Intergenerational Healing and the Quest for Educational Justice for/With Black Girl Artivists

• In Event: Black Girls and Young Women Enacting Civics Through Everyday Praxis

Abstract

Far too frequently, civics is defined as the belief of and participation in a democratic process, including voting, paying taxes, lobbying, and often respectable ways of servicing one’s community. It is essential that we problematize this, given the realities faced by Black people, particularly Black women and girls. From Jim Crow laws and policies that restricted Black women from voting to recognizing the disproportionate ways in which capitalism and other power structures impact Black women, often limiting their ability to run for public office or even to be present for city council and local school board meetings, Black women and girls have been historically and systematically marginalized from democracy.

In our work, we reject hegemonic notions of civics and turn to the recent work of Bettina Love (2019), where she posits that within education, civics is, “the practice of abolitionist teaching rooted in the internal desire we all have for freedom, joy, restorative justice (restoring humanity, not just rules), and to matter to ourselves, our community, our family, and our country with the profound understanding that we must ‘demand the impossible’” (p. 7). Building on Love’s rewriting of civics and Watson’s conception in Learning to Liberate (2012) that “it takes the hood to save the hood”, we coined the term “hood civics.” This term destabilizes traditional notions of civic engagement that do not always capture how Black girls see themselves in relation to broader society and in service to their communities. The use of “hood” grounds the communities in which Black girls navigate and fight for. Hood civics is the localization of civic engagement; an explicit rejection of the belief in a nation-state, American essentialism, patriotism, and other characteristics of nationhood that are commonly associated with civics. Thus, “hood civics” informs abolition; allowing Black women and girls to reimagine the possibilities of their communities while fighting for justice block by block via artivism, restorative justice, direct action, solidarity, and everyday acts of resistance.

Our study takes an intergenerational and intersectional approach to Black girl civics. In this chapter, we delve into the pedagogical possibilities and tensions of a high school elective course taught by Black women for Black girls. Specifically, we will use this case study to (1) consider notions of Black girlhood and what it means to be accepted and protected inside a class grounded in sistahood; (2) analyze the ways the students embody and enact a form of artivism rooted to their own lives, languages, and youth cultures—what we term hood civics; (3) argue for the necessity of this work to be intergenerational and carried out by Black women as the pedagogy of our lives. And (4), discuss radical love, intergenerational healing, and critical hope as a means to reclaim educational spaces for Black women’s knowledges, identities, and realities to emerge, providing important subtext for decolonizing spaces—including school systems.

Authors

• Jeanelle Kevina Hope, Texas Christian University

• Vajra M. Watson, California State University - Sacramento