Building a Youth Leadership Fortress: High School Women of Color as Visible Activists

• In Event: 35.058 - Women Leading for Social Justice Across P–20 Contexts

Abstract

Unfortunately, school reform policies and research typifies Black and Latina/o youth as an overall burden on the education system (Ginwright & Cammarota, 2007; Irizarry, 2011; Valencia, 2010). There is limited “nuanced understanding of how” Black and Latina/o youth as activists “respond, resist, and work to transform school and community” (Ginwright, 2007, p. 404). Women of color notably construct visible spaces where gendered racism (toward women and men) is contested (Collins, 2000; hooks, 1981; Oesterreich, 2007); and this community building should be legitimized as an educational asset or as critical social capital (Ginwright, 2007).

As such, we revisit our prior participation in V.O.I.C.E.S. (Verbally Outspoken Individuals Creating Empowering Sistahs), a leadership and empowerment program for high school women of color. Two of the authors are currently graduate and undergraduate students and at the time of their involvement with V.O.I.C.E.S., were high school students, youth facilitators as well as founders of the program. The first author is now a university professor in education and was the project director of V.O.I.C.E.S and a doctoral student at the time.

To prepare this essay, we spent three months corresponding via an online discussion board to reflect on how our prior role as visible young women activists in V.O.I.C.E.S. constructed a “space to survive and thrive in the complexities of institutional inequities,” transformed school policies and practices, and legitimatized youth leadership (Oesterrich, 2007, p. 4, Weis & Fine, 2001). We analyzed our discussion board text using principles of youth activism (Delagado & Staples, 2008; Noguera & Cammarota, 2006) as well as concepts from Black feminist thought and hip-hop feminism, theories that focus on young women of color (Collins, 2000; Brown, 2009). Black feminist thought recognizes that African American women in the United States experience the intersecting oppressions of race, class, gender, and sexuality (Collins). We integrate hip-hop feminism because it recognizes the creative expression of activism, “privileges the in-betweeness of a Black girl epistemology or a black feminist standpoint," honors black girls' and women’s knowledge, and is “located and interpreted through the community (or communities) in which it is immersed” (Brown & Kwakye, 2012, p. 4). Thus, we assert that as members of V.O.I.C.E.S., for us, hip-hop feminism represents “the real” everyday identity politics that we as young, Black women faced, resisted, and acted upon in high school settings.

In or analysis we discuss our (r)evolution as visible activist within the high school during our tenure with V.O.I.C.E.S. highlighting the following themes: resistance to having and using our V.O.I.C.E.S., rare moments and cherished spaces that are for us and by us, sistahs supportin’ the brothas, and our struggle as our source for activism. Our experience as visible activists in V.O.I.C.E.S. can serve as an example of how we, as young adults, have leadership assets that older adults can learn from. The young women of V.O.I.C.E.S were essentially cultural workers (see Collins, 2006) with a political agenda to transform the school by building bridges and restoring relationships between students, teachers, and administrators.

Author

• Anjale DeVawn Welton, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign