Testing My Gangsta: Improvised Assessments of Black Girlhood in "High-Ability" Academic Spaces

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

Abstract

Browning the curriculum requires curriculum workers to “expose ourselves and our ideas to the heat;” to be “more, rather than less dirty” (Gaztambide-Fernández & Murad, 2011, p. 14). I thus share memories of interactions with Black girls growing up in U.S. neighborhoods where the potential for physical violence was constant. The Black girls featured in my counter-storytelling were tracked into “high-ability” classrooms and schools (Parekh, 2017). I offer lessons learned from peers who tested my fortitude within spaces not traditionally associated with school violence.

Two frameworks inform the tensions I embodied at the intersections of ability, class, colorist ideologies, gender, race-ethnicity, and spirituality. I invoke Evans-Winters and Esposito’s (2010) conceptualization of critical race feminism to explore the multiple “realities of the state of Black girls’ education” (p. 22), and Dillard’s (2008) theorizing about (re)membrance and spirituality to trouble the framing of identities in research.

Using counter-storytelling (Solozarno & Yosso, 2003), three anecdotes are retold with emphasis on intersectionality, refusal of dominant ideologies, empowerment through inclusive schooling, Black girls’ experiential knowledge, and transdisciplinary/transgenerational understandings. A daughter of the Afro-Latinx oral tradition (Author 4, 2019), I have repeatedly shared these memories from ages 12, 15, and 18. Whether swapping survival stories with former classmates, telling cautionary tales to my teenaged daughter, or in moments of candor with colleagues who also had their fortitude tested, listeners’ reactions shaped how I (re)membered subsequent tellings. In their first written iteration, I explore lessons salient to my role as an education researcher.
1. “If some female in the first row don’t like me, come say it to my face!”
2. “Do you have something you wanna say?”
3. “Do you have an eye problem?”

Three encounters exemplify the improvised testing of “my gangsta” under the Black girl oppositional gaze (hooks, 2003; Jacobs, 2016). The first occurred after transferring into a gifted seventh/eighth-grade class in my neighborhood school. The second was at an International Baccalaureate magnet high school. The third anecdote explores the aftermath of getting shoved by a graduate student at an undergraduate Ivy League party. Information gathered from personal communications and employment-oriented websites reveal where my “good, ‘hood, bad and bougie” peers are today. These improvisational assessments of fortitude reinforced an unwritten curriculum of Black girls’ complexities, need for respect (not respectability), and diverse modes of recognition. I was a nerdy Dominican, “light-skinned” Black church girl. A Christian taught to see the power of forgiveness and victory in submission, my material circumstances nonetheless required that I handled myself accordingly in physical and intellectual confrontations.

Discourse about disciplinary policies and school push-out often alludes to black girls fighting (e.g., Morris, 2013). This counter-storytelling, however, explores violence in spaces designated for high-ability students, underscoring what is lost and gained through conflict. Constantly tested, I have reconfigured an embodied Black girl onto-epistemology into moves employed in Black womanhood. Today, whenever my expertise and abilities are challenged, especially by those who espouse values incongruent with their behavior, I am equipped to handle the testing of my (academic) gangsta.

Author

• Mildred Boveda, The Pennsylvania State University