Rupture,not injury: reframing repair for Black and Indigenous youth experiencing school pushout

Making Sense of Movements (MSOM)

MSOM was a youth participatory action research project created by the Tkaronto Collaborative Indigenous Research for Communities, Land and Education (CIRCLE) Lab at the University of Toronto between January 2018 and December 2020. The project ran as an afterschool program in four distinct waves or cycles. Across the four waves, 24 Black and Indigenous high school students from Toronto participated as youth co-researchers. During this time, youth co-researchers learned how to use visual and qualitative research methods, such as photovoice, audio interviewing, and podcasting.

We designed the first wave (January 2018–April 2018), of MSOM to study how prominent, contemporary Black- and Indigenous-led social movements were shaping Black and Indigenous young people’s post-secondary planning. Eve Tuck was the PI, and Sefanit and Jade were the lead facilitators of the project. True to the name of the project, we, along with other project facilitators and youth co-researchers, were interested in thinking with young people about how they made sense of social movements like Black Lives Matter, Idle No More, and #NoDAPL at Standing Rock. Our focus on contemporary Black and Indigenous led social movements allowed us to study how, and in what ways, Black and Indigenous youth co-researchers and their communities identified with and responded to the injustices highlighted by these movements.

In this project, we modified a method called photovoice to think more deeply with young people about Black and Indigenous social movements. Photovoice is a qualitative research method initially developed by Caroline Wang as a tool for participatory healthcare needs assessment (Wang, 1999; Wang and Burris, 1997). Emerging from participatory photography techniques, photovoice (Wang and Burris, 1997) is a creative approach that allows people to identify, define, and enhance their community according to their own specific concerns and priorities by holding discussions of photographs. More specifically, photovoice is intended to create change by using the visual work created by youth and the discussions around such work to influence policy makers and policy. In this version of photovoice, the agents of change are the people viewing the photos (i.e. policy makers) who are outside the community of collaboration. In MSOM, we modified Burris’s method of photovoice by interrogating the theory of change of photovoice, de-emphasizing the agency of the audience in the method, and by scaffolding a series of photo-making activities that led to youth altering photographic prints of their work (see Tuck and Del Vecchio, 2018, for a thorough discussion of these modifications of the process, as engaged in another study). Making this modification offers a theory of change that values the agency and expertise of Black and Indigenous young people and their communities.

Young people created photographs, and these photographs were the focus of many of the activities we did together. As such, youth co-researchers received training in using point-and-shoot cameras and in photography techniques. At the end of every session, youth co-researchers were assigned photo challenges to respond to and create for the next meeting. For example, youth would be asked to respond to the photo challenge prompt, ‘take a photo of a place that needs a change’ or ‘take a picture of yourself in the future’. Most of our sessions began with youth co-researchers presenting their photo challenge images to the group by displaying their image on a projector. While their image was projected, other youth participants in the session would take turns describing and interpreting the image. Then the photographer would share the processes of creating the photograph/s and describe the meaning of their image/s.

There is a long history of scholarship that aims to examine what photography can do and why it can do it within studies of Visual Culture. More specifically, scholars across several generations have been thinking with and against the photographic image, those who interact with photographic images, and camerawork. Such scholars include Susan Sontag (1977, 2003), Roland Barthes (1977[1961]), Thy Phu and Linda Steer (2009), and more recently Lisa Cartwright and Elizabeth Wolfson in an introduction to a themed issue on Affect at the Limits of Photography published in this journal in 2018. We also share a certain dissatisfaction with photography as a theory of change, a dissatisfaction that is deeply grounded in Black feminist approaches to photography and portraiture (see also Tuck and Del Vecchio, 2018).

Drawing on Black feminist practices of redaction and annotation not only informed our approach of using photovoice with Black and Indigenous youth, but also shaped how we facilitated the practice of intervening on images.

Black Studies scholar Christina Sharpe (2016) theorizes Black annotation and redaction as moves to counter imagery that fixes Black people as injured or suffering. More generally, annotations refer to the textual or visual additions made to an image to capture what often lives in excess of the frame; redaction, then, is the removal or an editorial revision that subverts images. In Sharpe’s work, redaction as a practice works ‘to confirm the status, location, and already held opinions within dominant ideology about [exhibitions] of spectacular Black bodies whose meanings then remain unchanged’ (p. 116). For Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński (2018: 91), Black redaction and annotation represent ‘the motive . . . to see Blackness otherwise, beyond the violent and traumatic history’. The practices of Black annotation and redaction emerge from an understanding that reproducing damaging visual and textual works will not put an end to anti-Black violence, nor will ‘something like empathy’ offer any reprieve to those repeatedly reproduced through pain-ridden, racist tropes (Hartman, 1997; Sharpe, 2016: 117). In her early work, Hartman (1997) critiques what she calls the ‘slipperiness of empathy’ through recounting the story of John Rankin, an abolitionist who wrote a story in which he and his family were enslaved. By placing himself in this fictionalized scenario where he imagines himself and his family as enslaved people, Rankin attempts to make readers experience, and then oppose, the horrors of slavery. However, Hartman argues that ‘the ease of Rankin’s empathetic identification is as much due to his good intentions and heartfelt opposition to slavery as to the fungibility of the captive body’ (p. 19). In this case, empathy replicates and reinforces the violence inherent in objectifying Black people.

