biblical character of Jonah. Exactly how the man who got swallowed up by a humongous whale bore any relation to a term denoting a game of insults could not be made clear. [11] Regardless of when “jonin’” came onto the cultural landscape, its connections to the more commonly known game of “Playing the Dozens” is apparent. Referring to the game in its form as “Playing the Dozens”—which specifically focuses on casting aspersions against one’s opponent’s mother—Sociologist Amuzie Chimezie traces the origin of the insult game back to the Igbo people of Nigeria. [12] Others have also placed it among the Ashanti tribe, various indigenous communities, some European ones, and even Caribbean islanders like those of Trinidad where the practice is known as “mamaguy”. [13] Despite its obscure origins, “jonin’” has had significant purchase as a Black oral practice.

One of the first scholars to have explored the nature of jonin’ and its various articulations within the broader socio-linguistic context of African American communities is Geneva Smitherman. Smitherman’s contribution in coining the terms African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and Black English (BE) helped to situate the game within an African American oral and literary tradition. No matter its derivative name, sociolinguists and literary scholars have recognized the game as an exercise of signification: “the verbal art of insult in which a speaker humorously puts down, talks about, needles—that is, signifies—to the listener.” [14] Sometimes this signifying is done for fun, other times it is done to make a point. As a game of signification, jonin’ belongs to a long lineage of African American oratory expression, the beginning of which can be located within the period of American chattel slavery. A form of literacy, jonin’ owes its existence to the original literacy acts committed by enslaved Africans in the United States.

Black Literacy and Liberation

 Limited educational opportunities and laws prohibiting literacy among enslaved Blacks demonstrated the plantocracy’s indefatigable attempt to control the minds of those held captive and at the same time testified to the immeasurable value of reading, writing, and speaking. Yet, even in the face of restrictive measures, by “listening hard and remembering well” enslaved Blacks formulated “intelligence networks” among themselves and crafted their own type of literacy. [15] In anticipation of freedom, African Americans labored intensely to create opportunities for learning and education while soldiers yet fought in the Civil War and runaway slaves became weapons against the Southern forces. [16] Communities of Black Americans across the South, spanning from Kentucky to North Carolina, publicly argued for public education to be made available to newly freed Blacks in order to prepare them to navigate the world of freedom. [17] African Americans “yearned to become literate, to have access to the news and ideas that otherwise would have been beyond their reach.” In response, southern white elites “continued their efforts to place literacy itself beyond the reach of African Americans.” [18]

More than enhancing communication for Black Americans, however, Black literacy arguably provided the means through which enslaved peoples would most successfully free themselves. Indeed, for Black people in the U.S., literacy did not simply connote proficiency in the English language. It also meant proficiency in the cultural language of whiteness in ways that allowed one to simultaneously speak to and beyond a white audience. Through the publication of slave narratives in which survivors provided first-hand accounts to white audiences of their own experiences in captivity, enslaved Africans argued for their inherent humanity and the redemption thereof. At the same time, through the use of chants, negro spirituals and creole languages, enslaved Africans spoke beyond whiteness and insisted that their Black existence would not be constituted by white people’s perception or understanding of them, thus enabling an anti-slavery language. [19] Whatever the form of codeswitching or translanguaging, the very undertakings of writing, reading and verbal expression, helped enslaved Blacks to imagine and demand the materialization of an existence beyond the one they had been relegated to under slavery. 

By the turn of the 20th century, largely through the efforts of the Harlem Renaissance, African American expression had begun to be celebrated for the ways it marshaled and mediated Black representation in the United States. By the1930s, robust conceptualizations of Black language, art, and writing helped to solidify Black literacy as systematic and distinctive. [20] The developments of this era serve as the foundation upon which Black literacy acts— Black speaking, Black reading, and Black writing—exists. It is important that I take this time to stress the interconnectedness of Black literacy acts and the extents to which it is impossible to speak of one without at some moment referring to the others—either jointly or exclusively. Black speech has and continues to represent the schema within which Black writing occurs. Black writing has both generated and contextualized Black reading. And both the reading and writing of Black people are informed by and serve to inform Black talk. Indeed, it is here at the juncture of speaking that the fugitive work of jonin’ holds most significance. 

