Counter-Narratives of Race, Resistance, and Language Learning in College Classrooms

“Pretty for a Black Girl”: Counter-Narratives of Race, Resistance, and Language Learning in College Classrooms

A Faculty Membership talk by Carmen Kynard (Lehman College)

"In this presentation, I open with a critical moment in the history of Black collegiate life in the United States: 1925, when Black college students at Fisk University became arguably the first college students to protest on-campus and off-campus racism in the United States as co-binding structures and rooted Black insurgency on college campuses in Black community arts, new aesthetics, new information technologies, and new diasporic migrations. I strive to work against my field’s tendency to erase such historical Black student insurgency and make possible/visible everyday processes and identities of thinking, learning, and studenting that intersect with longstanding visions of freedom and anti-racist teaching. I will then look closely at collaborative/digital writing projects of multiracial college students today and read their literate contributions as part of a long, protracted vision for radical equality and democracy. In this way, the college (writing) classroom can be seen as a significant praxis and laboratory for multiracial students’ “freedom dreams.”"