A critique of empathy is also offered by Eve Tuck (2009a), who writes at the intersection of education and Indigenous studies. In her open letter, ‘Suspending damage’, Tuck encourages researchers, educators, and communities to deeply consider the impacts that research has on Indigenous, Black and other racialized communities. More specifically, Tuck urges readers to reckon with the harmful ways that research is often used to document the pain and loss of Indigenous people, Black people, and other racialized people. Research that solely focuses on the damaged lives of Indigenous communities, Black communities, and other racialized communities relies on a theory of change that assumes that benevolent, agentic, (white) communities can be convinced to give up the benefits they receive through colonialism and racism. This leads Tuck to call for a moratorium on damage-based research, which Tuck defines as research that frames and reproduces communities as deflated, broken, and one-dimensional. Instead, she proposes research practices that center the wisdom, expertise, and resistance of communities, what she calls desire-based narratives. Black annotation and redaction can be thought together with desire-based frameworks as a set of refusals (Simpson, 2014; Tuck and Yang, 2012).

One of the ways that we adapted the photovoice process was to have discussions with youth about the harms of deploying empathy as a theory of change, and to reflect on the practices and philosophies of redaction.

In our MSOM work sessions, we had conversations with youth co-researchers about what should or should not be photographed, and how to manipulate or edit images to align with the set of this particular set of ethics developed by Black Studies and Indigenous scholars. To practice this, young people used drawing and crafts materials to remove parts of their images (by covering or cutting parts of the photograph) and added to their image (by drawing or writing upon the image).

In addition to engaging with photovoice as a visual and participatory research method, we invited artists and activists from the community to share their expertise and lead workshops for youth co-researchers. These artists and activists guided youth through visual research practices and community-based visual practices, including banner-making, designing and screen-printing t-shirts, creating place-specific pennants, and making graphic novels. The photographs and other artistic works created by youth co-researchers were showcased in a public exhibition at the end of the first wave.

In the second wave (April 2019 – July 2019), 11 youth co-researchers continued to study the relationship between social movements and their futures, this time by working in small groups to create podcast episodes. Each podcast episode was centered around a particular social issue impacting Black and Indigenous youth in our study.

The topics included belonging and unbelonging, family border separation, No Ban on Stolen Land, the Dish with One Spoon agreement (an Indigenous governance agreement for the Great Lakes, including Tkaronto), and, finally, school pushout. We facilitated multiple workshops so that youth could learn and research more about each issue or topic; and youth co-researchers scripted and recorded podcast episodes following the workshop series. For these sessions, the photo challenges were based on the specific topic on which youth co-researchers were working. When we had finished all of our workshops, we had discussions with youth about the topic or issue they wanted to do research on, and the consensus was school pushout. School pushout became the primary focus of the program in the third and fourth waves. As a participatory study, there was a gradual increase of youth decision making over the course of the four waves of the project. The first wave was largely designed by the university research team. In the second wave, youth had a more active role in designing research activities. Youth entirely designed the third wave, and the context of COVID-19 meant that the university research team had a more prominent role in design and facilitation. Throughout all four waves, youth co-researchers had the responsibilities of designing the weekly photo challenges and co-creating a set of questions they used to interview one another. In the second wave, they also designed the overall direction of each podcast episode. The work in the first two waves prepared youth co-researchers for the third and fourth waves, in which they collaboratively designed a study about the experiences of school pushout for Black and Indigenous students in Toronto. In summary, MSOM was a large, multiyear, multiphase study that offered us insight about how Black and Indigenous youth make sense of contemporary social movements, and the significance of these movements in their lives and for their futures. Over the course of all four waves, we also learned how Black and Indigenous youth understand social movements in relation to Tkaronto as a place and as their home, and to broader needs for change and social justice. In this article, we focus only on the findings from this study that are concerned with how schools do or do not, and should or should not, respond when something racist happens, and the role that visuality/aesthetics plays in how youth named and described these experiences of rupture.

Studying school pushout with youth co-researchers

Eve Tuck’s (2012) work challenges dominant framings of ‘school dropout’, emphasizing the processes that push students out of school. In her work, school pushout refers to the actions, messages, and stances engaged in by schools and school personnel to communicate to students that they would not or should not expect to graduate from high school. Tuck’s research, conducted from 2006–2008, documents the relationship between neoliberal accountability policies, especially high stakes testing, and school pushout. Her work highlights how rigid school curriculums, severe school discipline practices, and underfunding often characterize the conditions of schools with high levels of school pushout. She argues that the neoliberal policies ¹ that put blame on students for not conforming to the rigidity of school are the context for the interpersonal nature of school pushout. Youth participants in Tuck’s 2006–2008 study often said that it was one school staff member or teacher who made them feel unwelcome or disrespected. The school factors noted as significant in youths’ experiences of pushout included disrespectful words or physical gestures from school personnel, violence among students. Physical gestures, including school personnel rolling their eyes, turning on their heels and turning their backs, putting their hands in youths’ faces conveyed both disrespect and dismissal. Perhaps even more alarming to youth were times that school personnel seemed to observe harm done to students in real time, but then looked the other way. Because of such factors, students experienced a feeling of being pushed out, but also as preserving their own lives and wellbeing from spaces that harmed them (Tuck, 2011, 2012).

