Ugandan Educational Aspirations and Home Making: Moving Beyond the Exceptional Immigrant Paradigm

• In Event: 35.036 - Women of Color Feminisms, Epistemologies, and Knowledge Production as Historical and Contemporary Truth in Education

Abstract

Objectives
Drawing on Naluwembe Binaisa’s (2011) study on belonging for first and second generation Ugandans in England and Janet Smith and David Stovall’s (2008) articulation of home making in the landscape of containment, this paper explores how first and second generation Ugandans make sense of and give meaning to creating home in the diaspora. This work considers how educational aspirations figure as the primary drive in securing economic stability within the home country while simultaneously reifying Uganda as the “true” home.

Where Black immigrant exceptionality has traditionally been used to drive a wedge between Black immigrants and Black Americans, this work disrupts the celebration of such supposed exceptionality and rather contends with the nature of containment and violent school systems to make sense of educational aspirations within a landscape of rampant antiblackness (Dumas and ross, 2016; Patton, 2015; Pierre, 2004).

Theoretical Framework(s)
Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Black Feminism are used to examine this topic of Ugandan educational aspirations. CRT offers the perspective of interrogating endemic racism while validating the voices of marginalized. Black Feminism provides the space to articulate how gender complicates transnational narratives as well as explore the mundane moments (Sharpe, 2016) that provide relief for experiences of marginalization.

Methods
This study utilized qualitative methods through individual interviews with six Ugandan women living in the United States. Of the six participants, three are first generation and three are second generation. Interviews were recorded and transcribed. Transcriptions were reviewed by participants to verify that written transcriptions were accurate.

Findings
Findings reveal that despite the narrative of African immigrant success, Africans continue to experience racialized bias within schooling comparable to their African American counterparts (Pierre, 2004). Interviews with Ugandan second generation women reveal the extent to which they have been targeted in classrooms for being “disruptive,” evaluated by faculty as less intelligent than their white counterparts, and were less likely to receive academic support. It is evident that Ugandans are experiencing the violences of racialized school systems, yet their educational pursuits are still encouraged through familial support.

Scholarly Significance
Census data reveals that Black immigrants are a steadily increasing population within the U.S. with a population that has gone from just over 800,000 in 1980 to 4.2 million in 2016 (Anderson and Lopez, 2018). While research indicates that African immigrants and their children are more likely to have a college or advanced degree, it is imperative to note the disparities amongst Africans dependent on country of origin (Anderson and Lopez, 2018). I aim to disrupt the narrative of exceptionality amongst African immigrants and center the complexity of negotiating “belonging” within the U.S. This work navigates the contours of Black immigrant experiences to disrupt the homogenous narrative of immigrant as non-Black, highlight the importance of life making not simply as an assimilative endeavor, and contend with the frictions of generational differences in aspirations towards success.

Author

• Mary Senyonga, University of California - Los Angeles