On Black Laughter

As a practice that means to instigate laughter, jonin’ teaches a great deal about Black joy as resistance. [21] Black laughter, another form of Black oral expression, has been employed against the microaggressions of white supremacy. Humor has long served as the unconscious therapy for many Black Americans coming up in the age of Jim Crow and has carried over into digital and analog leisure spaces of contemporary 21st-century society. Through the crafting of songs, stories and memes, Black Americans have used Black humor and Black joy to deliberately confront systems of power. [22] Black people’s mere laughter has aggravated white people for the ways it simultaneously generates feelings of consternation and envy in them. [23] According to Mel Watkins, Black laughter had often been interpreted by others as inappropriate or aggressive because it seemed to connote Black trickery and white victimization. [24] However, this (mis)interpretation of Black laughter is only possible because of white people’s insistence on framing Black behavior within the confines of their white gaze and their conceptions of what Black bodies ought to do and be like from that perspective. 

In the United States, Black people’s bodies are consistently regarded as alien and categorically inappropriate. [25] Hence, wherever those bodies exist they are expected to be small and undetectable. A laughing Black audience in a public space defies this expectation of “appropriateness” that white people and institutions consistently utilize to justify their oppression of Black people. Laden with codes of exclusion that aim to determine who can and cannot exist in certain places in this country and how individuals must behave if ever granted entry, these public spaces become transformed by the untethered laughter of Black people. [26] Black laughter challenges the rules of appropriateness by creating an aerial maroon space where Blackness exists outside of the constricting arms of white envy and control. As resounding noise, Black laughter disrupts and discharges those public spaces defaulted as white spaces by challenging the validity of white civility. In fact, it is the science of it that is so radical. The porous and unbounded nature of laughter is what makes Black people’s engagement in it so transformative. Especially in the academic setting of an urban classroom where the project of learning has consistently been a project of adopting white normative culture, Black laughter does its most liberatory work by allowing students to be their full selves in an environment that rarely acknowledges them or their capacity for invention.

II. The Fugitivity of Jonin’

By centering Black student action in schools and placing their attempts at renegotiating the terms of their education within a genealogy of Black resistance, we are able to see patterns of fugitivity that reminisce the work of Black liberation fighters dating back to chattel slavery. Black students’ capacity to regulate their own speech in educational settings illustrates a resistance to the social control enabled by the American public school system. Not only have Black students regularly been assumed to be unintelligent, their actions as well as their speech have also been scrutinized—by white paternalistic forces and their Black deputies—as unrefined and in need of structural repair. [27] Yet, despite efforts to reform Black cultural representation, in general, and Black speech, in specific, Black expression has intrinsically held a definite and defiant quality. Within this frame, articulations of AAE and AAVE come to represent systems of signification meant to be unintelligible by, and therefore fugitive to, a dominant (white) master class. 

Navigating a Colonial Education

In the context of public schooling, jonin’ certainly makes a point. Public education as it has and continues to exist within the United States underserves students of color. The fact that American education happens within the political reality of settler-colonialism means that it is perpetually entangled in the work of dispossession and invariably invested in projects of domination and extraction. [28] That education in the United States originated from a desire to cultivate within an elite progeny the capacity for political rule and democratic citizenship cannot be lost when evaluating the institution of education and its relationship to a once-enslaved Black populace. [29] Constructed to conform to the needs of a White, wealthy ruling class, public schooling has consistently underserved Black students and disinherited them of opportunities for full democratic inclusion and robust citizenship, as much as such a citizenship is even possible for descendants of forced migration into a settler-colony. Whenever available, American public education’s curricular and workforce composition conjoin to inform the miseducation of Black students. A dearth in history curricular materials that thoroughly depict the Black American experience in a manner that respects the oppression, triumphs and contributions of African descendant people in the Americas has led to a state of education that is not only bankrupt, but skewed. Indeed, Black education occurs within a settler-colonial state where the predications of conquest reinforce the dynamics of domination and control that has so characterized Black people’s relationship to both this country and its various education projects. [30]

Public education as a controlling apparatus when taken in its most serious form reveals itself to also be an “enslaving” mechanism that forces Black students to appreciate the cultural products of white creators at the expense of their own. The enslavement of Black minds takes shape in the devaluing of Black cognitive and cultural ability or in literally redirecting that ability in ways that most benefits White America. Indeed, Black education is a colonial process insofar as it has been both the ideological and structural project of replacing purportedly uncivilized cultural norms with European-based ones that necessarily dictate the behaviors of said converted group of people. As political theorist Aimé Césaire warns, the conditions of colonialism rely upon contempt of the colonized, a belief and investment in their incapacities as well as the colonizers natural superiority. [31] The project of Black education in the United States—rather than escape this paradigm—lives squarely within its confines. 