Tuck’s research also demonstrates that school rules can be arbitrary, or simply authoritarian. Irish–Nigerian scholar, Emma Dabiri (2019), describes school policies in the UK that ban protective hairstyles, such as bantu knots and braids, because these hairstyles are deemed outside of many schools’ dress codes. Dress codes are a way to monitor and naturalize what is appropriate and acceptable, and students who fall outside of these standards are disproportionately Black. These kinds of exclusionary practices lend themselves to school pushout.

Monique Morris’s (2016) extensive research on school pushout in the lives of Black girls reveals that Black girls disproportionately experience exclusionary reprimand and punishment in schools in comparison to their white classmates. In her work, she describes pushout as the overwhelming and routine use of discipline and punishment in schools by school staff. Black girls are subject to suspensions, expulsions, and disciplinary practices. Together, the work of Tuck, Dabiri, and Morris problematizes ideas about school being a safe and welcoming place for young people – especially for Black, Indigenous, or racialized young people. Learning from this work, our study with Black and Indigenous young people emerged from their experiences of feeling unwelcome in Toronto high schools.

Before youth co-researchers decided on the research topic of school pushout, they participated in various workshops on different social topics and issues. Their collective interest in this topic emerged during a workshop on school pushout delivered by Paige Grant, a Graduate Research Assistant in the Tkaronto CIRCLE Lab. ² This particular workshop was one of a series of sessions that focused on four themes from the school pushout literature: (1) the designation of some students as ‘at risk’, and unwelcome at school (James and Taylor, 2010); (2) the conditions of school pushout (Tuck, 2012); (3) the insufficiency of the term ‘dropout’ for describing experiences of school pushout (Dei and James, 2002); and (4) demands made by community organizers on behalf of Black and Indigenous children in schools to stop school pushout (Abawi, 2017). After learning about the four themes from scholarly literature, the youth co-researchers engaged in a set of writing prompts, discussion prompts, and photovoice prompts to help them generate writing that could be recorded and edited into a podcast episode on school pushout. Some of the writing prompts used by the youth co-researchers to write for the podcast episode were: Why is this topic important to you? How have you seen school pushout play out at your school? How does this make you feel? Why do people in your community need to know about this topic? In their podcast episodes, young people attended to the visuality of observing, experiencing, and resisting pushouts by referring to photographic and mapping activities they had completed; this resulted in episodes that were visually descriptive, despite being in audio format. One component of the episode involved a discussion about photographs created in response to a ‘photo challenge’. ³ The youth co-researchers created two photo challenges related to school pushout: Take a photo that conveys where a student might have been had they not been pushed out; and What does resisting school pushout look like? The prompts helped youth use photography to bring attention to experiences that might otherwise be eclipsed by school pushout. The activity of taking photographs and then discussing those photographs helped reveal the affective aspects of pushout, such as the unseen consequences of pushout and the ways youth resist pushout. One youth co-researcher addressed the prompt, ‘Take a photo that conveys where a student might have been had they not been pushed out’, with a photograph of their friend at a local university. The youth co-researcher identified the university as a place a student may have been, had they not been pushed out. The youth co-researcher then intervened on the image. They digitally removed their friend from the photo. A white, ghostly silhouette remained, signifying pushout as an issue that prevents Black and Indigenous students from attending post-secondary education (see Figure 2).

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Figure 2.

Photo responses to the photo prompt, ‘Take a photo that conveys where a student might have been had they not been pushed out’. Reproduced with permission.

Another creative component of the podcast episode was an advice column segment. Youth wrote fictionalized advice letters about school pushout, and answered the letters by drawing on their own experiences and ideas from the scholarly literature. The fictionalized letter came from a student who, having witnessing her friend being ‘forced out of school’, wanted to know more about the distinction between school dropout and school pushout. In the youth co-researchers’ response to the letter, they highlighted various ways school staff, namely white teachers, push Black and Indigenous high school students out, and described how such actions make them feel ‘unwanted’ or ‘useless’. In both the fictionalized advice letter and the responses they created to it, the youth co-researchers shifted the blame away from the students who were leaving the school system. Instead, they placed the blame upon school staff. Whether in podcasts, photographs or in the pages of fictional advice letters, youth repeatedly identified teachers and school staff as active players in pushing young Black and Indigenous students out of Toronto high schools. In their response to one of the advice letters, one of the Indigenous youth co-researchers stated, ‘[Teachers] just keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get what they want – for whatever kid that they don’t like to leave the school.’ Here the imagery evoked by the co-researcher places an emphasis on the act of ‘pushing’, suggesting that there is nothing accidental about this process. This contrasts with the ghostly absences that appear in Figure 2. These images might suggest a more passive exit for the absent youth. However, this possibility is shattered by the description included with the image. This states that not only were the Black and Indigenous youth missing from this image actively pushed out of school, but that the school staff played an active role in pushing them out. The discussions on school pushout did not end with the second wave. They continued and became the primary focus of the third and fourth waves.

