Publication Date: December 19, 2025
Pages: 224
Series: Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies Series
This book offers a tangible antiracist pedagogical framework for engaging with Black youth in educational and community settings.
Resisting Antiblackness in Education refuses the logics of antiblackness that permeate societal and educational structures and, instead, offers an antiracist counter-logic rooted in the aesthetics of Black youth—a historical and ongoing form of cultural expression and perception.
Blending Black studies with critical educational theory, the author offers both a reflective and practical guide to help educators, researchers, community workers, families, and activists engage with Black youth aesthetics in ontologically restorative ways. Through memoir, aesthetic history, cultural critique, and case studies from a decade of research, readers are reoriented toward a pedagogy born from the social, psychic, and material lives of Black urban youth. Going beyond theory, this book includes actions, activities, and reflection questions that can be implemented directly in K–12 classrooms and other educational contexts.
Resisting Antiblackness in Education is a call to embrace an educational approach that is both intellectually stimulating and practically grounded, a critical and creative catalyst in the fight for Black youth and communities everywhere.
Book Features:
Justin A. Coles is an associate professor of social justice education in the Department of Student Development at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the inaugural Director of Arts, Culture, and Political Engagements at the Center for Racial Justice and Youth Engaged Research. Dr. Coles is a 2023 inductee into the Martin Luther King Jr. Collegium of Scholars at Morehouse College.
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