{"id":175,"date":"2021-08-17T17:58:26","date_gmt":"2021-08-17T21:58:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/?p=175"},"modified":"2021-09-01T10:08:20","modified_gmt":"2021-09-01T14:08:20","slug":"dr-jessica-s-samuel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/2021\/08\/17\/dr-jessica-s-samuel\/","title":{"rendered":"Dr. Jessica S. Samuel"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dr. Jessica S. Samuel<\/b> 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.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Disrupting Whiteness: Jonin\u2019 and the Fugitivity of Black Speech in American Public Schools<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Introduction<\/b><\/p>\n

A brown-skinned, teenage boy suited in a navy-blue polo and khaki pants sits at the back of a 12<\/span>th<\/span> 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. <\/span>\u201cNigga, why yo\u2019 hands so crispy? Lil\u2019 donut-hands-lookin\u2019 a\u2014<\/span><\/i>,<\/span>\u201d<\/span><\/i> he pipes at the young man two rows in front of him. Surprised faces resound in \u201cawww\u201d and erect the invisible ring wherein this battle is meant to occur. <\/span>\u201cOh, you tryna\u2019 go? I know yo big \u2018ol peanut head ass ain\u2019 talkin\u2019,\u201d<\/span><\/i> the boy two rows up retorts, confirming his participation in the competition. <\/span>\u201cNaw, naw! Dem beady eyes you got behind dem binoculars look like some peanuts<\/span><\/i>,<\/span>\u201d <\/span><\/i>the uniformed boy insists. <\/span>\u201cShut yo funky breath a\u2014 up. You stays neva brushin\u2019 yo damn teeth.\u201d <\/span><\/i>The class erupts into laughter and the teenage boy with the new fade bows his head in defeat. Both young men\u2019s scrutinization of the other\u2019s physical anatomy and hygiene in the presence of an onlooking audience outlines the general structure of a <\/span>jone. <\/span><\/i>That this particular jone session transpires in the classroom rather than at a lunch table or park outside school testifies to jonin\u2019s 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\u2019 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.<\/span> [1]<\/span><\/p>\n

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 <\/span>and outside<\/span><\/i> the limits of whiteness all constituted routine forms of protest and resistance to the institution of American slavery.<\/span> [2]\u00a0 <\/span>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\u2019s 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\u2019ve been subjected.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Though the legal end to American chattel slavery occurred at the ratification of the 13<\/span>th<\/span> Amendment in 1865, no sooner was this enacted than proxy schemes\u2014such as the systematic underfunding of Black educational initiatives\u2014arise to perpetuate the oppression of Black Americans.<\/span> [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.<\/span> [4] When contextualized by American education\u2019s 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\u2019 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 <\/span>critical race discernment<\/span><\/i>.<\/span> [5]<\/span><\/p>\n

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.<\/span> [6] Engaging in what American folklorist Paddy Bowman describes as \u201coverlooked traditional ways of knowing,\u201d 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 \u201ceducated.\u201d<\/span> [7] By <\/span>jonin\u2019<\/span><\/i>\u2014dissing\u2014on 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\u2019 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In this paper, I argue that<\/span> jonin\u2019<\/span><\/i> is Black students\u2019 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\u2019s. 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\u2019 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 \u201clearning maroons.\u201d<\/span> [8]<\/span><\/p>\n