In the third wave (September 2019–April 2020), 10 youth co-researchers designed a study focused on school pushout. As part of the design process, youth participated in a series of decision-making activities. The activities were designed to help them identify their objectives for this wave, and understand more about how they wanted to explore those objectives, including the kinds of questions they might use to help guide the research project. Photovoice would continue to be an important research method for them. In addition to photovoice work, youth expressed an interest in exploring additional visual and participatory research methods, including portraiture, concept and participatory mapping (Tuck, 2009b, 2012), The practice of photovoice and portraiture provided youth with engaging frameworks within which to connect, build knowledge, understand relationships, share experiences, and to begin to codify these experiences in the form of visual representations. Codification processes empowered youth to create a layer of difference between their personal stories and the photographic and sound representations of their stories that were becoming embedded in the project This layer of difference could also be understood as the opportunity for refusal (Simpson, 2014; Tuck and Yang, 2012), redaction (Kazeem-Kamiński, 2018; Sharpe, 2016), modification (Tuck and Del Vecchio, 2018), decision-making and, ultimately, consent.

We used various charting activities to plan an interview protocol where youth researchers interview people not otherwise involved in our project. Youth co-researchers created a double pros and cons list to decide who their study participants would be. ⁴ They decided that they were interested in doing research with hall monitors, Black and Indigenous teachers, Black and Indigenous peers, and older people who had been pushed out of the school system. In addition to this activity, youth co-researchers further narrowed down their decision about who they wanted to do research with by creating floor maps of their schools. Following Patricia Krueger-Henney’s (Krueger, 2009) work on surveillance maps, youth co-researchers mapped school floor plans to indicate where they observed racism happening in their schools. The floor maps were used to figure out who knew best about the racism that was occurring in such places. The double pros and cons list and school floor plans helped young people decide that Black and Indigenous peers would have the best insight into the kinds of racism that take place in Toronto high schools.

Once youth co-researchers decided on their study participants, they used a problem tree concept map to help them identify their research objectives with respect to school pushout. They also began to think through the questions they wanted the research to answer. This activity was designed and facilitated by Eve Tuck (see Tuck, 2009b, 2012) to deepen analyses of a problem by connecting everyday experiences to attitudes and beliefs, and then to root problems. We began with the central problem that Black and Indigenous students do not feel welcome in their schools. First, youth co-researchers were asked to identify the leaves of the tree, which are the everyday ways that the problem occurs. Then youth co-researchers worked in small groups to draw out the attitudes and beliefs that inform the problem (i.e. feeling unwelcome in their schools). These attitudes and beliefs made up the trunk of the problem tree. Finally, we had a discussion about the deep-seated structural causes that give way to the attitudes and beliefs feeding the everyday problems. The structural issues that youth co-researchers identified were the roots of the problem tree.

Participatory visual methods, including charting and mapping activities discussed above, helped bring youth co-researchers’ questions and curiosities into focus. Two research objectives emerged: (1) to expose how racist attitudes towards Black and Indigenous students are normalized and maintained, and (2) to theorize where racism occurs more frequently and why racism occurs in areas monitored by school staff. These research objectives elicited the following research questions: How are the racist attitudes against Black and Indigenous students normalized? Who maintains racist attitudes and how? Who determines what is normal? What makes a safe space at school for Black and Indigenous students? What kinds of racism are allowable, and what kinds are disallowed?

Youth co-researchers used interviews, portraiture, or both interviews and portraiture to address each research question. These interviews were conducted at the end of the third wave, and carried into the fourth and final wave (October 2020 – December 2020). In the final wave, nine youth co-researchers completed the interviews and created portraits addressing the research questions. Their interview guide primarily focused on the normalcy of racism in schools, how school staff respond to racist incidents, and students’ thoughts about how school staff should or should not respond following racist incidents. The interviews created an opportunity to invite their peers into this conversation, and youth co-researchers used the portraits to answer the research questions for themselves.

The students crafted a series of questions at the beginning of the third wave, including: How are the racist attitudes against Black and Indigenous students normalized? The question led one Black youth co-researcher to create two photos of the same girl with a tear and separation between the images (see Figure 3). On the left side of the image, the girl stands smiling towards the outside of the frame; on the right side, the girl is seated at a table with her hands on her forehead. From the right, the girl’s face is not visible and her body language appears to be stressed or overwhelmed, a tension described by the youth co-researcher as follows,

I feel like when it comes to forms of racism, especially when they’re microaggressions, we tend to show the more accepting, joyful side of ourselves because we want everybody to like us and not feel like we nitpick at everything. As a person of color, we don’t want people to feel we’re constantly offended by every little thing . . . I realized, especially as a young kid, we don’t realize sometimes people’s words do hurt us even though they don’t seem like they should. So [the girl] on one side shows that, ‘ha-ha-ha, it’s funny what you said, I’m not offended,’ when in reality you really are. On the other side, you go home, you sit and you think about what people said. You wonder, is this what people really think about me? And why is it normalized?

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Figure 3.

A photo response to the research question, ‘How are the racist attitudes against Black and Indigenous students normalized?’ Reproduced with permission.

The youth co-researcher designed their portrait to convey how Black and Indigenous students can feel uneasy about reacting against racist, interpersonal interactions, and thus minimize the impact and harm of these encounters. The youth co-researcher described how racist attitudes are normalized through a silencing pressure to not overreact or ‘take too seriously’ regular microaggressions that happen in schools. In response, another youth co-researcher said the tear or gash in the middle of the photo aptly represents how such experiences are degrading and can ‘rip you away from your happy self’. For us, the laceration in the image lends itself to theorizing racism as a rupture.

