A Community within a Community: Collectivism, Social Cohesion and Building a Healthy Black Childhood

Abstract

This article features in-depth interviews and ethnographic vignettes that explore collectivism, social cohesion, and Black educational leadership as a strategy to infuse liberatory practices in the educational process. The article examines how the social foundation of African-centered ethos of collectivism can shift how marginalized students approach and experience learning and socialization inside mainstream K-12 educational systems. Additionally, this article introduces a new theoretical concept entitled Ethno-Cultural Responsiveness. This theory explains how sub-culture groups socialize new members into their particular ideological and sub-cultural communities. This research demonstrates how African-centered leaders shape their schools through an ideological inquiry designed to challenge what they perceive as the cultural negation of African histories and understandings. Moreover, the leaders featured in this article use their public-facing political project (an African-centered institution) grounded in the politics of Black Nationalism and Pan Africanism to design and shape their institutional cultures to be responsive to people racialized in western counties as Black.