I found the author’s exploration of how political elements pervade and define classroom interactions fascinating. The relationship between race, academic success, economic mobility, and rates of mass incarceration per certain demographics is shocking and something Shange traces back to “enrollment into an educational system designed to depoliticize Black rage and criminalize Black joy” (55). I found striking the author’s discussion of Sophia’s work on the “’progressive” side of the paradox of carceral progressivism. Her consistent, successful, efforts to dislodge anti-blackness in the provision of Spanish-language curriculum mark her practice as a win for antiracist reform” (47). By focusing on examples of “Black-Latin coalition, unmediated by the whiteness of standard american english” as seen in a classroom, she proposes a unique and focused research topic designed to comment on what Damian Sojoyner argues is the “‘first strike” against Black children;” something not during arrest, but in the seemingly innocent school system (55).
The author also described her process of selecting pseudonyms so as to respect Black naming traditions while maintaining some anonymity for the people she observes. Through her analysis of tracing name genres and adjusting the number of syllables, she notes her own “convoluted relationship with Black autonomy” because she, in fact, decided not to use the participants’ chosen pseudonyms and instead decided that many were “too obvious (John wanted Johnnie), too fantastic (Keenan wanted Escobar), or playfully racially recoded in ways that exceeded by ability to reconcile them (Chaniqua wanted Becky)” (49). She ultimately decided to use the Spanish names chosen by the informants as a means of avoiding the “violence” associated with “replac[ing] these tiny, accented sincerities” (50).