B-MEIS Webinar: Do Black Lives Matter in Bilingual Education?

Lau vs. Nichols is considered a landmark court case in the education of language-minoritized students in the United States that paved the way for bilingual education and other special programs that are designed to meet the cultural and linguistic needs of students from bi/multilingual households. An often overlooked aspect of this case was the fact that it was decided based on Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, legislation that was enacted in large part due to Black community activism. Despite this connection to Black freedom struggles, bilingual education research, policy and practice continues to at best erase the experiences of Black students and at worse actively perpetuate anti-Black racism. This panel brings together experts in bilingual education to critically interrogate the ways that bilingual education has historically and continues to be complicit in maintenance and further exacerbation of anti-Black racism. This includes an examination of the development of the field of bilingual education and the ways that has been designed to marginalize and exclude the voices of Black people. It also includes an examination of the contemporary context of the ways that these programs marginalized and excluded African American students and the ways that the experiences of Afro-Latinxs are erased under the broad umbrella of Latinidad. Panelists will also discuss ways of countering anti-Black racism in bilingual education and offer pathways for moving forward in ways that acknowledge that bilingual education cannot be anti-racist unless it accounts for the specificities of anti-Black racism.