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"I Am Not Beneath You": Black Girls Truth-Telling in a Liberatory Counter-Space

Sun, April 19, 8:15 to 9:45am, Virtual Room

Abstract

In this paper, I discuss findings from a larger study that explored the cultural and civic experiences of Black girls who are members of the ARC, an intergenerational, public health and social action organization that serves Essex County, NJ and surrounding areas. The ARC runs structured summer and year-round programming focused on leadership development, critical civic literacy, and individual and community health and wellness. The ARC’s curriculum is designed and implemented within an Africentric framework centering on Ma’atian (Karenga, 2003), or, ancient Kemetic principles of truth, order, balance, and reciprocity. The organization’s program leaders are purposeful in their intent to raise cultural and critical consciousness among its members by celebrating a sense of shared Africana heritage and by enacting social justice-oriented civic training with a targeted focus on improving health and wellness of Black girls, their families, and their communities. The civic aspects of the ARC’s programs are strategically complemented by opportunities for the girls to create and participate in various art forms including African dance, drumming, step, and poetry. Evans-Winters (2019) calls for an intersectional and culturally-informed qualitative inquiry to examine the lived experiences of Black girls. The experiences of Black girls remain undertheorized (Evans-Winters, 2015; 2019) and the ways in which Black girls theorize and draw upon their own cultural ways of knowing and being are still marginalized within and outside of formal educational spaces.

In effort to understand how Black girls at the ARC make sense of self in a creative and academic space led by Black women, two of the research questions I ask in the study are as follows: 1) How do Black women develop the cultural and ethnic identities of Black girls through the ARC’s culturally relevant programming and 2) how do Black girls who participate in the ARC’s programs articulate their cultural and ethnic identities? I use Black feminism (Collins, 2000; Evans-Winters, 2015, 2019; hooks, 1989) and hooks’ (1990) notion of artistic and inclusive sites of resistance to interrogate how the ARC, as a liberatory counterspace, emboldens Black girls in their exploration of self, and self in relation to society, and to illuminate how they talk back (hooks, 1989), using poetry as a medium, to a society that decenters and attempts to erase their voices and experiences. A thematic analysis of the data drawn from participant observations, focus groups, and individual interviews found that the girls’ participation in various creative arts activities served as positive, cultural forms of racial socialization that strengthened their self-esteem, confidence, and self-efficacy, particularly as it relates to how they assert their social and civic agencies. While evidence of civic orientation, sociopolitical awareness, and community-focused ideologies were also present in the data, this particular paper demonstrates the girls’ poetry as artistic representation of their counterstories, and the building of self-narratives, in addition to how the ARC’s poetry workshops serve as a vehicle for fostering positive cultural, ethnic, and racial identity development; creating opportunity for engagement in sociopolitical critique; and developing and sustaining cultural consciousness.

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