In an American public education system where the neglect of Black students is commonplace, signifying (ritually communicating beyond a literal schema) must be read as a staple of Black educational engagement. Where public schools exist in abandoned and dilapidated urban environments, Black public schoolchildren forced to learn in those conditions become just as undesirable as the communities in which they must learn. The political circumstances of their education and its manifestation within the physical decay of a public-school building, the spiritual decline of a city space and philosophical degeneration of their educational environment fosters resentment and rebellion. Students defy the injustices beset upon them in a multitude of ways. Some more explicit than others. Some more abrasive than others. Yet, the fact remains that most students who demonstrate rebellious behavior do so in response to some circumstance of oppression they find to be undeserved. [32] Students’ inability to formally vocalize the degree of neglect they witness within their education system does not negate an overall ability to theorize and respond to it. Black students recognize and understand the decrepit conditions under which they must learn. They need not dissertate (only discern) to tell of the outdated textbooks, insufficient supplies, or underqualified staff that plague their classrooms. Indeed, for African American students, passively undertaking this educational nightmare far from characterizes their relationship to public schooling, even if such schooling has been circumscribed by white stakeholders. 

A 40-something year old white male teacher reads an excerpt from Moby Dick to his 11th grade American Literature class. Bored by both the text and the instructor’s reading, a young Black girl is caught with her head resting on her desk. “Monique, please sit up,” the teacher demands. “Why? This class hella boring,” she responds. “If you don’t sit up I’m going to have to ask you to step outside,” the teacher insists. “Whatever, Bill Nye,” Monique concedes.

In the above scenario a student critiques her education only to be dismissed by her educator. To avoid an inevitable visit to the principal’s office, Monique cedes with a subliminal diss or what her peers might describe as a “lowkey flame.” In this instance, there is no back and forth between her and the object of her “flame” and with little recourse available to her she resists the inculcation of Moby Dick as well as the white man who refuses to understand its problematic features by simply comparing him to a famous TV nerd. If simply read as disobedient and disrespectful, Monique’s response appears juvenile and unremarkable. However, it is the context of her learning environment that teaches us about her response to it. Perhaps, the scope and sequence for 11th grade English at Monique’s school contains only Moby Dick-ish options. This white educator content on solely reproducing his own cultural products refuses to critically examine Monique’s dissatisfaction and provide a reasonable solution to it, particularly in the form of advocating for more culturally responsive material. In both verbal and nonverbal form, Monique communicates her discernment of the inadequate features of the education she receives. Without assailing her instructor with curse words, she attempts to diminish his authority and the colonial state which gave it to him by insulting his appearance. 

Given the fact that the target of a jone can be either a peer or a superior, jonin’s disruptive qualities are expansive. Students jone to compete for status recognition among their peers, to engage in jovial banter, practice rhetorical dexterity, and reproach totalizing whiteness. [33] Through jonin’ students joke about each other and their surroundings and, thus, make light of an educational experience that means to weigh them down. For many Black students, like Monique, jonin’ is a way of working out the transgressions made against them in the classroom. Monique’s ability to critically discern the Eurocentricity of her 11th grade English curriculum and respond to it by levying subliminal insults against her white male teacher was both a way of expressing what she knows about the whiteness of public education in the U.S. as well as of insisting on ways of knowing meant to be taken for granted. As a Black girl, Monique’s jone on her white male teacher holds special significance. Regularly regarded as unruly and frequently oversexualized, Black girls who stand up for themselves in obvious ways often the run the risk of receiving excessive punishment from administrators. [34] Monique’s subtlety, in this instance, allowed her escape from this fate as well as from the burdens of whiteness. 

