The guiding question I’m using for my UnFinal project is, “How is the tradition of classroom care passed on?” I will share a piece of my 2nd exam that addresses this question through a Black educational historical context. I will trace (historicize) back the individual and collective moments in pre-21st century Black education where educators were practicing “Radical Care,” which laid the conceptual foundations of contemporary Racial Literacy and CR-SE work.
The provided selection contains sections of my 2nd exam that contain citations from the readings we were assigned in class.
Jordan Bell
Dr. Rivera-McCutchen
UnFinal exam
Spring 2021
Brief History of CSP and Its Interconnectedness to CRT, BlackCrit, and Racial Literacy
Now, a brief historicization of CSP will follow to illuminate how it serves as a theoretical framework that disrupts racism, specifically anti-Black deficit educational racism for the purposes of this work, and to reveal its interconnectedness to CRT, BlackCrit, and Racial Literacy.
The concept of Culturally Responsive Pedagogy (CRP) was birthed into the world by Gloria Ladson-Billings (1995) in her groundbreaking work, “Toward a Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy.” Ladson-Billings (2017) recalled doing research for pedagogical success and Black children, and she was not finding any results. Anecdotal evidence of anti-Blackness manifested in her “first electronic searches using descriptors like “Black Education” and “African-American Education” [that] quickly defaulted to cross-references that read, “see culturally deprived,” or “see cultural deficits.” The language of academic excellence was absent when it came to considering African-American children” (142). To address the dearth of academic excellence scholarship for Black students, Ladon-Billings coalesced and built upon the theoretical framework provided by Critical Race Theorists such as Derrick Bell (1980; 1992/2018), Cheryl Harris (1993), Kimberle Crenshaw (1989, 1990, 1991), and Lani Guinier (1991) with the fledgling asset pedagogy work of pedagogues such as Au and Jordan (1981, p. 139) — who coined the term “culturally appropriate” — and Cazden and Leggett (1981) and Erickson and Mohatt (1982) — who coined the term “culturally responsive” (p. 167). CRP was created as a response to the American “educational apartheid” that still existed almost 100 years after the Plessy v Ferguson (1896) decision legitimized and standardized the era of “separate but [un]equal” (Taylor, 2017, p. 5). These two fields were brought together because CRT came from similar frustrations as the Critical Legal Studies (CLS) field insofar that they both realized the law and educational structures were not objective nor-race neutral, as evidenced in Derrick Bell’s (1980) “Interest Convergence Dilemma” where he highlighted the rationale behind Brown V Board of Ed (1954) decision to integrate schools. Gloria Ladson-Billings and William Tate IV’s (2006 [original in 1995]), “Toward a Critical Race Theory of Education,” illumined and made clear the parallels in the everyday racism inherent in the legal and educational fields. Ladson-Billings’ CRP addresses and challenges the race neutrality of educational policies and practices through a CRT Theoretical framework and continues to further the asset pedagogy work to center and support Black and other marginalized student communities. Racial Literacy Ruptures serve as the responses to anti-Black educational racism that served as foundations for contemporary CRP/CSP work.
Gloria Ladson-Billings (1995) original CRP framework centered on the “criteria of [student] academic success, cultural competence, and critical consciousness” that occurs by having teachers “maintain fluid student-teacher relationships, demonstrate a connectedness with all of the students, develop a community of learners, encourage students to learn collaboratively and be responsible for another” (480). Practices like building cultural competency, developing a community of leaders, and teaching students to be responsible for one another were employed by Black educators during the 19th, and 20th centuries to respond to anti-Black educational racism (Anderson, 1988; Hine, Hine, and Harold, 2013; Painter, 2006). Unfortunately, while Ladson-Billings clearly articulated her CRP goals, her work became distorted by theorists and pedagogues. One of the distortions had teachers “relegating students’ cultural and linguistic resources to being tools for advancing the learning of an “acceptable” curricular canon, a “standard” variety of language, or other “academic” skill [, which] had some unintended consequences” (Alim & Haupt, 2017, p. 157). A concrete example of a CRP distortion is referenced in April Baker-Bell’s (2020) Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy, where she discusses how color-evasive approaches to education where students only are allowed to use of their “Home languages” (Delpit and Dowdy, 2008) outside of academic contexts is anti-Black linguistic racism. Baker-Bell’s work builds upon Jordan’s (1988) anti-Black language work. Color-evasiveness disrupts Cultural Responsiveness. Racial Literacy frameworks help people to see and understand that race is fluid and socially constructed (Omi and Winant, 1986) and see the cultural value of whiteness (Twine, 2010) so that colorblind racism can be disrupted.
