"Unnormal Sisterhood": Cultivating Interdependence With Girls of Color

• In Event: The Literate Lives of Youth of Color: Examining Race, Home, and Displacement

Abstract

Across history American schools have been mechanisms of social control, heralding white, middle class ways of knowing, being, and doing as indicators of educational achievement and success (Brayboy, 2006; Goodwin, 2010; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995; Paris & Alim, 2014). Youth of color are thus too often forced to the margins and silenced in schools. When schools operate in this way, the wealth of cultural knowledge, the plethora of ways of seeking and creating, and the collective power amongst youth and communities of color are ignored, and the needs and desires of those already in power continue to be served. This presentation will explore the ways that an alternative space was created for middle school girls of color in order to access their ways of knowing and being as resistant and collective power against the injustices they perceived within their schools.

This practitioner research study explored how Black and Asian girls living in a large Northeastern city came to develop resistant strategies and began to cultivate interdependence in an afterschool writing club designed specifically for and, in part, by them. The club recruited girls from a Catholic school that served mostly Black, Asian, and Latinx youth. Four Black and four Asian girls in sixth and seventh grades met twice a week for one school year. The club’s design attended to what Black, Chicana, and transnational feminist theorists have told us—that too often racist and sexist structures yield the notion that women of color cannot surmount their nondominant differences in order to form multiracial sisterhoods (Lorde, 2007; Mohanty, 2003; Moraga, 1983; Keating, 2013). To surmount this assumption, the curriculum was rooted in humanizing discourse (Kinloch & San Pedro, 2016) and writing as refuge, connection, and resistance (Anzaldúa, 1983; Bambara, 1992; Christian, 1998; Collins, 2000; Lorde, 2007).

By using a practitioner research methodology (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009), the author was positioned to both observe patterns and to create conditions for new possibilities, the path of the research and club’s curriculum taking shape in response to ongoing observations and analysis. The author collected and iteratively analyzed field notes, semi-structured interviews, and girls’ writing. Findings suggest that although the work was not without tensions, as the girls came to better understand each other, they also became more tender with one another (Lorde, 2007), stood with one another in the face of raced-gendered attacks, and challenged their own complicity in racist ideologies that fractured potential sisterhoods. It seemed in the refuge of this space, the girls both learned strategies to resist racist heteropatriarchal structures in sisterhood with one another and also, importantly, cultivated a desire and felt need to do so. This work fills an important gap in the literature as it attends specifically to the roles difference and solidarity within multiracial groups of students play in anti-racist and anti-sexist curriculum, a topic rarely attended to despite the proliferation of multiracial classrooms of students of color and a felt desire for multiracial coalition amongst people of color in the face of the current political climate.

Author

• Grace D. Player, University of Pennsylvania