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Abstract
This study uses poststructuralism, Michel Foucaults Effective History, and Africanist epistemology to examine ways in which scholars in k-16 schools perpetuate subjugation by using Eurocentric and other discourses. This study focuses on an interview study I conducted with three students I taught as a high school literacy educator. I use effective history to examine a racially motivated shooting event in which these one sixteen-year-old African-American male, three fifteen-year-old African-American females, and one fourteen-year-old African-American male shot at by a white security guard while attending a field trip in the southern United States. I examine reasons why these students were more afraid of revealing the fact that they were violated to their chaperones than in demanding the justice they deserved. As a participant as well as researcher, I enlist a qualitative researcher and university professor to conduct an intrasubjective interview with me. As a result of this interview, I discovered ways that my discourse as an African-American female educator reflected discourses characteristic of white supremacy. Using effective history, I examined events in the lives three of the young people involved and disclosed how their lives did not always circulate around race issues. This methodology revealed discourses participants used to resist effects of the shooting and other events in which they were raced or subjugated. Participants used Africanist, Eurocentric, and other discourses to negotiate their lives and challenges. I analyzed how discourses often oppressed them and spawned resistances or capitulation. In addition to the shooting, students experienced black-on-black violence, physical injury, abuse by collegiate athletic apparatuses, and efforts to diminish their scholarly achievements by professors. The methods of resistance they engaged in tandem demonstrated the array of discursive tools needed by young people of color in order to succeed in secondary and postsecondary institutions. It also shows how poststructuralism, particularly effective history, is used along with race theories, Africanist epistemology, and Eurocentric discourse for qualitative studies.