Failing to be Racially Literate incites distorting CRP. Distorters of CSP fail to recognize and learn the first essential component of the Culturally Responsive Teaching knowledge base. Geneva Gay (2002) suggested the CRP component involves determining “which ethnic groups give priority to communal living and cooperative problem solving and how these preferences affect educational motivation, aspiration, and task performance” (p. 107). For some Blacks, 18th and 19th-century clandestine communal schools served as sites of Racial Literacy Ruptures where cooperative problem solving created space for pockets of Black education to be accessible and anti-Black racism to be disrupted. While many pre-21st century Blacks had to employ their CRP practices through a Racially Literate lens in order to protect themselves in anti-Black racism, 21st-century educators do not face the life or death costs of Racially Illiterate operationalizations of CRP theory and practice. Thus, many educators have negated the benefits of CRP.
CRP distortions have been damaging for Black students. Thus, Django Paris (2012) raised awareness to these types of distortions and re-articulated a more precise 21st-century version of CRP known a Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (CSP) — which serves “as an alternative [to CRP] … [that] embodies some of the best research and practice in resource pedagogy tradition and as a term that supports the value of our multiethnic and multilingual present and future” (93). In other words, the CRP distortions that took place often manifested in tokenism or superficial interactions with race and culture instead of a deep interrogation of the lived experiences and joys/ problems that matter for communities of color. In other words, the CRP distortions may have (un)intentionally, or very intentionally (Baker-Bell, 2020), been “reproducing discourses that marginalize members of our [Black] communities” (Paris & Alim, 2014,p. 94).
Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Education (CRSE) is both an embodiment and an extension of CRP and CSP. Randy Bomer (2017) reveals how “Literacy is culturally responsive and education is culturally responsive. That is, all teaching and learning are shaped by culture” (p.11). Culture refers to a group of people’s ways of being, ways of living, their patterns of communication, their axiologies, their ontologies, their epistemologies, that exist in both micro and macro individual and collective interactions. Thus, to be an effective CRSE educator necessitates a nuanced understanding of the beliefs and values of the communities that are being taught. Many pre 21st century Black educators expressed their nuanced understandings of their communities’ beliefs in values by creating clandestine and Sabbath schools to teach Black children and create their individual and collective Racial Literacy Ruptures (Anderson, 1988). These pre 21st-century Black educators “Radically Cared” (Rivera-McCutchen, 2019) for their students, in part, because they came from the same or similar communities as their students. This “Radical Care” is an authentic form of care as obsessed to aesthetic care insofar as it involves embracing and displaying the “collective ethos of Black communities that believed education was the key to enhancing the life chances of their children. Particularly in many small southern towns, the all-Black school was the institution that reinforced community values and served as the community’s ultimate cultural symbol“ (Tillman, 2004, p. 105). However, educators who don’t come from direct or parallel communities to the ones they serve too often provide “instruction .. planned in response to a projection of [t]he[i]r own culture onto the students. And literacy education is especially responsive to culture [as per the definition of literacy] … So both the literacy part of “literacy education” and the education part are wholly shaped by the social doings that educators have become accustomed to” (Bomer, 2017, p. 11). In other words, teachers who don’t understand the material and social worlds of the students who are taught are often projecting mismatched onto-epistemic expectations onto students.
BlackCrit, CRT, and Racial Literacy theoretically work in concert to identify the systems, structures, and policies that create and perpetuate the anti-Black epistemology citizens are exposed to in everyday life through media images (Littlefield, 2008; Gammage, 2019); policing (Chaney and Robertson, 2013; Bloom, and Frampton, 2020), healthcare (Gupta, 1996; Elias and Peredies, 2021) practices; and governmental and legal post-racial liberalism policies (Bell, 1980; Guinier, 2004) that indoctrinate U.S. citizens into a culture/an epistemology of ant-Blackness. The culture/epistemology of anti-Blackness is part of the reason why educators from mismatched communities than the Black students they serve often project mismatched onto-epistemic expectations onto students. CRT, BlackCrit, and Racial Literacy work to abolish racism and anti-Blackness in all social and theoretical spaces, but CSP specifically operationalizes the CRT, BlackCrit, and Racial Literacy theoretical frameworks in the classroom to create educational theories and pedagogical practices to disrupt educational racism, specifically anti-Black educational racism in the context of this work. Thus, CRT, BlackCrit, Racial Literacy, and CSP are both appropriate and necessary for tracing back to the Racial Literacy Ruptures in Black education that created space for contemporary Racial Literacy and CSP work and disrupted anti-Black epistemological and educational deficit models.
