Be Smooth Emily Borg

Healing-Centered Youth Organizing to Dismantle the School-Prison Nexus: Reflections on a Pilot Study Through the Lens of Linguistic Justice

My name is Emily Borg and this is episode one of the Be Smooth podcast. I’m currently a doctoral student in educational leadership at San Francisco State University and a founding board member of Be Smooth, Inc.

Be Smooth, Inc. is a grassroots organization in Stockton, California, created by Lecia Harrison to honor the memory of her son Brandon, and to carry on his life’s work in disrupting the school-to-prison pipeline, while envisioning and building the community he wanted his sons to grow up in. The organization, and this podcast, are named Be Smooth because “‘Be smooth’ is what Brandon would say when ending phone calls or interactions.  What it meant to him was… be safe, be calm, and make good decisions” (besmooth.org).

Please see below for citations and references:


School-prison nexus (Stovall, 2016)
Healing centered engagement (Ginwright, 2016)
Polyphonic (Bahktin, 1984)
Baker-Bell’s (2020) book Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy
Baker-Bell (2020) writes that, “Anti-Black Linguistic Racism describes the linguistic violence, persecution, dehumanization, and marginalization that Black Language-speakers experience in schools and in everyday life. The Anti-Black Linguistic Racism that Black “youth...experience and endure in communities and classrooms is not separate from the contemporary forms of anti-Black racism and oppression they encounter as they navigate the world living within their Black bodies. Indeed, the marginalization, colonization, exploitation, policing, and stereotypes associated with Black Language is linked to a system of white supremacy that continues to support and maintain...oppression….Thus, the policing of Black Language and literacies in schools is not separate from the ways in which Black bodies have historically been policed and surveilled in U.S. society, and the ubiquitous assault and murder of Black bodies is not independent of the symbolic linguistic violence and spirit-murder that Black students experience daily in classrooms (Bryan, 2020; Johnson et al., 2017; Johnson, 2018; Love, 2019)” (p. 11).
According to Baker-Bell (2020), “Black Language is the linguistic consequence of slavery from which linguistic racism toward Black people was born.  This historical linguistic record of Black Language illustrates how a general theory of linguistic racism is inadequate in its ability to fully interrogate anti-blackness in and through language” (p. 18).
In addition to developing linguistic consciousness, Baker-Bell argues, “it is important for students to have an opportunity to create change within their communities” (p. 86).
In my research, I am utilizing intimate inquiry, a person-centered, love-based, methodological framework developed by Dr. Crystal Laura, that is rooted in relationships that exist beyond research and a commitment to engaged and political work (Laura, 2016).
For my dissertation, I also plan to use portraiture, a method that bridges art and science, and positions the, “portraitist’s voice...in duet, in harmony, in counterpoint…[while] the actors sing the solo lines” (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Hoffmann Davis, 1997, p. 85), which resonates with my hopes for this podcast.