Racial Literacies and Comprehension

This chapter intersects the practice of race theory (PRT) with comprehension scholarship, whether such scholarship is concerned with speaking, viewing, writing, or reading. Since reviews of comprehension scholarship are available, I summarize landmark studies and five identified “turns” within literacy research to focus on introducing the Racial Literacies and Comprehension Chart , a mapping of what constitutes comprehension that also accounts for race in (un)written meaning and in literacy instruction. What does it mean for each of us to recognize, resist, and recover from the distortions of living and learning in racialized society and racialized schooling with variously hued bodies? This transdisciplinary inquiry probes within and beyond the scope of this comprehension handbook chapter; nonetheless, I raise it here to foreground race as conceptually and concretely situating oral, visual, writing, and reading comprehension.