Anti–Black Girl Violence: Exploring the Specificities of School Violence Against Young Black Girls

• In Event: Accepting the Responsibility to Examine and Innovate With Frameworks Used in Education Research

Abstract

Recent scholarship suggests there is consensus that something specific exists about Black girls’ schooling experiences that warrants necessary attention (Crenshaw, Ocen, & Nanda, 2015; Morris, 2016) , yet scholars have not adequately explored how gendered anti-Black violence facing young Black girls should be addressed in theory and practice (Wun, 2015). Much of this is due to the limiting analyses of Black girl’s suffering. Debates within Afropessimist and Black Feminist scholarship diverge in analyzing the root cause of violence against Black women and girls as gendered or ungendered beings (Douglas, 2018). Afropessimists suggest Blackness [ontologically positioned as non-human] does not have legible access to human categories of ‘girl,’‘child,’ etc. therefore complicating intersectional theory (Douglas, 2018). While afropessimists help us understand the illegibility of Black suffering, specificity still exists in the ways Black girls experience anti-Blackness structurally and interpersonally, that requires rearticulated conceptions of intersectionality (Nash, 2019). Therefore, I combine this scholarship to describe what I refer to as anti-Black girl violence, to understand Black girls’ suffering and experiences with gender/ungendering violence at two predominantly white suburban middle schools in the Midwest.
Drawing on theories of symbolic violence, anti-Blackness and intersectionality, this study examines how schools enact and perpetuate anti-Black girl violence against girls as young as 10-years-old. This framework offers a combined analysis of how anti-Blackness and heteropatriarchal violence shape the everyday, mundane forms of gratuitous violence against Black girls in schools which remains overlooked in educational research (Wun, 2015). This qualitative, ethnographic study draws from 58 individual interviews with Black girls, teachers, administration, staff and school district leaders, 326 hours of participant and non-participant observations, and document analysis. Data analysis consisted of deductive, inductive and thematic processes.
The findings from this study suggest Black girls face anti-Black girl violence on a continuum beginning as they journey to school on the school bus and throughout the entirety of the school day including after school. Black girls faced anti-Black girl assaults from peers, teachers, staff and administrators daily. Though knowledgeable about the ways Black girls faced harm, school leaders instead put forth an investment in “fixing” Black girls and divestment in abolishing white supremacy and anti-Blackness. Therefore, school reforms resulted in more harmful practices through referrals and restorative mediations that exacerbated Black girls’ suffering through blame and encouraging silence for survival. Therefore, this work necessitates a shift in educational research to further explore anti-Black girl violence in order to move our practice from teaching Black girls how to survive schools to the abolition of violent school systems.
Anti-Black girl violence as a framework begins to capture the magnitude of the violence Black girls face in schools that is often dismissed as microaggressions and implicit bias of school leaders or improper behavior from Black girls. The anti-Black girl violence framework makes legible the ways school actors, policies and practices attempt to become “better” on the backs of Black girls’ pain, and offers more ways to keep schools and education accountable for the Black suffering it perpetuates.

Author

• Ashley L Smith-Purviance, Providence College