Black Immigrant Literacies and the Promise of Unbroken Englishes: Five Things Every Teacher Should Know and Can Do

Abstract

“Black immigrant literacies” is an intersectional framework that draws from diaspora literacy, racial literacy, and transnational literacy to center race and present teachers with a lens that can support Black immigrant students and their peers' literacies in classrooms. Black immigrant youth can be described as first‐, second‐, or third‐generation immigrants to the United States who identify as Black and who migrate to the United States from Africa, the Caribbean, or elsewhere. Many students from the Black immigrant population, though largely “invisible,” tend to be regarded as a new model minority and as designer immigrants. New model minority perceptions of Black immigrants persist because of claims of immigrant superiority and because Black immigrants have long been perceived as having socioeconomic advantages over their Black American peers. Given that Black immigrants originate primarily from the Caribbean or Africa, accounting for over half of all Black foreign‐born people in the United States, and considering that the Caribbean remains the most common region of birth for the over 4 million Black immigrants in the United States, accounting for almost half of the total, I paint a selective portrait of the intersectionalities surrounding Black immigrant literacies as a basis for teachers to better understand Black immigrant students' needs in classrooms. I also draw specifically from Black Caribbean immigrant literacies to identify and describe five things that every teacher should know and can do when encountering Black Caribbean in English language arts and literacy instruction. Through provisions such as legitimizing “unbroken Englishes,” supporting “translanguaging with Englishes,” cultivating “holistic literacies,” and fostering “local–global connections,” it is anticipated that teachers of Black immigrants in the United States, Caribbean, and beyond will begin to unmask invisibility of this population in their classrooms. Through the use of this framework, it is also expected that teachers will be able to better support all students who engage with the literacies of Black immigrants in United States schools.