(I’m challenging myself to write daily starting now, 8/7/2025)

Disclaimers: First, I have been challenging myself to write daily. I fell off for a whole week. Back at it now. Secondarily, my writing for this challenge is largely stream of consciousness. This is my thinking, things I’m puzzling through, knowledge I am building for myself. Therefore, some of this is incomplete and may not be as sound as my more polished pieces.)

In the last several years (at least since 45/47 1.0) there has been a concerted effort to raise the racial literacy of the populace of this country. Consultants, educators, scholars, politicians, media outlets, and more have been developing and delivering workshops, talks, conferences, equity audits, publishing papers, and more to bridge the gap left from the lack of education on race, gender, gender identity, religion, disability, immigration, etc. It doesn’t feel as if the progress we were all working toward has even made a dent. In fact, it feels as if we’ve backslid.

Not gonna lie, that last presidential election and the resultant consequences stemming from it is proof positive of Dr. Carol Anderson’s concept of white backlash to racial progress. Maybe I’ll circle back to this idea; but, I think it speaks for itself. If you’re reading and unfamiliar with this concept, I highly recommend reading Dr. Carol Anderson’s book White Rage.

What I’ve been thinking about lately is literacy. Just plain old literacy, critical literacy, racial literacy. Recently reports on literacy show a slump in people (teens and adults) reading for pleasure, something like 54% of adults read below the 6th grade level, approximately 21% of U.S. adults are illiterate, approximately 45 million people are functionally illiterate and read below a 5th grade level, and some states make projections for number of prison beds needed on elementary literacy rates. There is much more that could be said about this but I’ll leave it here because this is enough illustration for the purposes of my thinking here.

I’ve been wondering about the nexus between literacy generally and racial literacy specifically. I’m not sure one can have critical literacy skills (the ability to evaluate materials for veracity while understanding how language, power, and social contexts and locations impact and shape meaning) without being at least functionally literate. I’m not a literacy or reading expert, so I’m building my own knowledge in this area all the time. Thankfully, I have the privilege of being educated in a college of education, associated with an English department, and have several (approximately more than 30, less than 100 probably) friends who study literacy. As a result, I’ve been introduced to concepts, theories, and practices that many others have not. So, I’m not completely pulling this out of my ass, I have some knowledge, but am far from an expert. And this is the thing about literacy – if one has a literacy foundation, they can build knowledge in other areas, build upon areas of knowledge they are confident and competent in to expand into other areas they are less familiar with, and they can reason through information and evaluate how it fits, doesn’t fit, or partially fits with previous knowledge.

If people are either unable to read, unable to decode and decipher what they read, unable to make meaning from what they read, how can we or anyone expect them to develop racial literacy skills?

Sure, many people can or have developed racial literacy skills without reading the tomes of literature I’ve read. And I certainly don’t expect people to have the same foundational understandings, grasp of the body of knowledge and scholarship, or think as I do. I’ve taken a very specific route to get to where I am on my own racial literacy journey that is unavailable or inaccessible to so many others. However, many people have developed these skills without taking the same path or traveling some of the portions of my own journey. They’ve developed these skills intentionally or unintentionally through proximity, lived experience, friendship or family groups, or other means.

However, reading is a very specific skill that over 100 years of scholarship is demonstrated as being connected to things like employability, employment is whole sectors of the economy, crime and prison going, poverty (the first thing listed), and healthcare outcomes. While the benefits of reading are numerous, building emotional intelligence and empathy, increased brain activity (which is a protective factor to developing dementia – a precursor to Alzheimer’s), improvement of critical thinking skills, vocabulary building, strengthening cognitive processes, deepen knowledge, sleep improvement, build and maintain memory (another protective factor to developing dementia), and so much more.