Theorizing rupture

In research design meetings with youth co-researchers and in their interviews with other young people, an important theme emerged: the sheer frequency of racist events in their schools and the inadequacy of school staff responses. The research highlighted not only that Black and Indigenous youth in Toronto schools were experiencing racism, but that they were experiencing it often. Youth co-researchers and study participants observed that their schools treated some of these experiences of racism as a big deal, and others as mundane, or to be expected. Put another way, Black and Indigenous youth saw their schools treat some forms of racism as severe, and other forms as acceptable. From their vantage point as students, racism at school is incessant, yet only some racist acts are acknowledged or recognized as such by schools. The majority of racism that students observe in their schools are tacitly, or sometimes explicitly, acceptable by school personnel. When some incidents are perceived by school personnel as reprehensible and addressable, students who are tasked to help resolve the situation find themselves in the position of having to skew their own observations to attend to the incident as isolated, as extreme, as rare, and as discrete in time and place. There does not seem to be a predictable pattern to what will be on the visible register or not, only that it is just a small portion of the many incidents of harm that students are spectators to every day. Further, youth co-researchers and their interview participants identified a mismatch between how schools treat the severity of racism and how students experience it. How schools respond (or fail to respond) reveals two major assumptions: (1) that racist events are one-off incidents, and (2) that racism in schools is repairable.

To assume racism in schools is incidental and repairable dismisses Black and Indigenous theories of antiblackness and settler colonialism that teach us otherwise (Hartman, 1997, 2008; Sharpe, 2016; Tuck and Yang, 2012; Tuck et al, 2014; Wolfe, 2006; Wynter, 1995). To say that racism is incidental is to define anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity as events rather than structures that continue to inform every aspect of settler society. Settler colonialism and transatlantic slavery are not histories fixed to the past, but legacies that underlie and shape ongoing hierarchies, forms of domination, and oppression. In other words, there is nothing incidental about the racism that Black and Indigenous students face in their schools. It is symptomatic of embedded racial hierarchies that constitute our society. Presuming that racism can be repaired by school leaders underestimates the work it will take to uproot antiblackness and anti-Indigeneity, which is work that will impact every facet of our lives. The theories of change offered by Black and Indigenous scholars and activists point us to fuller possibilities: decolonization (Estes, 2019; Tuck and Yang, 2012), abolition (Davis, 2011; Kaba, 2021), and a complete epistemological break with our current order (Alagraa, 2018; Wynter and McKittrick, 2015).

Addressing racism as incidental gives way to superficial verbal and textual responses, such as statements of dismay and shock (i.e. ‘I can’t believe something like this could happen in our schools’) and calls for school unity in letters home to parents and school assemblies. It treats racism as astonishing in ways that are disingenuous to Black and Indigenous students. This assumption also gives way to harmful neglect within schools. The harm institutional denial causes youth is the focus of the youth-created podcast episodes that tell the story of Genesis, a young Black girl who was verbally and physically bullied in her Toronto school (Teotonio, 2019). The impact of this experience is described by one of the youth co-researchers as follows:

I think that the TDSB [Toronto District School Board] really pushes anti-bullying awareness and anti-bullying campaigns, but then when it happens to a Black girl, like Genesis, they’re quiet about it and try to downplay the whole situation. And that’s mainly what contributes to school pushout. I think it’s about students being pushed out of their schools and education system because of their school environment, and [feeling] unsafe or unwanted or unwelcome. And a lot of it has to do with how certain students are treated and perceived by the school, how they’re thought of by their teachers and the superiors.

Overall, the story is about how a young girl is not being protected by her school. And it’s about the culture of the school system that protects the needs of the white students over the Black students’ safety, and specifically young Black girls.

The youth co-researcher connects Genesis’s experience to a school system that allows a Black girl to be continually assaulted within an institution that is charged with protecting her. The youth co-researcher clarifies that what Genesis has experienced is endemic to the culture of the school system, and they undermine and discredit the ongoing efforts by the School Board to attribute racism not to the culture of the school, but to inexplicable unacceptable acts of a particular individual.

The TDSB is not alone in attempting to distance itself from responsibility for racism and racist violence. Racism extends beyond schools. It can be seen in the way liberal reparation and reconciliation projects package interpersonal responses as complete resolutions. The assumption of reparability lends itself to the idea and creation of task forces, committees, and the production of extensive documentation destined to overburden the Black and Indigenous people charged with providing the labour required to address these systemic and deeply embedded issues. As a result, students are left unsatisfied by their school’s response. At best, they will see/hear the school address racism as an injury. At worst, students see them sweep racism under the rug entirely. Our argument is not to rely upon the former response as a better response, but to insist upon framing racism in schools as a rupture rather than an injury. ⁵

In our work with the youth co-researchers, in their research with Black and Indigenous peers, and now in this article, we turn to rupture rather than injury as a useful concept for shining a light on the connection between failed responses to racism in school and histories of transatlantic slavery, genocide, and settler colonialism. The writer who has influenced our thinking in this direction the most is Saidiya Hartman, specifically Hartman’s field-shaping text, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (1997). Hartman argues that the formal end of slavery merely transformed state-sanctioned enslavement into legal forms of debt-peonage, involuntary servitude, and ‘an abiding legacy of Black inferiority and subjugation’ (p. 10). Thus, Hartman deems emancipation a non-event and a durable refiguration of one form of bondage into a new one. Elsewhere, Hartman draws continuities between the era following emancipation into our present day, articulating this abiding legacy as the afterlife of slavery, ‘skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment’ (p. 6).