I. Inheriting a Legacy of Fugitive Speech<\/b><\/p>\n

The name of this game of insults may vary by region, state or city, but the rules stay mostly the same. Known as Flamin\u2019, Doggin\u2019, Dissin\u2019, Snappin\u2019, Choppin\u2019, Roastin\u2019, Goin\u2019, Cappin\u2019, Soundin\u2019, and even Siggin\u2019, Jonin\u2019 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\u2019. Primarily done by African American school-aged youth, jonin\u2019 is a performance known for its participatory audience. Scholars of jonin\u2019 have varying ideas about the origins of the word and place it as having emerged sometime between the 1940s and 1960s. In his book, <\/span>Talking \u2018Bout Your Mama<\/span><\/i>, Elijah Wald notes that the term was recorded to have first appeared in literature in 1940.<\/span> [9] The author who remains undescribed in Wald\u2019s 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 <\/span>Washington Post<\/span><\/i>, American linguist J.L. Dillard described the term \u201cjonin\u2019\u201d as principally appearing in the Black community of Washington D.C. in the 1960s. He depicts it as \u201ca quasi-ritualized game of verbal insult, with recognized rules for excelling and status rewards.\u201d<\/span> [10] In addition, Dillard\u2019s 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.<\/span> [11] Regardless of when \u201cjonin\u2019\u201d came onto the cultural landscape, its connections to the more commonly known game of \u201cPlaying the Dozens\u201d is apparent. Referring to the game in its form as \u201cPlaying the Dozens\u201d\u2014which specifically focuses on casting aspersions against one\u2019s opponent\u2019s mother\u2014Sociologist Amuzie Chimezie traces the origin of the insult game back to the Igbo people of Nigeria.<\/span> [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 \u201cmamaguy\u201d.<\/span> [13] Despite its obscure origins, \u201cjonin\u2019\u201d has had significant purchase as a Black oral practice.<\/span><\/p>\n

One of the first scholars to have explored the nature of jonin\u2019 and its various articulations within the broader socio-linguistic context of African American communities is Geneva Smitherman. Smitherman\u2019s 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: \u201cthe verbal art of insult in which a speaker humorously puts down, talks about, needles\u2014that is, signifies\u2014to the listener.\u201d<\/span> [14] Sometimes this signifying is done for fun, other times it is done to make a point. As a game of signification, jonin\u2019 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\u2019 owes its existence to the original literacy acts committed by enslaved Africans in the United States.<\/span><\/p>\n

Black Literacy and Liberation<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a0Limited educational opportunities and laws prohibiting literacy among enslaved Blacks demonstrated the plantocracy\u2019s 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 \u201clistening hard and remembering well\u201d enslaved Blacks formulated \u201cintelligence networks\u201d among themselves and crafted their own type of literacy. [15]<\/span>\u00a0In 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.<\/span> [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.<\/span> [17] African Americans \u201cyearned to become literate, to have access to the news and ideas that otherwise would have been beyond their reach.\u201d In response, southern white elites \u201ccontinued their efforts to place literacy itself beyond the reach of African Americans.\u201d [18]<\/span><\/p>\n

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 <\/span>to<\/span><\/i> and <\/span>beyond<\/span><\/i> 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 <\/span>beyond <\/span><\/i>whiteness and insisted that their Black existence would not be constituted by white people\u2019s perception or understanding of them, thus enabling an anti-slavery language.<\/span> [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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

By the turn of the 20<\/span>th<\/span> 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.<\/span> [20] The developments of this era serve as the foundation upon which Black literacy acts\u2014 Black speaking, Black reading, and Black writing\u2014exists. 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\u2014either 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\u2019 holds most significance.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

On Black Laughter<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

As a practice that means to instigate laughter, jonin\u2019 teaches a great deal about Black joy as resistance.<\/span> [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 21<\/span>st<\/span>-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.<\/span> [22] Black people\u2019s mere laughter has aggravated white people for the ways it simultaneously generates feelings of consternation and envy in them.<\/span> [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.<\/span> [24] However, this (mis)interpretation of Black laughter is only possible because of white people\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In the United States, Black people\u2019s bodies are consistently regarded as alien and categorically inappropriate.<\/span> [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 \u201cappropriateness\u201d 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 <\/span>public spaces<\/span><\/i> become transformed by the untethered laughter of Black people.<\/span> [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\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

II. The Fugitivity of Jonin\u2019<\/b><\/p>\n

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\u2019 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\u2014by white paternalistic forces and their Black deputies\u2014as unrefined and in need of structural repair.<\/span> [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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Navigating a Colonial Education<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

In the context of public schooling, jonin\u2019 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] <\/span>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.<\/span> [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\u2019s 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\u2019s relationship to both this country and its various education projects.<\/span> [30]<\/span><\/p>\n

Public education as a controlling apparatus when taken in its most serious form reveals itself to also be an \u201censlaving\u201d 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 Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire 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.<\/span> [31] The project of Black education in the United States\u2014rather than escape this paradigm\u2014lives squarely within its confines.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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.<\/span> [32] Students\u2019 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 <\/span>discern<\/span><\/i>)<\/span> 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

