Constructing Identities in Middle School: African American Girls Navigating Antiblack Racism in East Texas

• In Event: Imagined and Realized Places: Spatializing Youth Political and Racial Identity Development

Abstract

Extensive research highlights the importance of racialized identities for Black youths’ experiences with school and opportunities for academic achievement. From a cultural-historical psychology perspective, identity development is best understood as a product of human social activity and as serving to shape our social reality (Stetsenko & Arievitch, 1997, 2004). In a synthesis of this perspective and theoretical work on anti-black racism and coloniality (Gordon, 1995; Maldonado-Torres, 2007; 2017), the present paper examined how African-American girls’ construction of identities were informed by the local social practices of their city and their middle school. The following questions were addressed:
1) How are local social activities implicated in African-American adolescent girls’ identity construction in East Texas?
2) How do African-American adolescent girls in an East Texas middle school understand opportunities for social change as a function of the identities they construct?
From 10 total girls in an after-school program class, 6 African-American girls participated in interviews. The interviews were designed to elicit narratives about the social interactions that informed the girls’ understandings of what opportunities existed for changing their world and how anti-black racism and coloniality informed their opportunities for academic achievement at a middle school for high-achieving youth. The after-school program class these participants were drawn from was developed by the researcher at after-school program staff’s recommendation for girls enrolled in 2016-2017. The class was discussion-based and the discussions were facilitated by the researcher once weekly for a semester, each session lasting one hour. Topics discussed were developed with youth participants’ and program staff’s input (e.g. mental health’s relationship with abuse experiences, LGBTQ rights, Black Lives Matter activism, cultural responsiveness in local schools’ curricula). The researcher facilitated the discussions, encouraged generation of solutions by youth participants, and intentionally encouraged exploration of points for social action by youth participants. Verbatim interview transcripts were produced and qualitatively coded in a thematic analysis addressing the research question.
African-American adolescent girls discussed the ways that middle school was a space of racialized surveillance criminalization of Black youth (e.g. “Whether you’re whispering, whether you’re talking like this, whether you’re yelling across the room…they’re gonna be looking for it. So it doesn’t matter how small it is, or how big it is, you could pass your friend a pencil and they’re gonna be like umm Khaila you need to uh get back in your seat. You know they’re going to get on you for little things because you already gotten in trouble before, so it’s kinda like you gotta tip toe around everything.”). Others discussed intergenerational disconnects regarding what constituted anti-black racism, such as a brief exchange with one’s mother over criminalizing Black youth, a reflection of childhood itself involving a colonial divide (Author, 2020): “And I said why are you lockin’ the doors? She’s like, you see them, you see them boys ova there, them hoodlums. I said hoodlums? I said they- they’re Black like us, they’re still, they’re still kids”. Implications for supporting Black youth’s transformative activist projects will be further discussed.

Author

• Karlyn R. Adams-Wiggins, Portland State University