Writing about redressive actions towards formerly enslaved people, Hartman asks: ‘If redress does not or cannot restore or remedy loss, redeem the unceremoniously buried, or bridge the transatlantic divide, then what possibilities for relief, restitution, or recovery does it provide?’ (p. 76). This is a rhetorical question Hartman offers to trouble the underpinnings and utility of redress. Hartman begins by intervening on the possibility of restoration or remedy. More specifically, she emphasizes loss as an undeniable and irreversible condition of newly free captives, and their descendants – losses of language, kin, traditions, stories, body parts, and so much more. Hartman does not articulate loss as the only condition for Black people. She also describes their practices of self-fashioning, resisting, and building new relationships and traditions. An important ethic in her work is to theorize the realities of extreme violence that were ushered in through transatlantic slavery, without discounting that Black life persists despite and in spite of these continuities. It is from within this tension that Hartman explicitly draws attention to the ‘enormity of loss’ (p. 77) that cannot be easily redressed. Hartman’s theorizing begins from the point of rupture, from the point of no return, and from the middle passage crossings that ushered in a tremendous breach.

Given the ‘magnitude of the breach’ (p. 77), possibilities of redress become futile when fixed upon restoration or remedy. Furthermore, redressive actions – like reparation or reconciliation – often hinge upon the notion that these efforts can adequately address the rupture. Attempts to do so minimize the extent of loss and are unsatisfying forms of relief or recovery. They will inevitably fail, unless they offer an epochal shift. Hartman writes:

It is impossible to fully redress this pained condition of slavery without the occurrence of an event of epic and revolutionary proportions – the abolition of slavery, the destruction of a racist social order, and the actualization of equality. The incompleteness of redress is therefore related to the magnitude of the breach – the millions lost in the Middle Passage and the 15 million and more captured and enslaved in the Americas – and to the inadequacy of remedy. (p. 77, emphasis added)

We are living in the incompleteness of redress – the afterlife of slavery – and not yet at the event(s) of epic and revolutionary proportions that lead to freedom. The impossibility of full redress and the inadequacy of remedy draw us to rupture as a more viable starting place than injury. By injury, again, we mean perspectives that do not account for the magnitude of the breach, or perspectives that deliberately look away from anti-blackness and settler colonialism as existing structures. Injury not only assumes that it is possible to go back to a time ‘when things were better’, but it also implies that we can move on once something is resolved.

Our research with Black and Indigenous young people problematizes the logic of injury. The logic of injury requires easy forms of repair and treats racist incidents as isolated experiences. Youth participants described the processes through which schools minimize racism to singular, uncommon incidents or resolvable situations. In our research design, discussing racism as an incident was an issue the co-researchers grappled with, knowing full well that racism in their schools happened frequently. It was not only the frequency and familiarity of racist occurrences within their schools, but also the abiding legacies of racism that indicate it was more than injurious. Thinking of racism in schools as more than an injury, but rather a rupture, allows us to shift our attention somewhere beyond a reparative framework.

Beyond injury and repair

We return to Saidiya Hartman’s theorizing, specifically her work on critical fabulation (Hartman, 2008, 2019). Critical fabulation offers a way of contending with loss that cannot be repaired, fully recovered, or known in the archive of slavery. Although we did not engage the method of critical fabulation in MSOM, this method, offered by Hartman, gives room to the enormity of rupture with no intention of mending it, but as a place from which to start.

In her article ‘Venus in Two Acts’ (2008), Hartman tries to tell the story of an enslaved Black girl named Venus that she was unable to tell in her earlier work, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2006). For Hartman, Venus’s story is one ‘impossible to tell’ (2008: 10) because Venus is a fleeting figure in the archive. Her name only appears twice in the legal indictment records of the slave ship captain, John Kimber, and then she disappears. Venus is one of the enslaved Black girls murdered by Kimber, but her existence is barely accounted for. Grappling with the ‘magnitude of the breach’ and the loss such breach engenders, Hartman engages what she considers narrative constraint by refusing to fill in the blanks or resolve stories that are missing from the archive. Instead, she engages the method of critical fabulation as a way of ‘narrating a certain impossibility’ (Hartman and Wilderson, 2003: 184). Hartman articulates critical fabulation as a method that attends to what is lost in the archive by imagining what enslaved and legally emancipated Black girls could have said or done, even if we can never know for certain. Elaborating on critical fabulation as an impossible story that ‘must be told’ (Philip and Boateng, 2008: 189), Hartman (2008: 11) writes:

This double gesture can be described as straining against the limits of the archive to write a cultural history of the captive, and, at the same time, enacting the impossibility of representing the lives of the captives precisely through the process of narration.

For Hartman, critical fabulation does not and cannot remedy the violent mistellings and disappearances of enslaved Black girls in the archive. It disbelieves that remedy is possible; disbelieves that remedy should be our preoccupation. Yet, critical fabulation encounters the traces and fragments of the lives lived by enslaved Black girls with deep care and regard. Hartman’s approach throws the legitimacy of the archive into crisis by offering a fuller account of Black girls’ lives. From Hartman’s work, we learn a method of attending to and addressing immeasurable loss and harm without seeking, expecting, or demanding repair.

