The article discusses a multiple literacies and traditional approach to literacy by drawing on the experiences of 2 African American young women in a high school English classroom. The article suggests that teachers who use a more traditional approach to literacy are more apt to view students of color as powerless, failing, struggling, and/or having low literacy abilities; whereas teachers who use a multiple literacies approach are more likely to interrogate power relations, and understand that students of color and students from historically underrepresented groups draw on their social and cultural interpretive frames to make meaning of the world around them and to create spaces of agency within the classroom.