Education sociologist Leigh Patel argues that for underrepresented and historically marginalized students, learning is already a fugitive act. Distinguishing learning from “achieving” through rote memorization, Patel identifies learning as an act that relies upon a “dialectic to the stratifying cultures of formal education that insist on contingent possibilities for well-being for some and unmitigated safety for others.” [35] To deny that there exists a hegemonic order in the education system is to obscure the ways in which certain epistemes are readily available for intellectual consumption while others are not. [36] Jonin’, then as a disruptive speech act, when done in the classroom responds to the hegemonic order of whiteness in public American education that privileges the cultural tools and resources of white America. Because Black speech is framed by Black people’s experiences of subjugation in this country and the innovation that results from such a predicament, Jonin’, then, follows from a heritage of marronage whereby Black people make communities and opportunities for citizenship while existing on the very periphery to which they’ve been relegated by U.S. society. [37]

If we consider slave work stoppage as the mechanism through which enslaved Blacks rejected the institution of slavery and the many ways it meant to totalize their experience, we are able to then render jonin’ an anti-slavery effort for similar reasons. Monique’s refusal to sit up and instead rest her head in the middle of instruction exemplifies this practice. Rather than perform a more ostentatious act of defiance, she simply refuses to engage. Given its literal characteristics of interruption especially when it occurs in the midst of class, jonin’ can be viewed as work stoppage in itself. Even Monique’s use of AAVE in her critique of Moby Dick proves fugitive. By “talking Black”, Monique naturalizes her own purportedly “inappropriate” linguistic practices and cultural products in an academic setting and by so doing crafts a fugitive space whereby her Black body and the history it contains can exist regardless. [38] While delinquent, it is not senseless. Far too often is Black resistance misconstrued as nonsensical. Far too often are the “bad kids” in the classroom those who are simply most vocal and precocious. When we insist on framing Black power as Black degeneracy, we deny Black people’s intelligence, and therefore, the legitimacy of their actions. Jonin,’ thus, must be taken as a logical and rational response to a repressive institution. It is in spite of and, therefore, epitomizes Black resistance.

Conclusion

Jonin’ does not show up in the high school English curriculum and rarely, if ever, does it show in the American history course. Thus, its extra-curriculuar feature makes it both a runaway vehicle and destination to escape the anti-Blackness of American public education. We are to remember that for all its signifying, the jone is the where the students mean to arrive when they mean to tell their observational truths in the context of structural oppression. A rhetorical strategizing that requires intellectual vigor and imaginative depth, the jone is where Black urban students mean to go when they’ve had enough of the disrespect a subpar, colonial public school education provides them. It is in the joking around, the banter and laughter, that Black students are able to undermine the aspects of their education meant to neglect and forget them. Jonin’ is their fugitive act and enclave. Their port and place of escape. That Black students express themselves in ways principally legible and acceptable to themselves is testament to their determination to live lives free of oppression and domination. Jonin’ rejects that knowledge which is meant to confine and corrupt. It circumvents an agenda that dismisses Black bodies and Black minds but wishes to enslave them nonetheless. Most importantly, it creates learning maroons where Black epistemes and Black bodies may righteously exist. 

As a Black cultural product, jonin’ contains the treasures of Black ingenuity and persistence. Because Black literacy has always been rebellious, Black students’ speech in school is necessarily insurrectionary. In the American public school that deprives and depraves Black learners, jonin’ becomes as much about legitimizing an inherited Black cultural legacy as it is disrupting white American hegemony. The school-based joner becomes a culture hero—a champion and master of all codes Black, hidden and beyond the scope of whiteness—who defies the persistent oppression of Black people and the erasure of their contributions. [39] Wherever students are welcome to jone and engage in other cultural linguistic practices or rituals they are able to express and celebrate the particularities of their identity. By regarding Black language as substantial in and of itself, we are able to nurture rather than demonize this Black resource. Educators who facilitate rather than condemn jonin’ acknowledge that American public education is fundamentally anti-Black. This effort has the potential to create a co-constructivist education where students take active part in creating their own learning and, thus, transform public education by disrupting the colonizing foundations of American schooling. As James Baldwin reminds us in his 1979 essay “If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?”: 

A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled. A child cannot be taught by anyone whose demand, essentially, is that the child repudiates his experience and all that gives him sustenance, and enter a limbo in which he will no longer be black, and in which he knows he can never be white. Black people have lost too many black children that way. [40]

 