When we first started to have discussions with youth co-researchers about school pushout, we asked them, ‘Why is this topic of school pushout important to you?’ For some youth co-researchers, the topic of school pushout mattered because it was a way for them to account for their experiences of racism in high school as structural and systemic, rather than individualized. For others, as emphasized in the fictionalized advice letter segment of the podcast, school pushout mattered because it was a framing that moved blame away from the students being pushed out of schools, instead holding schools accountable for practices which push students out. Both sets of responses revealed that youth co-researchers were not interested in the topic of school pushout with expectations that schools could be fixed. In fact, our discussions were not invested in proving to schools that students are continuously subjected to entwined experiences of racism and pushout. The portraiture project in the third wave, in particular, was a visual engagement with living in ways that exceed the expectations that schools can offer adequate repair. The portraits and discussions by youth research photographers were not expectant that schools could somehow distill and extract their racism. Through Hartman’s work on critical fabulation, we understand racism in high schools as part of the root of rupture that cannot be easily resolved. Rather than the discussed tendency to bypass this reality, it became our grounding axiom: anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism is foundational to the world we live in, and therefore, our schools. From here, we can more earnestly ask, what are more viable ways forward?

Responding to rupture

When youth co-researchers began conducting interviews, the focus of the interviews was not about getting their Black and Indigenous peers to recount the amount of racism that they endured in their schools. Rather, youth co-researchers were more interested in how other Black and Indigenous young people wanted or did not want school staff to respond following racist events. Youth co-researchers asked, Can you tell me about a time when you witnessed something racist happen in school while a teacher or a school staff were around?; followed by the questions, What did the teacher or staff member do or not do? and How do you think they should have addressed your situation? These questions helped to reveal the discrepancies between how teachers and school staff deal with racist events, and how students feel these matters should be handled.

The focus on rupture – not injury – shapes the questions in two significant ways: (1) those harmed know best how a situation should be addressed; and, (2) addressing an issue is not the same as resolving an issue. During their interviews, youth co-researchers and youth participants expressed the embeddedness of racism in their schools. Given the normalcy and regularity of racism in their schools, the emphasis was not on fixing the issues, as discussed above. Therefore, the question of how racist situations should be addressed was not caught up in the trappings of finding a solution or resolution. Instead, these questions allowed for the time and space for youth to speculate what could be done in the very likely hypothetical that their school would be the next site of a racist incident. This approach is one learned from a core understanding within transformative justice practices, in which plans and processes for attending to a relational breach are considered even before the breach has happened (Mingus, nd). This approach also seeks to learn from people in relation to those who have harmed, not only the harmed person, to determine what steps of redress might entail.

In response to the question around how racist incidents should be addressed, youth participants’ responses varied from desiring better resources for Black and Indigenous students, direct acknowledgment, or some form of consequence:

[They should] put more funding in the BSA [Black Student Association] programs where kids should feel comfortable going to and have fun going to. Just . . . support. Show that support. Make more clubs. Have classes on Indigenous history and Black history. (Cassius, he/him, Black youth)

[They should] probably address it to the entire school publicly, [rather than] sweeping it under the rug. (Evan, he/him, Black youth)

I think, for one, teachers and staff should listen to the kids involved. And I think also just holding people accountable and trying to make sure the kid is okay as well. I think that would help a lot, like just doing something towards the benefit of the kid being hurt and not the kid doing the hurting would be a nice switch. (Chromarink, Indigenous trans youth)

So first, I think they should acknowledge what happened, and there should be certain punishments in place for what happened. So I don’t think they should just let it slide. There should be, whoever, whatever the situation was, there should be consequences for actions. And I think that’s the first step. (Luna, she/her, Black youth)

I feel, first off, they need to address the problem. And, secondly, apologize about what happened. It shouldn’t just go unnoticed, they should make it known and there should be assemblies held for this. (Ella, she/her, Black youth)

I feel like immediately, whichever party caused or said whatever, I think they should be reprimanded immediately. I feel like the school putting down their foot and saying, hey, we don’t accept this, we don’t tolerate this. (Stephanie, she/her, Black youth)

In this collection of responses, youth participants gesture towards more viable and visible responses to racist situations in their schools. Many participants described how racism was swept under the rug or evaded by school staff, especially teachers. As Luna states, the acknowledgement of racism was merely the first step for many participants. Youth participants’ responses also reveal that the onus of addressing racist incidents rests on school staff and not on Black and Indigenous students. Although Black and Indigenous students are the ones who know best where and how racism is experienced in their schools, they should not be burdened with the expectation to address these situations, especially when the misconception is that these situations are (easily) resolvable. As Chromarink suggests, responses to racist incidents in schools should center and prioritize the wellbeing of the young person that is harmed. Here, the expectation of redress is not placed on the young people who are experiencing harm first-hand.

Further, participants such as Cassius suggested that schools should respond by increasing investments in spaces that do (or have the potential to) provide meaning and comfort for students. This strategy has many possible applications, such as schools responding to racist incidents by increasing material support to student organizations, spaces, and activities in which Black and Indigenous students are otherwise or already organizing and thriving. This might, at first glance, seem like throwing money at a problem or trying to purchase forgiveness. But, instead, we might understand one of the impacts of incidents of racism as communicating to students that they do not belong in a particular school setting. If we return to the school floor maps that youth co-researchers created to map where racist incidents took place in their schools, their maps reveal that racism occurred in classrooms, offices, hallways, stairwells, auditoriums, gymnasiums, and by school entrances and exits. When racism towards Black and Indigenous students is happening almost everywhere in youth co-researchers’ schools, student organizations such as the BSA can offer students alternative sites of belonging and community. Thus, by investing in spaces that Black and Indigenous youth are already making for themselves, schools and school districts might offset this particular impact. This is very different from a school setting up a task force or listening circle.