A 40-something year old white male teacher reads an excerpt from <\/span>Moby Dick<\/span><\/i> to his 11<\/span>th<\/span> grade American Literature class. Bored by both the text and the instructor\u2019s reading, a young Black girl is caught with her head resting on her desk. \u201c<\/span>Monique, please sit up,\u201d<\/span><\/i> the teacher demands. \u201c<\/span>Why? This class hella boring,\u201d <\/span><\/i>she responds. <\/span>\u201cIf you don\u2019t sit up I\u2019m going to have to ask you to step outside,\u201d<\/span><\/i> the teacher insists. <\/span>\u201cWhatever, Bill Nye,\u201d<\/span><\/i> Monique concedes.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the above scenario a student critiques her education only to be dismissed by her educator. To avoid an inevitable visit to the principal\u2019s office, Monique cedes with a subliminal diss or what her peers might describe as a \u201clowkey flame.\u201d In this instance, there is no back and forth between her and the object of her \u201cflame\u201d 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\u2019s 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 11<\/span>th<\/span> grade English at Monique\u2019s school contains only Moby Dick-<\/span>ish<\/span><\/i> options. This white educator content on solely reproducing his own cultural products refuses to critically examine Monique\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Given the fact that the target of a jone can be either a peer or a superior, jonin\u2019s 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.<\/span> [33] Through jonin\u2019 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\u2019 is a way of working out the transgressions made against them in the classroom. Monique\u2019s ability to critically discern the Eurocentricity of her 11<\/span>th<\/span> 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\u2019s 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.<\/span> [34] Monique\u2019s subtlety, in this instance, allowed her escape from this fate as well as from the burdens of whiteness.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Education sociologist Leigh Patel argues that for underrepresented and historically marginalized students, learning is already a fugitive act. Distinguishing learning from \u201cachieving\u201d through rote memorization, Patel identifies learning as an act that relies upon a \u201cdialectic to the stratifying cultures of formal education that insist on contingent possibilities for well-being for some and unmitigated safety for others.\u201d<\/span> [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.<\/span> [36] Jonin\u2019, 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\u2019s experiences of subjugation in this country and the innovation that results from such a predicament, Jonin\u2019, 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\u2019ve been relegated by U.S. society.<\/span> [37]<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019 an anti-slavery effort for similar reasons. Monique\u2019s 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\u2019 can be viewed as work stoppage in itself. Even Monique\u2019s use of AAVE in her critique of Moby Dick proves fugitive. By \u201ctalking Black\u201d, Monique naturalizes her own purportedly \u201cinappropriate\u201d 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.<\/span> [38] While delinquent, it is not senseless. Far too often is Black resistance misconstrued as nonsensical. Far too often are the \u201cbad kids\u201d 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\u2019s intelligence, and therefore, the legitimacy of their actions. Jonin,\u2019 thus, must be taken as a logical and rational response to a repressive institution. It <\/span>is<\/span><\/i> in spite of and, therefore, epitomizes Black resistance.<\/span><\/p>\n

Conclusion<\/b><\/p>\n

Jonin\u2019 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\u2019ve 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\u2019 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<\/span> is testament to their determination to live lives free of oppression and domination. Jonin\u2019 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

As a Black cultural product, jonin\u2019 contains the treasures of Black ingenuity and persistence. Because Black literacy has always been rebellious, Black students\u2019 speech in school is necessarily insurrectionary. In the American public school that deprives and depraves Black learners, jonin\u2019 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\u2014a champion and master of all codes Black, hidden and beyond the scope of whiteness\u2014who defies the persistent oppression of Black people and the erasure of their contributions.<\/span> [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\u2019 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?”:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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.<\/span><\/i> Black people have lost too many black children that way.\u00a0<\/span><\/i>[40]<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Endnotes<\/strong><\/p>\n

