Black Girls Play: A Praxis of Getting Free

• In Event: 25.035 - Underground, Outer Space, and on the Move: Fugitive Possibilities in Black Education

Abstract

Child/adolescent developmental theorists promote “play” as necessary engagement for children to develop linguistic, cognitive and social skills, as well as, general personality development. Brown (2014) explores this concept drawing heavily on disciplines lodged in performance studies and her own research with Black girls to examine “play” in the form of Wreckless Theatrics. Brown conceptualizes “play” as a site for “opportunities to tell multiple truths of those typically unheard , and, when spoken out loud, and the act of telling feels a lot like freedom(36)”. The act of play, joy and laughter is a radical act for Black girls in a culture that heavily policies their behavior and appearance. Black girls in the U.S. are systematically adultified, and dehumanized, and have no right to defend themselves (Spillers, 1987). In school settings, they receive harsh punishments for standing up for themselves or subjective behaviors deemed as disrespect (Morris 2007). The challenge for Black girls to explore “play” or liberatory performance is also tied up in Black girls’ inability to find physical “safe” spaces as well.

My paper applies a structural analysis to look at the loss of childhood for Black girls in Chicago and centers their narratives which expands the narrow ways we discuss violence. I center the politics of play as a site for radical imaginations to manifest not only for young people, but adults as well. It unpacks the complacency of schools in diminishing Black girlhood, to observe the intentional work of a particular Black girl space in Chicago that provides a framework for restoring Black girlhood in youth-centered spaces. This paper draws on data from a two-year action participatory project with 11 Black teen girls in the first year, and 14 in the second year at a summer program in Chicago. The site of my research interestingly, was originally hosted at a school and then pushed out as a result of empowered Black girls organizing to address gendered issues in the school. My theoretical framework for this study employs Black girlhood studies (Brown, 2014) Black geographies (McKittrick, 2006) and fugitivity (Hartman, 1997). Findings demonstrate the praxis of play as necessary to Black girls creating fugitive spaces that allow for them to be amongst others like them in authentically engaging in the multi facades of Black girl performance or theatrics. My analysis theorizes the ways these young women used play as an act of reclaiming space and control over their own images that challenge surveillance and spectatorship.

Author

• Aja Reynolds, University of Illinois at Chicago