I know for myself, reading has done all of the things listed above. Reading has expanded my thinking, helped me understand the world, helped me understand my place within it, and is one of my mental health/healing practices. Reading brings me peace, joy, and knowledge. Reading activates my emotions. Reading has made the world and the people in remote areas of the world more real, more present, more human for me. Reading has shown me how interconnected humans are across space and time. Reading lets me dip into other cultures, religions, time periods and learn from those whose experiences are unlike my own or what I am familiar with. Reading has made the strange familiar and decreased my fears or anxieties about the world, people from different backgrounds, and my place within unfamiliar spaces. And these are just off the top of my head. There is more, so much more that I could list – maybe I’ll jump back in and update as I think of things. Perhaps most importantly, reading has helped me learn how to think about my own thinking, giving me the power of deep reflection, comparative analysis of my own thinking and understandings, and the ability to adjust my thinking – like Ancestor Maya Angelo said, when you know better, do better.

While reading is perhaps not the only way to develop racial literacy skills, I would argue it is perhaps one of the most powerful and effective methods of developing these skills. It’s a direct rather than indirect way to learn and grow. Myself and other scholars and educators could certainly educate people in ways that could help them develop racial literacy skills but, as I said earlier, certain types of education are inaccessible to a huge segment of the U.S. population for many reasons (proximity to educational institutions, money, gaps in skills, access to continuing education, ability to find resources, ability to evaluate veracity of resources, time, and energy, etc).

I grew up in the 1970s and I remember we had several public service announcements on TV – from Smokey the Bear, to the crying Indian (who wasn’t Native), to literacy. Many people might not know the history of literacy campaigns or that the U.S. government had a national campaign to target adult illiteracy that began in the mid-1960s that continued through the 1980s or so. State and the national governments put a lot of funding behind eradicating illiteracy. Prior to these efforts, the illiteracy rate hovered around 2.4% of the U.S. population aged 14 and above. The aforementioned 2.4% statistic seems to be in contradiction to the 21% illiteracy statistic stated in the beginning paragraphs, which is because 1) it depends on how one measures literacy/illiteracy and 2) how we gauge literacy in the U.S. has varied across time (back to the history of literacy). Anyways, it seems our literacy rates in this country has plateaued and there may not be much more growth that can be made to reach 100% literacy in this country – at least not how our current systems are structured.

Anyways, so how do standard literacy rates relate to racial literacy? I don’t know for sure. I, for one, would like to see studies on this because I’m guessing that if/where/when people’s reading level is at the 6th-grade level or below, that learning racial literacy would be much more difficult. We’re asking people to think at levels likely beyond their cognitive capabilities. Our cognitive capabilities can change and grow but to do so, learning needs to occur. For learning to occur, people have to puzzle through information that challenges what they think they know about the world, they have to have space to reconcile new knowledge with long held notions of knowledge, and they have to learn how to evaluate and process this new knowledge.

Learning is a complex process that requires challenge and support. It is about presentation of information that is just beyond a person’s comfort zone (Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development). The way I explain this to students is to image a pendulum in a grandfather clock. When it is at rest, that is the Zone of Actual Development – there is no learning occurring here because the person is handily working with and from the knowledge they already know. The Zone of Proximal Development is just beyond the Zone of Actual Development – this is the sweet spot of learning, a little discomfort in a controlled environment. Then there is the Zone beyond Proximal – this is what I might call crisis. It is very difficult for people to learn when they are in cognitive overload. This is a survival stage, really. Basically, learning is hard to achieve when it causes an overload of stress. Makes sense, right? There are, of course, a myriad of learning theories but this one is one of the most widely subscribed to theories. There are also cognitive development theories. I particularly like Perry’s college student development theory, as flawed as it is. But suffice it to say that the basic tenets of Perry’s cognitive development theory are similar enough to Vygotsky’s learning theory in ways I think are obvious to folx who study these types of things, like myself.

I wish I could tie this up in a tidy little bow of a conclusion but this is my thinking thus far. I don’t know how literacy, critical literacy, and racial literacy are connected. I believe there is a connection there. And perhaps with targeted educational programming that is funded and supported by state and the national governments, we could help grow individual’s racial literacy. And it’s highly unlikely in the current socio-political climate that any state or national efforts on this won’t happen for some time, if ever. Because the one thing this country does is avoid any accurate conversation or reparation surrounding race. In fact, honestly dealing with race in this country has always sparked white rage. Which is exactly the moment we find ourselves in – white rage to the first Black president, to racial progress, to people of the global majority demanding equity, to non-Black people waking up and realizing the depths of systemic racism in this country. And it shows no signs of letting up any time soon.