Blackness, Colonial Difference, and Schooling: Somali Mothers Navigating Discourses of Parental Involvement

• In Event: 45.035 - Subaltern Knowledge of Educational Leadership and Coloniality: Pathologizing People of Color and the Poor

Abstract

In this paper, we explore the intersubjective/subjective dimensions of coloniality of power as it relates to Somali mother’s perceptions of school and its treatment of their children. We draw on concept of Coloniality (Quijano, 2000; Mignolo, 2012), and specifically how coloniality is experienced intersubjectively as gendered colonial subjects (Lugano, 2015). We illustrate how the colonial racial (Quijano, 2000) and gender logic (Lugones, 2010) were used to construct and deal with Somali mothers and their relationship with school leadership in an urban working-class community in London, UK. Both white and Indian/Pakistani British school leaders often rationalized their subjugation of Somali students and their families based on colonial difference. This was manifested in three different ways: a) coloniality understanding of Somali family dynamics; b) reconfiguring the subaltern alterity, where Somali mothers were assigned to the bottom of social hierarchy; c) school’s approach to community-relations through one individual mother, whose voice was often marginalized by the schools leadership. Somali mothers’ experiences with the school administrators revealed sophisticated understanding of the ways school uses race and gender to control voice, bodies, and resources for accessing academic success. But more importantly, the mothers’ stories highlight collective effort to contest oppressive power patterns, and hence engage the work of what Maria Lugones (2010) called decolonizing feminism.

Author

• Nimo Abdi, University of Minnesota