    \n
  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,”\u00a0<\/span>English Education<\/span><\/i>\u00a049, no. 2 (01, 2017): 116-129; Bettina L. Love, Anti-Black state violence, classroom edition: The spirit murdering of Black children,\u00a0<\/span>Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy <\/span><\/i>13, no.1:\u00a022-25; Lamar L. Johnson, Nathaniel Bryan, and Gloria Boutte. “Show Us the Love: Revolutionary Teaching in (Un)Critical Times.”\u00a0<\/span>The Urban Review<\/span><\/i>\u00a051, no. 1 (03, 2019): 46-64. <\/span><\/li>\n
  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. <\/span>See<\/span><\/i> Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone:<\/span> The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America, (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1998); Erica Armstrong Dunbar, <\/span>Never Caught: The Washingtons\u2019 Relentless Pursuit of their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge<\/span><\/i>, (New York: 37 Ink\/Atria, 2017); Edward E. Baptiste, <\/span>The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism<\/span><\/i>, (New York: Basic Books, 2014); Harriet Beecher Stowe, <\/span>Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin: Or, Life Among the Lowly<\/span><\/i>, (London: Penguin Classics, Reprint Edition, 1981); Frederick Douglass, <\/span>Narratives of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave<\/span><\/i> (Boston: Bedford\/St. Martin\u2019s, 2003); Harriet A. Jacobs, Lydia M. Childs, Jean F. Yellin,\u00a0 John S. Jacobs, <\/span>Incidents in the Life of Slave Girl: Written by Herself<\/span><\/i>, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000)<\/span>,<\/b> Harriet E. Wilson, <\/span>Our Nig, or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black<\/span><\/i>, (New York: Penguin Books, 2009); Stephanie Camp, <\/span>Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South<\/span><\/i>, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).<\/span><\/li>\n
  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. <\/span>See<\/span><\/i> Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone:<\/span> The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America, (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1998); Erica Armstrong Dunbar, <\/span>Never Caught: The Washingtons\u2019 Relentless Pursuit of their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge<\/span><\/i>, (New York: 37 Ink\/Atria, 2017); Edward E. Baptiste, <\/span>The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism<\/span><\/i>, (New York: Basic Books, 2014); Harriet Beecher Stowe, <\/span>Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin: Or, Life Among the Lowly<\/span><\/i>, (London: Penguin Classics, Reprint Edition, 1981); Frederick Douglass, <\/span>Narratives of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave<\/span><\/i> (Boston: Bedford\/St. Martin\u2019s, 2003); Harriet A. Jacobs, Lydia M. Childs, Jean F. Yellin,\u00a0 John S. Jacobs, <\/span>Incidents in the Life of Slave Girl: Written by Herself<\/span><\/i>, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000)<\/span>,<\/b> Harriet E. Wilson, <\/span>Our Nig, or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black<\/span><\/i>, (New York: Penguin Books, 2009); Stephanie Camp, <\/span>Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South<\/span><\/i>, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).<\/span><\/li>\n
  4. See Heather Williams\u2019 <\/span>Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom<\/span><\/i>, Jonathan Kozol\u2019s <\/span>Savage Inequalities: Children in America\u2019s Schools<\/span><\/i>, Adrienne Dixson and Celia K. Rousseau\u2019s <\/span>Critical Race Theory in Education: All God\u2019s Children Got a Song<\/span><\/i> for examples of the persistent deficiencies of American public education in Black communities.<\/span><\/li>\n
  5. According to Johnson, Bryan and Boutte, \u201ccritical race discernment\u201d refers to Black students\u2019 development of a racialized third-eye by which they are able to determine those who show them \u201cfake love\u201d rather than revolutionary love. It is a spiritual phenomenon designed to help Black children both read the word (gain literacy) and <\/span>read <\/span><\/i>their world (understand how they are oppressed and the need to work against such oppression. Johnson et al., \u201cShow Us the Love, 56.<\/span><\/li>\n
