Racial Reckonings:

Language, Race, and Pedagogies of Accountability

across Latinx Classrooms and Communities

Jonathan Rosa

Stanford University

In recent years, widely circulating public discourses have suggested the emergence of and backlash against racial reckonings in the United States and across global contexts. Political struggles focused on identifying signs of race and (anti)racism figure centrally in these discourses. Thus, while racial reckonings might be regarded as abstract ethical appraisals, they can also be understood as situated communicative acts which narratively reproduce and transform sociopolitical relations, capacities, and responsibilities. Drawing on these insights, this presentation analyzes how language is often presumed to enact antiracism yet often participates in reproducing racial essentialization and hierarchy. It examines these dynamics in diasporic Puerto Rican and broader Latinx educational and community collaborations in Chicago, Western Massachusetts, and the San Francisco Bay Area. By attending to pedagogical experiments and community knowledges across these contexts, this work rethinks dominant assumptions about relations, learning, and modes of attunement—ways of sustaining, knowing, and perceiving.