It's Not Me, It's You: Examining Antiblack Racism Across the Life Span of Black Girls

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

Abstract

Recently, a friend shared her concern about a multi-racial five-year-old girl’s declaration that she could not marry her brother’s friend because he was Black. As I asked follow-up questions, I wondered how a little girl with a seemingly strong Black mother could say such a thing. After reflection, I knew that antiblack racism was likely the culprit and that I had fallen into its grasp myself as a girl, even as I embodied the “Black” this little girl was distancing herself from. Antiblack racism disciplined me into being the “smart Black girl” bussed from a Black neighborhood to the lily-white magnet school where I had to continuously earn my visitor status. Antiblack racism is also the reason that at 40 years old, my mother still insists that I don’t cut my natural hair and is the reason why I bristle when someone thinks that my lighter complexioned daughter is the child of my light-skinned friend and is not mine. The curriculum of whiteness not only disciplines white people to believe in their superiority and the inferiority of Black and brown people, it also disciplines Black people to turn away from particular performances (and physical presentations) of Blackness in order to escape the psychological and material harms of white supremacy. What happens, however, when whiteness renders Black girls unrecognizable within both their own community and those in which they find themselves? What does it mean to deny Black girls of the communities and ways of being that have grounded their joy and resilience?

This paper engages critical autoethnographic methods (Staples, 2016) and Dumas and ross’ (2016) BlackCrit theory to analyze and reflect upon four vulnerable narratives (Bhattacharya, 2016) stemming from racialized incidents that have functioned as instruments of spirit murdering (Love, 2016) occurring from my PK-12 and postsecondary schooling through my role as a mother to a Black girl. It makes visible the ways in which social institutions, in particular schools, suffocate the full range and complexity of Black girlhood that can be expressed by Black girls at any given moment. Attacks on Black girlhood on multiple fronts ensnares some Black girls in the school to prison pipeline (Wun, 2016), while others digest antiblack girl narratives and (re)configure themselves in ways that will make them more desirable, more legible, more of what society says they lack, never rooting in the resilience, innovation, brilliance and strength that is an outgrowth of their collective cultural experiences and struggles.

This paper contributes to current research about asset pedagogies such as culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 2014) and culturally sustaining pedagogy (Paris, 2012) by articulating how these frameworks may counter ever present antiblack girl curricula and disrupt the extensive losses Black girls endure through disproportionate discipline, opportunity loss, and/or assimilative educational practices. Instead this paper helps us to (re)envision educative spaces that amplify and nurture Black girl brilliance of all kinds and from all kinds of Black girls.

Author

• Keisha McIntosh Allen, University of Maryland - Baltimore County