This site is designed to be a space for discovering and sharing Racial Literacy knowledge. Racial Literacy and Me is pre-loaded and consistently updated with various iterations of Racial Literacy knowledge and Racial Literacy resources as a way to support anti-racist and anti-Blackness efforts in the classroom and beyond. At any time you can view a copy of these resources by clicking on the hyperlinks provided throughout the Racial Literacy and Me website.

So what is Racial Literacy?

Racial Literacy is a conceptual, analytical, and diagnostic tool designed for reading, teaching, understanding, and responding to race and racialization on both the individual and structural levels that was created simultaneously in the Sociological field by France Winddance Twine and the Critical Legal Studies field by Lani Guinier in 2003/4.

Iterations of Racial Literacy: 

France Winddance Twine (2003/4, 2010):

1. recognition of racism as a contemporary rather than historical problem;
2. 2. consideration of the ways in which race and racism are influenced by other factors such as class, gender, and sexuality;
3. 3. understanding of the cultural value of whiteness;
4. 4. belief in the constructedness and socialization of racial identity;
5. 5. development of language practices through which to discuss race, racism, and antiracism; and
6. 6. ability to decode race and racialism (Twine, 2010, p.92).

Lani Guinier (2004): Racial Literacy is defined as or entails: “ the capacity to decipher the durable racial grammar that structures racialized hierarchies and frames the narratives of our republic“ (100). For Guinier, Racial Literacy is a living literacy that considers the “psychological, interpersonal, and structural dimensions” of race and interrogates “the dynamic relationship among race, class, geography, gender, and other explanatory variables” (115).

Rebecca Rogers and Melissa Mosley (2006): Racial Literacy “can create spaces for white, working-class children to step into texts to identify, problematize, and, most importantly, reconstruct whiteness in relation to social justice” (p. 483).  In other words, Racial Literacy is for White people too. 

Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz (2011):  Racial Literacy “is the ability to read, discuss, and write about situations that involve race or racism” (p.386).

Sonya Horsford (2014): Racial Literacy entails the “ability to understand what race is, why it is, and how it is used to reproduce inequality and oppression” (p. 126).

Howard Stevenson (2014): Racial Literacy “is the ability to read, recast, and resolve racially stressful social interactions” (4).

LaGarrett King (2016): Racial Literacy “is an interpretive framework that
exposes the interwoven structural components of race and racism in both US and global contexts.
Racially-literate people understand racism as a persistent problem and consider its various manifestations,
socio-historical, socio-economic, and socio-political structures, as salient racial apparatuses” (1).

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