  6. H. Samy Alim, and John Baugh, <\/span>Talkin Black Talk: Language, Education, and Social Change<\/span><\/i>. (New York: Teachers College Press, 2007), 3-32.<\/span><\/li>\n
  7. Paddy Brown, \u201cStanding at the Crossroads of Folklore and Education,\u201d <\/span>Journal of American Folklore<\/span><\/i> 119, no. 471 (2006): 66-79.<\/span><\/li>\n
  8. In \u201cPedagogies of Resistance and Survivance: Learning as Marronage,\u201d Leigh Patel posits that fugitivity is fundamental to decolonial educational experiences. I invoke her conceptualizations of resistance and decoloniality to explicate Black students\u2019 speech work in the public school classroom. Leigh Patel, \u201cPedagogies of Resistance and Survivance: Learning as Marronage,\u201d <\/span>Equity& Excellence in Education, <\/span><\/i>49, no. 4 (2016):397-401.<\/span><\/li>\n
  9. Elijah Wald,\u00a0<\/span>Talking ‘Bout Your Mama: The Dozens, Snaps, and the Deep Roots of Rap<\/span><\/i> (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 64.<\/span><\/li>\n
  10. \u201cSay Wha?,\u201d <\/span>The Washington Post<\/span><\/i>, last modified June 7 1987,\u00a0 <\/span>https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/archive\/lifestyle\/magazine\/1987\/06\/07\/say-wha\/09c557d4-2278-4065-81ac-bc1b813532d3\/?utm_term=.5c69b9eda3db<\/span><\/a><\/li>\n
  11. Ibid.<\/li>\n
  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 \u201cPlaying the Dozens\u201d. <\/span>Amuzie Chimezie, \u201cThe Dozens: African-Heritage Theory,\u201d <\/span>The Journal of Black Studies<\/span><\/i> 6, no. 4 (1976): 401-404.<\/span><\/li>\n
  13. Among the Ashanti, royal families are distinctively excluded from being the butts of any joking vituperations. <\/span>Henry Louis Gates Jr.,\u00a0<\/span>The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism<\/span><\/i> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 3; \u201cMamaguy\u201d is defined as deception or teasing in jest. <\/span>Wald, <\/span>Talking\u2018Bout Your Momma,<\/span><\/i> 72.<\/span><\/li>\n
  14. Ibid.; Geneva <\/span>Smitherman, <\/span>Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America<\/span><\/i> (Detroit: <\/span>Wayne State University Press, 1986)<\/span>, 118.<\/span><\/li>\n
  15. Heather Williams, <\/span>Self-taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom<\/span><\/i>, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2005,) Print, 19.<\/span><\/li>\n
  16. Ibid., iBooks Digital Edition,103-107.<\/span><\/li>\n
  17. Ibid., 213.<\/span><\/li>\n
  18. Ibid., Print, 22.<\/span><\/li>\n
  19. Ibid., iBooks Digital Edition, 217-223; DuBois, <\/span>Black Reconstruction,<\/span><\/i>71-72; 123; 365-367; W.E.B. DuBois, <\/span>Souls of Black Folks:Essays and Sketches<\/span><\/i>, (New York: Johnson Reprint Corp, 1968) Gutenberg Digital Edition; Anne Schraff, <\/span>Harriet Tubman: Moses of the Underground Railroad<\/span><\/i>, (Berkeley Heights; Enslow Publishers, Inc., 2001), 48-49; Amy Lotson Roberts and Patrick J. Holladay, <\/span>Gullah Geechee Heritage in the Golden Isles<\/span><\/i>, (Charleston: The History Press, 2019), Amazon Digital Edition, Part 1.<\/span><\/li>\n
  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. <\/span>See <\/span><\/i>Henry Louis Gates Jr.,\u00a0<\/span>The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism<\/span><\/i> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014);<\/span> African American Literary Theory: A Reader<\/span><\/i> ed. Winston Napier (New York: NYU Press, 2000).<\/span><\/li>\n
  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\u2019s resistance. Camp, \u201cCloser to Freedom,\u201d 60-92.\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n
  22. Corliss Outley, Shamaya Bowen and Harrison Pinckney, \u201cLaughing While Black: Resistance, Coping and the Use of Humor as a Pandemic Pastime Among Blacks,\u201d <\/span>Leisure Sciences<\/span><\/i>, DOI:\u00a0<\/span>10.1080\/01490400.2020.1774449<\/span><\/a>; <\/span>Mel Watkins, <\/span>On the Real Side: Laughing, Lying, and Signifying\u2014the Underground tradition of African-American humor that transformed American culture, from slavery to Richard Pryor<\/span><\/i>, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 13-14; “What Are Those?” <\/span>Know Your Meme,<\/span><\/i> November 02, 2017, Accessed November 8, 2017, <\/span>http:\/\/knowyourmeme.com\/memes\/what-are-those<\/span><\/a>; “You look like a mufucking uhhhh,” <\/span>Know Your Meme<\/span><\/i>, November 02, 2017, Accessed October 15, 2017, <\/span>http:\/\/knowyourmeme.com\/memes\/you-look-like-a-mufucking-uhhhh<\/span><\/a>; “You’re Not My Dad,” <\/span>Know Your Meme<\/span><\/i>, November 02, 2017, Accessed November 08, 2017, <\/span>http:\/\/knowyourmeme.com\/memes\/you-re-not-my-dad<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/li>\n
