Curriculum of the Gutter: Confessions of a (Maybe) Reborn Black Gutter Girl

• In Event: Good, Hood, Bad, and Bougie: Complicating Conversations About Black Girlhoods Lived in Dark Places

Abstract

Lexicographers define the term gutter as “the lowest level, especially of society,” connoting ruin (www. Cambridgedictionary.com). This suggests that the gutter is a place of dilapidation, brimming with undesirable derelicts cast out of mainstream society. However, although their currency is certainty, experts’ knowledges are certainly not absolute, particularly those knowledges regarding places and people pushed to society’s periphery.

I confess that I am a Black woman evolved from a Black girl borne of the darkness of the gutter. I have sinned, yet I am not ruined. I deconstruct this proclamation in this paper, which challenges Black girlhood as a singular category, bringing attention to ignored and/or invisibilized multitudes within the construction of Black girl. A first-generation Black African immigrant to the U.S., I grew up among the working-poor. My parents, although highly educated, survived this xenophobic society by enduring the psychic indignities of low-wage labor. I grew up Black and working-poor, then entered academe; this renders me a statistical anomaly. The hidden curriculum of my tertiary education exposed me to the hushed truism that academia’s halls were configured for “upper middle class, or upper class, people. People who had created and shaped these spaces to ensure that every mold fit their mannerisms, words, networks, knowledge, and norms” (Justice, 2019, para. 2). This paper foregrounds knowledges gleaned from my life as a Black girl in the gutter—a Black gutter girl. By highlighting these knowledges, I irradiate Black girlhood as an expansive category that encompasses those on the edge of the idealized (upper) middle-class, cisgendered, heterosexual, and able-bodied Black girl (Author 1, forthcoming). This re-conceptualization of Black girlhood as plural can contribute to reconfigured curricular and pedagogical practices that are responsive to myriads of Black girls, including those whose knowledges about the intersections of race and gender emerge from the (sin-full) nuances of lives experienced in places on the outskirts of mainstream.

I am a Black woman evolved from a Black girl borne of the darkness of the gutter. Using critical autoethnography (Boylorn & Orbe, 2014) as methodology and writing as a method (Richardson, 1994), I reveal and (re)engage with how the gutter endarkened my knowledge of Black girlhood. Here,
I use the term ‘endarkened’...to articulate how reality is known when based in the
historical roots of Black feminist thought, embodying a distinguishable difference in
cultural standpoint, located in the intersection/overlap of the culturally constructed
socializations of race, gender, and other identities, and the historical and contemporary
contexts of oppressions and resistance for African American women. (Dillard, 2006, p.
3)

I apply Alice Walker’s (2003) womanist theory to my analysis of autoethnographic writings that convey stories curated from my adolescence in high school and college. These stories prompt contemplation about Black girlhoods, proving that alongside sin, strife, and struggle, the gutter can generate textured knowledges regarding how those relegated to society’s outermost margins audaciously resist and rewrite hegemonic rules about learning, loving, healing, and surviving—that is, about being (reborn as) wholly human—while raced (as Black) and gendered (as girl).

Author

• Esther O. Ohito, Rutgers University