In this article, Carmen Kynard provides a window into a present-day “hush harbor,” a site where a group of black women build generative virtual spaces for counterstories that fight institutional racism. Hidden in plain view, these intentional communities have historically allowed African American participants to share and create knowledge and find their voices in hostile environments, which, in the case of this study, involve an academic institution. Kynard also discusses the need for critical scholar/student alliances that interrogate taken-for-granted institutional practices that invalidate out-of-school literacies. The article parallels the instructional practices that disenfranchise black students with research agendas that claim to alleviate inequity while really perpetuating it.

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Carmen Kynard is an assistant professor of English at St. John’s University, where she is also the director of the first-year writing program with the Institute for Writing Studies. In her work she interrogates race and the politics of writing instruction in secondary and postsecondary settings, looking closely at the ways racialized political economies get expressed as literacy praxis. Kynard is a former high school teacher with the New York City Public Schools/Coalition of Essential Schools and instructor at the City University of New York. Her work has appeared in Changing English, Teaching English at the Two-Year College, College English, Computers and Composition, Reading Research Quarterly, English Teaching: Practice and Critique, and College Composition and Communication. Her first book, Vernacular Insurrections: Race, Black Radicalism, and the New Century in Literacy and Composition Studies, is forthcoming from SUNY Press.