Endnotes

  1. April Baker-Bell, Tamara Butler, and Lamar Johnson, “The Pain and the Wounds: A Call for Critical Race English Education in the Wake of Racial Violence,” English Education 49, no. 2 (01, 2017): 116-129; Bettina L. Love, Anti-Black state violence, classroom edition: The spirit murdering of Black children, Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy 13, no.1: 22-25; Lamar L. Johnson, Nathaniel Bryan, and Gloria Boutte. “Show Us the Love: Revolutionary Teaching in (Un)Critical Times.” The Urban Review 51, no. 1 (03, 2019): 46-64.
  2. There is a rich body of work accounting racialized oppression during the times of American chattel slavery. This body of work also depicts the many forms of Black resistance that arose in response to this abuse and dispossession, from firsthand reports to deep historical studies. See Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America, (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1998); Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge, (New York: 37 Ink/Atria, 2017); Edward E. Baptiste, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, (New York: Basic Books, 2014); Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Or, Life Among the Lowly, (London: Penguin Classics, Reprint Edition, 1981); Frederick Douglass, Narratives of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003); Harriet A. Jacobs, Lydia M. Childs, Jean F. Yellin,  John S. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of Slave Girl: Written by Herself, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), Harriet E. Wilson, Our Nig, or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, (New York: Penguin Books, 2009); Stephanie Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
  3. There is a rich body of work accounting racialized oppression during the times of American chattel slavery. This body of work also depicts the many forms of Black resistance that arose in response to this abuse and dispossession, from firsthand reports to deep historical studies. See Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America, (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1998); Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge, (New York: 37 Ink/Atria, 2017); Edward E. Baptiste, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, (New York: Basic Books, 2014); Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Or, Life Among the Lowly, (London: Penguin Classics, Reprint Edition, 1981); Frederick Douglass, Narratives of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003); Harriet A. Jacobs, Lydia M. Childs, Jean F. Yellin,  John S. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of Slave Girl: Written by Herself, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), Harriet E. Wilson, Our Nig, or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, (New York: Penguin Books, 2009); Stephanie Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
  4. See Heather Williams’ Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom, Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools, Adrienne Dixson and Celia K. Rousseau’s Critical Race Theory in Education: All God’s Children Got a Song for examples of the persistent deficiencies of American public education in Black communities.
  5. According to Johnson, Bryan and Boutte, “critical race discernment” refers to Black students’ development of a racialized third-eye by which they are able to determine those who show them “fake love” rather than revolutionary love. It is a spiritual phenomenon designed to help Black children both read the word (gain literacy) and read their world (understand how they are oppressed and the need to work against such oppression. Johnson et al., “Show Us the Love, 56.
  6. H. Samy Alim, and John Baugh, Talkin Black Talk: Language, Education, and Social Change. (New York: Teachers College Press, 2007), 3-32.
  7. Paddy Brown, “Standing at the Crossroads of Folklore and Education,” Journal of American Folklore 119, no. 471 (2006): 66-79.
  8. In “Pedagogies of Resistance and Survivance: Learning as Marronage,” Leigh Patel posits that fugitivity is fundamental to decolonial educational experiences. I invoke her conceptualizations of resistance and decoloniality to explicate Black students’ speech work in the public school classroom. Leigh Patel, “Pedagogies of Resistance and Survivance: Learning as Marronage,” Equity& Excellence in Education, 49, no. 4 (2016):397-401.
  9. Elijah Wald, Talking ‘Bout Your Mama: The Dozens, Snaps, and the Deep Roots of Rap (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 64.
  10. “Say Wha?,” The Washington Post, last modified June 7 1987,  https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/magazine/1987/06/07/say-wha/09c557d4-2278-4065-81ac-bc1b813532d3/?utm_term=.5c69b9eda3db
  11. Ibid.
  12. Chimezie postulates that the Nigerian game of Icho Notchu is the ancestral cousin what is practiced among African Americans in the United States as “Playing the Dozens”. Amuzie Chimezie, “The Dozens: African-Heritage Theory,” The Journal of Black Studies 6, no. 4 (1976): 401-404.
  13. Among the Ashanti, royal families are distinctively excluded from being the butts of any joking vituperations. Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 3; “Mamaguy” is defined as deception or teasing in jest. Wald, Talking‘Bout Your Momma, 72.
