The authors of the article “The Black Feminist Mixtape” in JCSHESA’s special issue Promoting Access and Critical Literacy came together post-publication to reflect on the creative approach they took, the process of collaborative writing, and the community they built and continue to maintain as a result of the article.
Please also enjoy the Black Feminist Mixtape Spotify playlist to hear some of the songs featured in their article and other inspirational songs by Black women.
Today, the United States is experiencing a highly-documented wave of white supremacist rhetoric and violence towards minoritized groups – especially Black and Asian people. As community engaged scholars focused on racial equity and increasing educational opportunities for minoritized communities in our city, this violence and racism impacts our partners and their ability to make meaningful change in. In our paper “The role of race in urban community-university relationships: Moving from interest convergence to critical literacy” (Winfield & Davis, 2020), we use data from a multi-year partnership with a local community and their self-designed afterschool program to explore how racism influences interactions between the historically white institution and the community on a daily basis and in community-university partnerships.
This project began as Jake, a then-first year doctoral student, began familiarizing himself with the partnership by reading interview transcripts and project records about the community university partnership. The community, a public housing complex with predominantly low-income Black residents, developed and implemented a culturally relevant afterschool program that catered to student needs. As an outsider to the project, he was struck by how Ms. Jackson, a Black woman and the program director, expressed frustration with the university’s presence in the community. She shared her concern that students from the university were entering into the community without permission to conduct research for classes. She shared: “You stop dissecting us – we’re not frogs. We’re not lab test dummies. I don’t like it. I wish they would stop.” Her words were vivid and seared into his mind. In conversation with Dr. Davis, we came to realize how important her experience was for us to understand the complex and racialized dynamics of the relationship between the community and the university. We began to grapple with how race and racism were often invisible but always present in the university’s interactions.
Our analysis of the relationship between the university and community recognized that interest convergence (Bell, 1980) was central to how the university acted in everyday interactions and with partnerships. The university promoted student research in the community and established traffic safety initiatives that prioritized the safety of white students without the community’s consent. The university’s actions regarding the partnership were often racist as they centered interests of the university. For instance, the university’s policies require that a portion of grant money be allocated for indirect costs to support the university’s operating expenses. In this case, this policy took funding away from the low-income Black community who developed and ran the afterschool program and this reallocation of funding negatively impacted the community’s perception of the university as a partner.
One key tenant of critical literacy includes disrupting the commonplace (Lewison et al., 2002). With this as a key component of our analytic framework, we were able to consistently question the normative practices of the university and how these practices often reinforced racial inequalities and perpetuated harm on the community. This interrogation of the commonplace allowed us to, for example, question why a grant received by a low-income, predominantly Black community to provide services to the community was treated the same as a grant received by an employee to conduct research by allocating part of the grant to general overhead costs. We see critical literacy as a tool to carefully investigate norms in university interactions with local communities and as a potential framework to work collaboratively to create truly equitable partnerships in the future.
Anti-Blackness and racial inequalities have become a center point of political conversations. While we were writing and revising our manuscript, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade and many more Black people were murdered by police officers. As we write this post, Derek Chauvin, a former Minneapolis Police Officer, is on trial for the murder of George Floyd and Daunte Wright was murdered ten miles away by police officers. Our paper cannot be separated from this critical moment in time when public scrutiny of policing and systemic racism are at, seemingly, all-time highs. Questioning the norms of higher education can play a small but important role in envisioning a better, more just world. We believe that the framework of critical literacy can provide an accessible and useful frame to question current practices and create a new paradigm for community-university interactions.
Bell, D. A. (1980). Brown v. Board of Education and the interest-convergence dilemma. Harvard Law Review, 93(3), 518-533.
Lewison, M., Flint, A. S., & Van Sluys, K. (2002). Taking on critical literacy: The journey of newcomers and novices. Language Arts, 79(5), 382-392. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41483258
Weerts, D. J. & Sandmann, L. R. (2010). Community engagement and boundary-spanning roles at research universities. The Journal of Higher Education, 81(6), 632-657. https://doi.org/10.1080/00221546.2010.11779075
Winfield, J. D. & Davis, J. E. (2020). The role of race in urban community-university relationships: Moving from interest convergence to critical literacy. Journal of Critical Scholarship on Higher Education and Student Affairs, 5(3), 16-31. https://ecommons.luc.edu/jcshea/vol5/iss3/5 https://ecommons.luc.edu/jcshesa/vol5/iss3/5
Author Bios
Jake Winfield is a second year Ph.D. student in the Policy, Organization, & Leadership Studies Department in Temple University’s College of Education and Human Development. His research interests are the intersection of community-university partnerships and college access for minoritized students. Before coming to Temple, Jake was a high school math teacher in Helena-West Helena, AR and Phoenix, AZ.
James Earl Davis is the Bernard C. Watson Endowed Chair in Urban Education at Temple University and serves as a professor of higher education. His research centers issues of access and equity – primarily for Black boys – and community-university partnership.
PRAXIS 