  23. Ibid., <\/span>Watkins, 13-14. <\/span><\/li>\n
  24. Ibid. 17, 19.<\/span><\/li>\n
  25. W.E.B. DuBois, <\/span>The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches<\/span><\/i>, (New York: Johnson Reprint Corp, 1968).<\/span><\/li>\n
  26. Philosopher Shannon Sullivan theorizes that there is no such thing as \u201cobjective spaces\u201d and that such a notion overlooks the \u201cracially magnetized whiteness of spaces\u201d especially in the American context. Shannon Sullivan, \u201cThe Racialization of Space: Toward a Phenomenological Account of Raced and Antiracist Spatiality,\u201d in <\/span>The Problem of Resistance<\/span><\/i>, ed. James Joy and Steve Martinot, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011), 91.<\/span><\/li>\n
  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. <\/span>H. Samy Alim, “Critical Language Awareness in the United States: Revisiting Issues and Revising Pedagogies in a Resegregated Society,” <\/span>Educational Researcher<\/span><\/i> 34, no. 7 (2005): 24-31.<\/span> See <\/span><\/i>\u201cOakland Board Amends Ebonics Policy.\u201d CNN. Cable News Network, January 16, 1997. http:\/\/www.cnn.com\/US\/9701\/16\/black.english\/.<\/span><\/li>\n
  28. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, \u201cDecolonization Is Not a Metaphor,\u201d <\/span>Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, & Society<\/span><\/i> 1, no. 1 (2012): 1\u201340.<\/span><\/li>\n
  29. Patel, <\/span>Decolonizing Educational Research<\/span><\/i>, 30-44; Julie Reuben,\u201cPatriotic Purposes: Public Schools and the Education of Citizens,\u201d in <\/span>American Institutions of Democracy: The Public Schools<\/span><\/i>, ed. Susan Furhman and Marvin Lazeron (New York, 2005), 1-5.<\/span><\/li>\n
  30. Ibid. Patel; William H. Watkins, <\/span>The White Architects of Black Education: Ideology and Power in America, 1865-<\/span><\/i>1954, (New York: Teacher\u2019s College Press, 2001),11-15.<\/span><\/li>\n
  31. Translated by Joan Pinkham from French. <\/span>Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire<\/span>,\u00a0<\/span>Discourse on Colonialism <\/span><\/i>(<\/span>New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 41-42.<\/span><\/li>\n
  32. Alim and Baugh,\u00a0<\/span>Talkin Black Talk<\/span><\/i>, 3-32.<\/span><\/li>\n
  33. Ibid.<\/li>\n
  34. Monique Morris, <\/span>Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools<\/span><\/i>, (New York: The New Press, 2016), 18-24; 34-35.<\/span><\/li>\n
  35. Leigh Patel, <\/span>Decolonizing Educational Research: From Ownership to Answerability<\/span><\/i>, 1st ed. (New York: Routledge, 2016), 30-44.<\/span><\/li>\n
  36. Michael W Apple, <\/span>Ideology and Curriculum<\/span><\/i>, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2004).<\/span><\/li>\n
  37. Patel, \u201cPedagogies of Resistance and Survivance: Learning as Marronage,\u201d 2016.<\/span><\/li>\n
  38. Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa, \u201cUndoing Appropriateness: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and Language Diversity in Education,\u201d <\/span>Harvard Educational Review<\/span><\/i>, 85, no. 2 (2015): 150-155. <\/span><\/li>\n
  39. Alim and Baugh,\u00a0<\/span>Talkin Black Talk<\/span><\/i>,<\/span> 131.<\/span><\/li>\n
  40. James Baldwin, “If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?,” <\/span>New York Times, <\/span><\/i>July 29, 1979. <\/span>https:\/\/movies2.nytimes.com\/books\/98\/03\/29\/specials\/baldwin-english.html<\/span><\/a>. <\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19530,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19530"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=175"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":344,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175\/revisions\/344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}