The Achievement Gap Deficit Model
This phenomenon of blaming the Black victim has continued throughout American history, particularly in educational settings as will be revealed when the Black Racial Literacy Ruptures are traced (Bell et. al., forthcoming). An academic example of blaming the victim manifests in the form of the Achievement Gap. To many educators, poorer results on test results (both standardized and individualized) point to some type of deficiency in the student(s) with the poor results. This epistemology of deficiency was provided with (perceived) concrete evidence in the form of the 1966 Coleman Report (Coleman, 1966). The fact that the Coleman report was used to substantiate the achievement gap is ironic considering that the report was used by opposing school interest groups to, on one side, argue for desegregation in schools and, on the other side, community-controlled schools (Kantor and Lowe, 2017). Coleman “suggested it was likely that members of Congress wanted to document the gross differences in the quality of the schools that black and white students attended and thereby legitimate the fight for school desegregation and equal educational opportunity” (Kantor and Lowe, 2017). In other words, Congress wanted to use the report to create a cultural deficit model by idealizing that Black kids necessitate being in closer proximity to white students to achieve academic success. The cultural deficit model created by congress has done nothing to close the “achievement gap” in the 50+ years since the Coleman Report (Wilson, 2016;Ladson-Billings, 2006). This is why Black educators such as Kenneth b. Clark and Charles H. Thompson disputed the Coleman Report’s assertion that culture mattered more than schools (Gordon, 2017).
Many disputes over the Coleman report were centered around the idea that the Coleman Report did not accurately explain “the Gap” that exists between students of color and their white peers. In other words, the Coleman Report failed to provide context. The contextual ineptness is often overlooked and may be deemed unimportant. However, this failure to provide context speaks volumes about how academic success is measured by hegemonic influences — which don’t include CR-SE methodologies and practices. Why is it that white students consistently perform better on standardized tests than most students of color? For morally erect educators, the asking of the previous question begs the asking of the following question: What can I do to (re)center the humanity of students of color who are oft marginalized in academic settings?
Gloria Ladson-Billings (2006) reframes the Achievement Gap into a Structural Inequity Gap: “[She] called upon educational researchers to shift their lenses from the achievement gap to the educational debt” (Patel, 2016, p19). This shift is of the utmost of importance because “a debt is something that is owed; a gap can simply exist. A debt raises a question of who owes whom and who stands to benefit, and surfaces questions of equity” (Patel, 2016, p. 19). Yes, it is the last move towards equity that is the most salient in the reframing of this issue. In other words, students are no longer deficient or deviant. No, a Racially Literate analysis of the Achievement Gap reveals that society has collectively, consciously or not, worked against Black persons to create barriers to academic success. This reframing of the question puts the impetus back on society and takes the blame off the individual. More than just blaming the victim, another contention with deficit models is that some of them equate academic literacy with intelligence. I want to draw attention to the fact that academic literacy should not be falsely equated with intelligence “in which first Native Americans and then African Americans, etc., are
disenfranchised from a cultural model of literacy that is home of the White middle class (Lee, 2005) (as cited in Patel, 2016). Both the “Negro Problem” and the “Achievement gap” serve as concrete examples of deficit models and help to rationalize why diverse epistemologies and literacies need to be explored in educational spaces and beyond. Moreover, these examples make clear that the primary issue with deficit models is that they are often cultural models, and cultural appreciation can’t be had nor can cultural gaps be closed without developing cultural competency. Racial Literacy epistemology exposes the ruptures where cultural competency was first practiced by Blacks in American schools. Racial Literacy epistemology is needed to have better, more complete, and more accurate understandings of the ways in which racism, specifically anti-Blackness, have contributed to epistemic ignorance (Mills, 2007) and epistemic violence (Sharpe, 2016).
