Imperialist Blackness, Immigrant Whiteness, and the Reinscribing of Semiolingual Innocence
Dr Patriann Smith
The current landscape reflects a callous cajoling of confounded sensitivities surrounding what have largely become an array of dichotomous discourses regarding immigration. In the absence of a calm and collective consideration of the prevailing scientific complexities that characterize immigrant humans and their relationships with those with whom they interact across borders, intertwined threads of our collective humanity are overlooked and the now shared transnational nativity by which the world is governed remains obscure. To address this concern, I draw from the authentic narrative of the Afro-Bahamian youth, Shem, to first present how portrayals of imperialistic Blackness worked to operate in and undergird literacies reflected across his K-12 trajectory. In doing so, I illustrate how this dynamic, emerging from an understanding of the literacies of migration, was reflected structurally in Shem’s experiences in the Bahamian context, as an elementary and secondary school student. Second, I present portrayals of how immigrant Whitenessbecame imposed on Shem’s literacies as a college student, both ideologically and structurally in the US context, highlighting just how critical it is to work with immigrant children and youth, and with immigrant peoples at large to reinscribe the semiolingual innocence that is part and parcel of the literacies that they present in the world. I conclude by demonstrating the significance of teaching literacies to all students, K-12 and otherwise, in ways that acknowledge these tenets as a basis for liberating the minds from dichotomous ideologies steeped in a privileging of monolingual, monocultural, and monoracial norms that significantly limit one’s literacies. In turn, I call for a liberation of all students and humans from the propensity to operate as a function of what seems to arguably be, at the moment, an almost irredeemable deficit -- the result of literacies operating sans attention to the privilege afforded by transnational nativity and its accompanying multilingual, multicultural, and multiracial realities in a rapidly evolving world. For immigrant and non-immigrant humans alike, there is every reason to believe that a reinscribing of semiolingual innocence stands poised to help reclaim literacies operating daily as a function of such realities, and thus, can yet make possible, our reclamation of a shared and redemptive humanity. Ultimately, action towards such reclamation lies nowhere but in our capable hands.
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