Content area
Full Text
Pedagogies of healing and critical media literacy are important, especially in the wake of racial violence when mainstream media work to stigmatize, characterize, and marginalize Black youth by projecting them as dangerous Others. In this article, we offer an overview of how mainstream media reinscribe and reinforce white supremacy, which leads to anti-blackness. Next, we discuss the impact that uncritical consumption of mainstream media narratives of Black people has on media consumers and how Black youth use social media as counterspaces. We then theorize about pedagogies of healing and critical media literacy as tools to encourage Black youth to investigate, dismantle, and rewrite the damaging narratives. We conclude with sample lesson plans and a discussion of how English educators have a responsibility to use our discipline to transform our world and raise awareness of the crisis of racial injustice.
If you aren't careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.
-Malcolm X, At The Audubon, 1964
Rather than seen as victims, Black youth are vilified, and viewed as suspicious, delinquent or dangerous by mass media.
-Henry Giroux, The Fire This Time, 2015
When we first began writing this article in October 2015, we were witnessing mainstream media's coverage of a 16-year-old Black student at Spring Valley High School in Columbia, South Carolina, who was assaulted in her math class by a White school resource officer. Allegedly, the girl, whose name was not released, failed to comply with requests made by her teacher and a school administrator to leave the classroom,1 and therefore, resource officer Ben Fields was called to remove her. The incident, captured by stu- dents on cell-phone video, shows the girl sitting at her desk when the officer grabs her and tosses her around like a rag doll. There were many conflicting views about the nature of the incident. For example, Harry Houck, an analyst from CNN-a major force in world news and information delivery-argued: "If that girl got out of the seat when she was told, there'd be no problem. But apparently she had no respect for the school, no respect for her teacher, probably has no respect at home or on the street, and that's why...