Reading, writing, and racialization: The social construction of Blackness for students and educators in a Prince George's County public middle school

We do not fully understand how people of African descent, both in the United States and foreign born, conceptualize their integration into the predominantly "Black space" of Prince George's County or if and how the constituents of Black spaces are conceived of as diverse. Furthermore, we do not know enough about how these processes operate in the public school setting. This dissertation focuses on interrogating the public institution of Prince George's County Public Schools to examine how students and educators construct, negotiate, challenge, and reproduce notions of Blackness. The first research question is "how do youth of African descent, including the U.S. born children of immigrants and those with a Spanish ethno-linguistic heritage, construct or deconstruct a Black identity in a United States context"? The second large area of inquiry asks "how are educators influencing social constructions of Blackness"? There is also a focus on if and how the educational process acknowledges and responds to complex dynamics among students, how they identify, and how they get identified racially, ethnically, and culturally by others. I investigate this quandary by using ethnographic data conducted over a seventeen month span in a middle school. I find that all people in the school, with an intentional focus on students of African descent with a Spanish ethno-linguistic heritage are engaged in their own dialogues and complex constructions of what it means to be Black.