Resistance, Silence, and Armoring: Black Girls' Navigation of the Intersections of Schools and Emotion

• In Event: 77.023 - Examining the Intersectionality of Policy and the Educational Lives of Black Girls

Abstract

This paper explores how the emotional lives of Black girls interact with the dominant norms and expectations of emotion management and performance in schools. Using a critical feminist framework of intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989) and Black feminist thought (Collins, 1989, 2000), the author highlights how the emotional rules that Black girls are expected to follow in schools are raced and gendered. Additionally, the author discusses the socialization that Black girls undergo in connection with their emotional lives by drawing on the concepts of critical consciousness (Freire, 1970), armoring (Edmondson Bell & Nkomo, 1998), and emotional labor (Hochschild, 1983).
The data from this paper are drawn from a larger phenomenological study that examined the raced, gendered, and classed experiences of high school-aged Black girls in elite independent schools. The participants for this study were 25 adolescent Black girls in grades 9–12 who attended weekly discussion sessions over a period of 3 months, facilitated by the author. Most of the participants also participated in one-on-one interviews with the author.
The findings from this paper illustrate how Black girls develop a particular emotional literacy that operates on both an internal and external level in order to navigate their school lives. On an internal level, this concept describes the awareness that Black girls have of their own emotions and the decisions they make to display those emotions. Being able to trace the origins of their emotions during a particular encounter and developing the skills to regulate their emotions is critical to an emerging literacy about one’s own emotions.
On an external level, similar to critical consciousness, this concept reflects Black girls’ awareness of how their emotions might be viewed by others because of the stereotypes associated with Black girls and women. Emotional literacy also requires that Black girls are able to read others’ emotions. This aspect of emotional literacy is particularly important as Black girls make decisions about when and how to respond to encounters of race, gender, and class within the context of their school culture, which has its own rules and norms about which emotions are allowed to be made visible and how they are allowed to be enacted.
The author concludes that school culture and classrooms become places where the notion of “safe spaces” is often translated into a debate between the emotions of comfort and discomfort, with the emotional safety of students from the dominant group being given priority over that of Black girls. Educators can push back against this normative standard and promote the emotional safety of all students by engaging in a pedagogy of discomfort where educators and students alike are pushed to critically study how power relations function in society and are communicated through the daily workings of school life. A pedagogy of discomfort enhances the emotional literacy of all students and teachers, and could work to relieve Black girls of some of the emotion labor that they are forced to engage in on a daily basis.

Author

• Charlotte E Jacobs, University of Pennsylvania