Tracing Back to the Racial Literacy Ruptures in Clandestine, Common, and Sabbath Schools
With-out a Negro past, without a Negro future, it was impossible for me to live my Negrohood. Not yet white, no longer wholly black, I was damned. Jean-Paul Sartre had forgotten that the Negro suffers in his body quite differently from the white man. Between the white man and me the connection was irrevocably one of transcendence. But the constancy of my love had been forgotten. I defined myself as an absolute intensity of beginning. So I took up my negritude, and with tears in my eyes I put its machinery together again. What had been broken to pieces was rebuilt, reconstructed by the intuitive lianas of my hands. My cry grew more violent: I am a Negro, I am a Negro, I am a Negro …. (Fanon,1986, p.138)
Franz Fanon informs readers that being Black in a white nation is an inherently violent experience, whether it be physical, intellectual, relational, financial, individual, structural, or any other type of violence imaginable. In other words, Fanon is asking, where
is the love for Black folx? In direct relation to this work, his musings beg the questions, who is teaching Black (Negro) people to love themselves and how are they teaching Black people to love themselves in schools?
One of the first Black educators to show the love in the classroom and beyond for Black students in America was Maria Stewart. Maria Stewart’s “original synthesis of religious, abolitionist, and feminist concerns places her squarely in the forefront of a Black female activist and literary tradition only now beginning to be acknowledged as of integral significance to the understanding of the history of black thought and culture in America” (Stewart, 1987, p. xiv). Maria Miller was born free in Hartford, Connecticut in 1803 and married James Stewart in 1826, who died in 1829. After her husband’s death, Stewart began a three-year public speaking career in Boston, and she became the first American (Black) woman to speak publicly to mixed-gender audiences. In September 1832, she lectured for the Afric [sic] American Female Literary Society in Boston where she spoke out against colonizing Blacks to Africa. Then, in 1832 and 1833, she presented four public speeches where she addressed issues that the Black community (both freed and enslaved) were being exposed to (Haywood, 2003, p. 6). In one of her 1832 speeches, she drew attention to the vocational oppression experienced by free Blacks:
I have asked several individuals of my sex, who transact business
for themselves, if providing our girls were to give them the most satisfactory references, they would not be willing to grant them equal opportunity with others? Their reply has been-for their own part they had no objection; but as it was not the custom, were they to take them into their employ, they would be in danger of losing the public patronage (the Weekly Advocate, 1837, p.2)
Steward made clear that freed Blacks (freedmen) were systemically and individually oppressed, providing an early 19th century bifurcation (Weis and Fine, 2012) of anti-Black racism. She exposed the ways most free Blacks experienced ontological and epistemic legal restrictions that prevented them from narrowing and eliminating the social, economic, and political gaps (aka debts) that existed between whites and Blacks in the antebellum United States (McGary, 1992). For example, although a Black person may have been born as a free person, if they were kidnapped and enslaved, their “free status” could not be used to secure their release (Northup, 1853). This was because of the Fugitive Slave Law (1850) and the Scott V Samford (1847) Supreme Court decision (Hines et al., 2016). Not only in legal spaces, but also in educational spaces was Stewart denied equity: “deprived of the advantages of education, though [her] soul thirsted for knowledge” (Stewart, 1998, p.3). She spoke about the dearth of educational spaces and opportunities for Blacks in one of her public speeches where she addressed some of the following topics: “poverty and oppression; education; the uplift of the race; securing a future for black children; and the role of women in black liberation” (Haywood, 2003, p. 6).
The focus on Black children and Black women in liberation is where Maria Stewart makes Ruptures that serve as early Black Racial Literacy Epistemology. Her radical pedagogy that guided Black students away from victim status/stance was honed when she started teaching the Bible in dynamic rather than static ways in an attempt to get Blacks to reconceptualize their place and positionality in White supremacist society (Bassard, 2010). Her teaching went beyond the Sunday (Sabbath) school classroom, for she taught in New York after leaving Boston in 1832 (Haywood, 2003). Stewart’s pedagogical philosophy focused on “breaking the chains of ignorance shackling the mind in ways analogous to the iron fetters used to restrain enslaved women and men. Education freed the mind, fostered the ability to recognize societal ills, and made it possible to envision the creation of a better world” (King, 2006, p.89). Her social and pedagogical approach is an early Racial Literacy rupture. Stewart read, recognized, and responded to racism in supporting Black students (Stevenson, 2016). One of the Racial Literacy legacies of her rupture rests in the fact that “By 1845 more than 60 Black scholars were taught by Maria W. Stewart” (Stewart, 1987, p. xvi). She did not allow Black persons to remain victims in a White supremacist society that preyed on Black bodies. Maria Stewart empowered Blacks by educating them in ways that protected them from the structures and people who meant Black folx harm.