In our study, youth co-researchers were interested in thinking with other Black and Indigenous young people about meaningful responses to racism in their schools rather than remedies to such racism. Talia, a youth participant, conveys her lack of belief in the ability to fix racism in schools saying:

If I’m being honest, there is nothing that a school can do to make someone feel safe in a place that they’re attending. Reason being, they always have awareness. They have assemblies. They talk to people one on one. They have counselors. They have a whole bunch of stuff, but that doesn’t change who a person is on the inside and the mindset that they have to be putting out that negative energy. (Talia, interview participant, she/her, Black and Indigenous youth)

For Talia, racism felt so embedded in her school experiences that it was unsurprising, which further challenges notions of repair. Talia’s response is echoed by another youth participant Paul (he/him, Indigenous youth) who stated, ‘after something racist happens to a student, ways to make them feel welcome and comfortable again in school is something tricky to do.’ We believe that the trickiness Paul points us to is instructive. Staying with the trickiness, and taking it seriously, means we disbelieve in resolvability.

Staying with trickiness

We end our discussion staying close to Paul’s language of trickiness. In our research, co-researchers learned more about what school staff should or should not do when responding to racist incidents from their Black and Indigenous peers. In their conversation, youth co-researchers asked their participants to imagine different ways that schools might respond to the harm that they cause and to attend to the students who are actively being pushed out of schools. As previously mentioned, Black and Indigenous participants shared a variety of useful ways that school staff could respond to racism in high schools. This was not to place responsibility on Black and Indigenous students experiencing harm, but to turn to Black and Indigenous students as experts who have something to say about schools’ inadequate responses to racist incidents. Therefore, when Black and Indigenous young people are saying that schools need to ‘acknowledge what happened’, ‘address the problem’, ‘listen to the kids involved’, and ‘make [racism] unacceptable’, schools that understand racism to be one-off incidents and believe repair is possible are ineffective and harmful.

Responding to racism in high schools is tricky when high schools are understood to be places where racism barely or rarely happens. This notion is at odds with what Black and Indigenous co-researchers and their Black and Indigenous participants know to be true. When co-researchers were asked to answer the photo challenge prompt, ‘How are the racist attitudes against Black and Indigenous students normalized?’, a Black youth co-researcher responded by taking a photograph foregrounding an empty grass field. To the right of the frame, a paved pathway cuts through the grass leading to a brown school building, which appears in the distant background (see Figure 4). Elaborating on his photo challenge, the co-researcher stated,

That pathway, it’s a place you don’t want to go to because schools, there’s lot of different kids, lots of different parents, lots of different ideologies, and most of them are pretty harmful. You might not want to even go to school, so that path looks pretty bad right now.

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Figure 4.

A photo response to the research question, ‘How are the racist attitudes against Black and Indigenous students normalized?’

In this photo challenge, the youth co-researcher brings the school into the frame not only as a site where racist attitudes against Black and Indigenous students are normalized, but also as a place where Black and Indigenous students experience harm.

Appropriate responses to racist incidents get even trickier when school officials treat racism, specifically racism towards Black and Indigenous high school students, as singular occurrences. Thinking of racism as more than a treatable injury, but rather as a rupture caused by ongoing antiblackness and anti-Indigeneity, moves us away from easy and superficially packaged responses to racist incidents in high schools.

The participatory visual research in MSOM has been a way for our team of university-based researchers and youth researcher photographers, like others before us, to question the role of affect in photography (Brown and Phu, 2014; Cartwright and Wolfson, 2018; Phu and Steer, 2009). In particular, we have been suspicious of the leveraging of sympathy or pain stories as effective photographic approaches that will pave the way for repair (see Sontag, 2003, 1977). Instead, we have engaged participatory photography methods as a practice that creates a layer of difference between the stories that youth researchers tell and the representations or codifications of their stories of witnessing and experiencing, and resisting school pushout. This layer of difference is a layer of refusal, redaction, consent and complexity, one less concerned with nailing down the story and more concerned with addressing the trickiness with care and respect for youth.

This also has implications for public policy. If policy makers understand racism in schools as an injury, they will continue to create policies that offer shallow and individualized responses to deeply embedded, structural problems. Policy makers and school administrations will continue to ‘sweep [racism] under the rug’, as one Black youth co-researcher aptly conveys (see Figure 5). Our objective is not to offer a best set of responses to address racism. It is to refuse the idea that racism is addressable. It is an insistence on conceptualizing racism in schools as a rupture. This is not simple work, and not the kind accomplished through diversity, inclusion and equity initiatives. This work needs to attend to irreversible harm in order to imagine other kinds of responses that do not expect redress. With this, we understand trickiness as a productive place to think from. Trickiness refuses reparative and reconciliatory gestures to fix racism in schools. Trickiness demands that we stay with complexity and uncertainty in order to attend to an ongoing breach. Trickiness requires that we move beyond reparative frames.

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Figure 5.

A photo response to the research question, 'How are school staff responding to more overt forms of racism?’ Reproduced with permission.