  14. Ibid.; Geneva Smitherman, Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1986), 118.
  15. Heather Williams, Self-taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2005,) Print, 19.
  16. Ibid., iBooks Digital Edition,103-107.
  17. Ibid., 213.
  18. Ibid., Print, 22.
  19. Ibid., iBooks Digital Edition, 217-223; DuBois, Black Reconstruction,71-72; 123; 365-367; W.E.B. DuBois, Souls of Black Folks:Essays and Sketches, (New York: Johnson Reprint Corp, 1968) Gutenberg Digital Edition; Anne Schraff, Harriet Tubman: Moses of the Underground Railroad, (Berkeley Heights; Enslow Publishers, Inc., 2001), 48-49; Amy Lotson Roberts and Patrick J. Holladay, Gullah Geechee Heritage in the Golden Isles, (Charleston: The History Press, 2019), Amazon Digital Edition, Part 1.
  20. An extensive list of poems, essays, songs, and artwork from Harlem Renaissance illustrate the legitimacy of Black expression in mainstream American consciousness. Various scholars have studied and theorized about the monumental implications of the artwork that came out of this period for Black social and political life. See Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); African American Literary Theory: A Reader ed. Winston Napier (New York: NYU Press, 2000).
  21. The Black body has always been the most intimate site of pleasure and joy for enslaved Black people looking for deliberate ways to regain a modicum of control in as totalizing an institution as American slavery. Since the institution relied upon the subjugation and commodification of Black bodies, the reappropriation of their own bodies in order to engage joy and happiness has long been a critical form of Black people’s resistance. Camp, “Closer to Freedom,” 60-92. 
  22. Corliss Outley, Shamaya Bowen and Harrison Pinckney, “Laughing While Black: Resistance, Coping and the Use of Humor as a Pandemic Pastime Among Blacks,” Leisure Sciences, DOI: 10.1080/01490400.2020.1774449; Mel Watkins, On the Real Side: Laughing, Lying, and Signifying—the Underground tradition of African-American humor that transformed American culture, from slavery to Richard Pryor, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 13-14; “What Are Those?” Know Your Meme, November 02, 2017, Accessed November 8, 2017, http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/what-are-those; “You look like a mufucking uhhhh,” Know Your Meme, November 02, 2017, Accessed October 15, 2017, http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/you-look-like-a-mufucking-uhhhh; “You’re Not My Dad,” Know Your Meme, November 02, 2017, Accessed November 08, 2017, http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/you-re-not-my-dad.
  23. Ibid., Watkins, 13-14.
  24. Ibid. 17, 19.
  25. W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches, (New York: Johnson Reprint Corp, 1968).
  26. Philosopher Shannon Sullivan theorizes that there is no such thing as “objective spaces” and that such a notion overlooks the “racially magnetized whiteness of spaces” especially in the American context. Shannon Sullivan, “The Racialization of Space: Toward a Phenomenological Account of Raced and Antiracist Spatiality,” in The Problem of Resistance, ed. James Joy and Steve Martinot, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011), 91.
  27. Educators of color often espouse and uphold the internalized baggage of white supremacy in the classroom, carrying out the colonial project of American public education both consciously and unconsciously. H. Samy Alim, “Critical Language Awareness in the United States: Revisiting Issues and Revising Pedagogies in a Resegregated Society,” Educational Researcher 34, no. 7 (2005): 24-31. See “Oakland Board Amends Ebonics Policy.” CNN. Cable News Network, January 16, 1997. http://www.cnn.com/US/9701/16/black.english/.
  28. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40.
  29. Patel, Decolonizing Educational Research, 30-44; Julie Reuben,“Patriotic Purposes: Public Schools and the Education of Citizens,” in American Institutions of Democracy: The Public Schools, ed. Susan Furhman and Marvin Lazeron (New York, 2005), 1-5.
  30. Ibid. Patel; William H. Watkins, The White Architects of Black Education: Ideology and Power in America, 1865-1954, (New York: Teacher’s College Press, 2001),11-15.
  31. Translated by Joan Pinkham from French. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 41-42.
  32. Alim and Baugh, Talkin Black Talk, 3-32.
  33. Ibid.
  34. Monique Morris, Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools, (New York: The New Press, 2016), 18-24; 34-35.
  35. Leigh Patel, Decolonizing Educational Research: From Ownership to Answerability, 1st ed. (New York: Routledge, 2016), 30-44.
  36. Michael W Apple, Ideology and Curriculum, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2004).
  37. Patel, “Pedagogies of Resistance and Survivance: Learning as Marronage,” 2016.
  38. Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa, “Undoing Appropriateness: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and Language Diversity in Education,” Harvard Educational Review, 85, no. 2 (2015): 150-155.
  39. Alim and Baugh, Talkin Black Talk, 131.
  40. James Baldwin, “If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?,” New York Times, July 29, 1979. https://movies2.nytimes.com/books/98/03/29/specials/baldwin-english.html.