Maria Stewart’s abolitionism and Racial literacy practice involved emotional labor. Miriam Muller (2018) defines emotional labor as committed work that involves salient elements of relationship and community building: “listening to the other’s worries, sensing that something is going on and providing space for the other to talk about it, keeping in touch, remembering important things in the other’s life etc. The currency of this type of emotional labour includes care, respect, attention, affection or empathy (Muller 2018, 8; see also Hochschild 1985)” (as cited in Toole, 2019, p. 602). Maria Stewart had to listen to the stories of her peers and students to reveal the ways in which racist, anti-Black incited oppression manifested in their lives. Her listening to those narratives, as well as her internal narratives, exposed counter-narratives (Solorzano and Yosso, 2002; Yosso, 2005; Milner, 2008) that did not align with the ways in which whites treated and positioned Blacks. Stewart displayed an ethic of critical care in performing emotional labor that went “beyond pertaining to building nurturing and trusting relationships (Noddings, 1992) to also consider power dynamics and redress inequities (Antrop-Gonza´lez, 2006; Cooper, 2009a; Shields, 2003)” (as cited in Wilson, 2016, p. 2). While she disrupted on the individual and structural level, this tracing (Hill, 2018) back to her work marks the ruptures that created space for current iterations of Black Racial Literacy Epistemology.
Stewart’s work reveals that “education was more than mere literacy. It defied racist stereotypes while embracing an orientation toward achievement and social responsibility. It also expanded employment opportunities and commanded respectability. “Knowledge is power,” said Stewart repeatedly” (King, 2006, p. 91). Knowledge is power was such a GANGSTER assertion at a time when most Blacks were denied access to education. She knew that it was her responsibility to deliver that POWER to Blacks. Moreover, she felt that it was women’s collective responsibility for engendering children’s thirst for knowledge. In centering Black women’s role in education, Stewart knew that Black women educators would enact a pro-Black “political clarity: With their students, both in deed and in word” because they understood their society and knew they had to disrupt anti-Black racial oppression (Tillman, 2004, p. 80). She endeavored to successfully found Black educational communities because she knew how to “directly speak to educators [and parents] responsive to the needs of racially minoritized students” (Wilson, 2016, p. 6) Stewart knew most Blacks had few resources for schools or academies, yet she believed Black parents should provide their children with the “first rudiments of useful knowledge” (Stewart, 1987, p. 36). She suggested hiring private instructors to teach the “higher [academic] branches” (Stewart, 1987, p. 41). Stewart dreamt of creating a powerful educated populace through the coordinated efforts of women raising and pooling their monies to build schools. This “Freedom Dream” (Kelley, 2003) culminates with the development of generations of girls and boys who generationally possess more knowledge than their parents and previous generations. In other words, she provided a Black Racial Literacy Rupture.
While tracing (Hill, 2018) Maria Stewart’s individual Racial Literacy contribution, it becomes evident that she desired a collective rupture, not an individual rupture. Unbeknownst to Stewart at the time of her teachings and abolitionism, ruptures that supported Blacks in education spaces were already taking place. Making these ruptures was not an easy task by any means, particularly in the South where Blacks were not afforded the same limited opportunities presented (or taken) to Maria Stewart. There were very few educational opportunities for Blacks in the Antebellum South. This was in large part due to the fact that many anti-literacy laws were created to outlaw any and all forms of Black literacy: “In 1770, Georgia passed a law,providing for a fine of $20 for teaching slaves to read and write … in 1829 [another law] provided for a fine of $500 for any person caught teaching Blacks to read or write … in [Savannah] 1833 [for] any person caught teaching Blacks to read and write should be fined $1,000 and if a Black, be given thirty-nine lashes” (Perdue, 1976, p.2) Even though laws were created to prevent Black folx from learning, Blacks took the risks and created schools. Sometimes, those schools were run by free, educated Blacks. Julian Frotianie, a free Black man from San Domingo, opened such a school for enslaved persons to attend from 1819 – 1844 in Charleston, South Carolina (Perdue, 1976). There were many such schools like this throughout the South, and some of them were even purported to be also run by Frotianie.
