My Choice: Black Girls' Speak About the Journey to College

• In Event: Politicized Caring, Healing, and Empowerment: Black Feminist Praxis and Schoolin' Urban Girls

Abstract

In 1994, Barbara Omolade declared Black girls as learners were “invisible to the naked eye” (pp. 137-150). In the 20-years that have since passed, a handful of scholars have explored the educational experiences of Black girls, providing limited insight into the schooling conditions necessary for their long-term success (e.g. Evans-Winters, 2011; Fordham 1993; Henry, 1998). The use of race-or-gender-based epistemologies in isolation, led to the inadvertent exclusion of Black girls from educational scholarship and dialogue. However, as Evans-Winters & Esposito (2010) proclaim, Black girls face their own exclusion and marginalization in the educational system, which unfortunately is lost at times because “feminist epistemologies tend to be concerned with the education of White girls and women, and race-based epistemologies tend to be consumed with the educational barriers negatively affecting Black boys” (p. 12). In other words, Black girls live in a world in which their experiences are left out, whited out, blacked out, or pathologized (Evans-Winters, 2011).
In recognizing the paucity of research and intervention aimed at supporting the academic and college preparatory development of Black girls, the author founded the Girls of Color Rock program (pseudonym), a two-year educational and entrepreneurial empowerment program for Black and Latina girls. The purpose of the community-based program was to create a safe and empowering space for girls of color to pursue post-secondary education. As a result, this study examined the experiences of the program’s Black female participants, and their perceptions of the programmatic aspects they found most supportive in their pursuit of higher education. Given the program’s goal, to improve the college preparatory outcomes of girls of color, the Black female participants illuminated ways in which a community-based learning environment contributed to their educational success. As shared by a GCR participant:

Alana: …I changed a lot during [GCR]…from the beginning me to now, if I had the “me” now, it would just be like two different people…if I was to talk to my beginning [GCR] person, like I don’t really know, but it’s just…
Interviewer:…how is she different from who you are now?
Alana: She’s just not as confident. She doesn’t know like what the future
holds…she’s like scared of her future kinda. She doesn’t really know like where she’s going. She knows she wants to go to college, but she doesn’t know how it’s gonna be.

Given that Black female youth have among the lowest college enrollment and completion rates among all girls, Alana’s description of herself before participating in GCR serves as a glaring reminder about the importance of understanding how to support underrepresented youth, and Black girls in particular, through the daunting journey to college. In this presentation, the author discusses the programmatic features identified as most effective during the participant’s college choice process, noting in particular the critical and overlooked aspect of providing social-emotional support as a part of Black girls’ academic and college preparatory journey. Insights and practical solutions for educators will be discussed, and will include a GCR alumna who will participate on the panel.

Author

• Samarah Blackmon, University of California - Los Angeles