Black Femme Youth Organizing for Transformation

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

Abstract

This study examines Black young femme people’s engagement with Power U, a youth organization that campaigns for educational and reproductive justice in a large urban school district. As an organization that sees connections between punitive discipline policies and gender-based violence in schools, Power U has been working to raise the consciousness of young Black people, while engaging in struggles for policy changes. This study explores how through Participatory Action Research (PAR) and organizing efforts, the leadership of Black femme students is developed through critical consciousness and building their capacity for being transformative agents.

We use a Black feminist approach for understanding the experiences of the participants as being enabled and constrained by intersecting forms of domination (Crenshaw, 1989; Collins, 2004) including racism, sexism, and homophobia that shape their experience in particular ways. Black feminist thought has taught us that understanding the ways that Black young femme people experience intersecting forms of oppression will illustrate how these forms reinforce each other and maintain power relationships (Collins, 2014). The leadership of people who live at these intersections, then becomes especially important as we work to understand how oppressive structures operate, how to challenge power dynamics, and how to create change that doesn’t end up privileging one group of people at the expense of another (Young, 1990).

This is an autoethnographic case study. Both authors were active in shaping and participating in the strategy and practices that we studied; and our experiences are reflected in the findings. The data was collected over a 4-year period, beginning in 2014. Our interviews and observations aim to deepen our understanding of both the issues that Black femme youth confront as well as the tactics that an organization like Power U uses to both create new consciousness around the issues and organize for systemic change. To that end, we conducted open-ended interviews with participants as well as observations at Power U meetings, public forums, and during the survey process.

We found that spaces that were specifically designed to support Black femmes helped to create a safe environment to talk about issues that the young people were facing, and to connect their issues to structural forms of oppression in their schools and communities. Through public forums, healing circles, and applying an intersectional lens to the work, the organizing efforts of Power U and allies challenge the racialized and gendered nature of oppressions the young people face. PAR helped document the systemic nature of these oppressions, demonstrating that they are not individual cases, but need to be addressed at a systemic level. The process of developing the survey, conducting it with students, and analyzing the data helped recruit and politicize new youth into the organization, and helped shape demands that were reflective of students’ experiences.

This study contributes to previous research on the potential of PAR and youth organizing to transform power dynamics and inequalities, bringing an intersectional lens to deepen our understanding of fighting multiple forms of oppression simultaneously.

Author

• Julia A Daniel, University of Colorado - Boulder