Celebrating Black cultural wealth in graphic design through counter-storytelling and critical practices: An exercise in critical race theory
Date
2021-08
Authors
Frazier, Zachary
Major Professor
Advisor
Quam, Andrea L
Rodríguez, Noreen N
Kang, Sunghyun R
Committee Member
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Abstract
Graphic design is a discipline whose canon, methods, and contemporary culture are dominated by white, male practitioners and ideals. This claim is supported not only by the overrepresentation of white practitioners in the discipline but by funds of cultural knowledge, particularly from Black communities in the United States. In recent months, an expansion of civil rights and racial equity has been called for by various sectors in society including graphic design. However, this thesis argues that none of these efforts are the truly radical, abolitionist, and transformative changes that the discipline needs in order to divest from its white supremacist legacy.
Through interviews conducted in the legacy of critical race theory’s (CRT) method of counter-storytelling Black graphic designers share their testimonies in existing against graphic design as a white-dominant institution (Delgado, 1989). These interviews are analyzed through grounded theory, a feminist research method, which allowed for themes to arise within and across our participants. These emergent themes include— mitigating microaggressions in the classroom and workplace, owning their racial literacy while resisting the racial illiteracy of their white coworkers, and a celebration of collaboration in Black graphic designers. This celebration of collaboration is sustained by ideas of community cultural wealth (CW), a theory derived from critical race theory. CW exists to acknowledge and build upon funds of wealth that are plentiful in communities of color. Types of CW highlighted in this thesis include social, resistant, and navigational forms (Yosso, 2005).
This thesis works to elevate the narratives of the Black community— a community that has been omitted from all levels of graphic design for far too long. This is long overdue arrival will be sustained through an array of critical frameworks.
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thesis