Larger Southern cities had larger concentrations of Black populations, which typically offered better educational opportunities for Blacks than did rural locations and were often self-supporting. However, considering that the South was an agricultural region that depended upon enslaved persons labor, there was not much support or opportunity for self-sufficient Black folx. Thus, most Blacks who were exposed to education came to it by private instructor or Sabbath/Church school. However, an exception and possible historical conflation existed in “A colored “Santo Dominican” named Julian Troumontaine taught openly in Savannah up to 1829 when such an act was prohibited by law. He taught clandestinely thereafter, however, until 1844” (Woodson, 2008, p. 67). While the facts may be disputable as to where Julian taught, as he was purported to have taught in Charleston, South Carolina under a different last name in the above paragraph, there is no disputing when he taught and to whom he taught. His having to close his public school and create a Clandestine School was a microcosm of the educational experience for most Southern educated Blacks. Clandestine schools were how many Blacks were educated during the Antebellum period.
During the Antebellum period, Blacks had to avoid the detection of slave regimes and patrols to educate themselves. One example of effectively executed avoidance manifested in a Black school in Savannah, Georgia from 1833-1865; the school’s “teacher, a black woman by the name of Deveaux, quickly expanded her literacy campaign during and following the war” (Anderson, 1988, p. 7). This type of behavior was mimicked across the South to eventually form an abundance of Common Schools in the South. But prior to those Common Schools were Clandestine schools. One of these Clandestine schools was run by yet another Black woman, Mary Peake. Mary Peake’s story helps to explain why she, herself, became an educator who made a Black Racial Literacy Rupture. Mary Smith Kelsey was born in Norfolk, Virginia in 1823 (Freedman, 1999). She was the child of a free woman of color, Sarah, and a Frenchmen father who was not allowed to marry Sarah due to Virginia Law. The father eventually returned to France without Sarah and Mary, but he did provide for the family and Mary’s education. In 1829, Mary came into direct contact with a Black educator when she was sent to live with her Aunt and attend school in Alexandria: “It is not unlikely that this was the school taught by Sylvia Morris who taught a primary school in Alexandria for about twenty years (about 1826-1846) … Kelsey is reported to have attended a number of schools during her ten years in Alexandria, the last being Mr. Nuthall’s … who taught in the First Baptist Colored Church” (p.1). As a student, Kelsey likely encountered in Mr. Nuthall an educator who believed in the education of all Black students. Nuthall probably displayed “confidence in the ability of all students to do well; and compassion for, and understanding of, all students and the communities in which they live” (Lomotey, 1993, p. 396). Her experiences as a student gave her the impetus to teach enslaved children shortly after her arrival in Hampton, Virginia: “Between 1851 just after her marriage and 1861 when Hampton was burned by the retreating Confederate army, Mary Peake taught reading to free and enslaved African-Americans at the same time” (p. 2).
Mary Peake courageously and surreptitiously created a Clandestine school in her home, as was a common practice for many Black educators. In her school, Mary Peake taught any and all Blacks who would come, whether freed or enslaved, young or old, but she most likely did so in small groups, for large congregations would have been very likely to draw the attention of Whites (Freedman, 1999). Worthy of mentioning, “Mary Peake taught, among others, Thompson Walker (her step-father), William Thornton, and William Davis, all of whom would remain important public leaders of the African-American community through the war and into Reconstruction” (p. 2). However, because of the Civil War, “By the summer of 1861, Hampton had been largely abandoned by whites mostly moving towards confederate strongholds …
and around 900 African-American refugees had made it to Fort Monroe. Any efforts or need to keep the school hidden were gone” (p.2). Mary Peake was teaching publicly and had 40-50 pupils by September of 1861. She even began teaching a night school that reportedly had “20 adults at night” (p. 3). Peake taught parents because she knew that “Caring in the Black family has had to be, in part, about the surrounding society, because it has had to provide children with the understanding and the strategies they need to survive racism” (Thompson, 1998, p. 532)(as cited in Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 2002, p. 80).
