Black mothers as bad teachers: Intersectional raciolinguistic erasure in teacher preparation curricula

Curricular text depictions of Black communities and mothers who lead within them, anchor teacher preparation programs and potentially construct, challenge or distort how pre-service teachers perceive them. With rampant U.S. housing segregation, reliance on these representations serve to familiarize (Cross, 2016) early career teachers with Black communities increasing the influence of these texts. Thus, teacher educators’ selections of curricular texts to prepare K-12 teachers must be curated from a critical perspective with particular attention to intersecting oppressions. In this paper, I conduct an intersectional raciolinguistic analysis of a canonical teacher preparation text, Unequal childhoods: Class, race, and family life, (Lareau, 2003) revealing portrayals of Black mothers as poorly preparing Black youth for U.S. public schooling. Via critical race counterstorytelling (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002) document analysis, I challenge this silence and distortion surrounding Black mothering (Dumas, 2013) by centering Black voices to narrate their own realities.