"You Made Me Just Breathe": A Case for Fugitive Black Girl Space in Education

• In Event: Examining Black Girls' Educational Experiences Across Three Differing Contexts

Abstract

Scholars address the many ways Black girls experience anti-Black violence in schools. Their experiences range from harsh and severe discipline, pushout, and gendered anti-Black attacks from teachers, administrators and staff daily (Harrison, 2015; Fordham, 2016; Hines-Datiri & Carter Andrews, 2017; Morris, 2016; Wun, 2014; 2015; 2016). As a result, scholars and community leaders aim to create educational spaces for Black girls to learn and thrive, otherwise known as Black girl space (Brown, 2009; Price-Dennis, et al., 2017). Most importantly, these spaces have become sites of survival and fugitivity from the violence and harm caused by traditional school spaces, and allow Black girls to understand their identities and experiences (Brown, 2009; ross, 2019). This paper explores the development of Black Girl Magic (BGM), a school-based, Black girl space alongside 28 Black girls and 5 Black women facilitators at two predominantly white middle schools.
To understand the specificities of Black girls’ experiences I use anti-blackness, Black feminism and theories of Black girlhood (Brown, 2009; Dumas, 2016). Black feminism and Black Girlhood theories are useful to understand the oppression that Black women and girls describe in society and within the contexts of schools. Yet, anti-blackness is most useful to understand the specificities of Blackness, its positioning as slaveness, and therefore the reality that Black youth cannot have access to humanizing schools in ways other children do (Dumas, 2016). Because educational institutions are foundational in creating, shaping and maintaining anti-Blackness, it is important to explore how Black girl spaces like BGM aid in escaping, resisting and ultimately refusing the day-to-day treatment they experience.
This study draws from 33 semi-structured interviews with Black girls and BGM facilitators; 276 hours of participant observations in the BGM group, facilitator meetings, and day-to-day interactions with Black girls, and document analysis of student produced work in BGM. This paper answers the questions: How do middle school Black girls utilize the BGM space as a site of fugitivity and resistance? And in what ways do Black girls refuse the school’s deficit, anti-Black perceptions of them and create their own self-affirming educational space?
Findings suggest that BGM allows the girls to holistically be themselves in the same educational environment that punishes their behaviors. The space helped them build solidarity through shared stories of their school violence, engage in calling out school actors on their persistent anti-Blackness, and develop self-proclaimed descriptions of their Black girlhoods. While many praise the creation of the Black girl spaces as catering to the “needs” of “troubled youth”, this paper halts these acknowledgments that frame Black children as the problem (Baldridge, 2019). Instead, the focus on fugitive Black girl space is an effort to hold schools accountable for the violence perpetrated against Black girls who find respite in only being able to “breathe” in these educational spaces. This paper continues the necessary complex conversations about what it looks like to end this cycle of violence to create and foster educational spaces for Black youth that do not require them to enter harmful school buildings.

Author

• Ashley L Smith-Purviance, Providence College