"She Asked If My Blood Was Red": Afro-German Diasporic Experiences in Education

• In Event: The Back of Blackness: Critically Examining the Construction of Blackness in Educational Research and Practice

Abstract

Okpalaoka and Dillard (2012) note that “in order to answer the question of who we are as African ascendant people, we need to take a closer look at the role that history, time, displacement, and geographical location have played in our migrations and the dynamism to the nature of the identities we adopt within and across national contexts” (p. 122). This notion has particular implications for educational research, as considering the question of “who we are as African ascendant people” both historically and presently, also requires us to think more deeply about who our African ascendant students, teachers, and other educational stakeholders are, and how we can collectively create educational spaces that optimally serve them.

Considering the roles of history, time, displacement, and geography (Okpalaoka and Dillard, 2012), this paper draws on a subset of data from a year-long qualitative study of the educational experiences and identities of Black transnational women in the U.S. It explores the following questions: “How do two Black German women reckon with the ways German and U.S. educational spaces have shaped and continue to shape their identities and educational pursuits? What implications do their narratives have for educational research more broadly, and Okpalaoka and Dillard’s (2012) question of “who are we as African ascendant people?” more specifically. To address these questions, the author will engage a Transnational Black Feminist approach (Burkhard, 2019) to qualitative educational research both theoretically and methodologically. According to Hall (2016), Transnational Black Feminism “[…] offers four guiding principles: intersectionality, scholar-activism, solidarity building, and attention to borders/boundaries” (p. 91). Drawing on transnational feminist traditions (Grewal and Kaplan, 1994; Mohanty, 2003) and Black feminist approaches (Evans-Winters, 2019; Hall 2016; Okpalaoka and Dillard; 2012), this framework attends to the implications of the nation-state’s persistence of (colonial) borders and boundaries, historical and geographic contextualization, as well as the lived experiences and social positioning of Black women in the United States and abroad.

Against this backdrop, the author will present the Afro-German women’s movement as an anchoring point of discourse about transnational Black womanhood in Germany to frame the narratives presented in this paper. The author will present autoethnographic narratives of her own racialized and gendered experiences in the German and U.S. educational systems and bring these narratives into conversation with interview data and artifacts collected from Ama, a Black German participant in the author’s aforementioned qualitative study. Although both the author and Ama grew up in different parts of Germany and as part of different Black diasporic communities, their narratives reflect many shared racialized and gendered experiences. Both women migrated to the United States to pursue their education, where they both had to reckon with numerous layers of difference related to racialized and cultural understandings as scholars and instructors.

The significance of this research is the further development of Transnational Black Feminist theory and practice, particularly by considering historical contexts (e.g. the Afro-German women’s movement) and educational narratives that are not typically included in U.S. educational discourses.

Author

• Tanja Burkhard, Washington State University