Toward a Black Girl/hood Standpoint: Naming and Resisting Misogynoir Violence Through Black Feminist Storytelling

• In Event: "As We Have Always Done": Resurgence, Resistance, and Fostering Educational Lifeways for Collective Liberation

Abstract

Decades of research demonstrates how school discipline policies and practices are enacted in ways that disenfranchise Black girls (Morris & Perry, 2017; Wun, 2016; Morris, 2007; Skiba, Michael, Nardo, Peterson, 2001). Black girls are seven times more likely to be suspended from school and are four times more likely to be arrested on school campuses than their white peers (Innis Thompson, 2018). Well-established explorations have explained these trends are not reflective of higher rates of misbehavior among Black girls. Rather the offenses incurred most often by Black girls are largely influenced by dehumanizing, racist-sexist stereotypes that influence how adults interpret and respond to their behaviors (Morris & Perry, 2017; Neal-Jackson, 2020). Though extensive research documents the nature of Black girls’ disproportionate encounters with exclusionary punishment and how these mechanisms facilitate their criminalization and pushout into the youth prison system (Morris, 2016; Annamma, 2017), there are several queries missing within this body of scholarship. First, a dearth of literature explores the ways racialized and gendered discipline inequities are interpreted by Black girls who face these exclusionary punishments themselves. Second, most of the literature has paid particular attention to traditional modalities of school discipline (i.e. suspensions, classroom removals, and office referrals), which as the scholarship of Connie Wun (2016) illustrates obscures the “unaccounted forms” of gendered-antiblack violence Black girls frequently endure in school spaces. Third, the literature that explicitly attends to the interstitial axes of race, gender, class, and place -- which render Black girls in the hood vulnerable to violence and the school/prison nexus-- remains underdeveloped (Butler, 2018). By neglecting to attend explicitly to the nexus of race, gender, place and poverty, much of the literature mutes the experiences and voices of Black girls in the hood and how their geopolitical and sociocultural locations uniquely structure and compound their experiences with misogynoir violence and punishment in school.
The present study builds upon the small but growing body of literature that amplify the voices of Black girls into public and scholarly discourse concerning the school/prison nexus and state violence by examining how Black girls live, interpret, and construct knowledge about conditions that recapitulate systems of carcerality and misogynoir violence in school (Wun, 2016). Through Black Feminist Storytelling Methods, this work centers on 15 Black girls’ experiences in the Concrete Rose Project, a co-created afterschool space for Black girls with discipline records, and explores how Black girls use the group to self-define, co-construct knowledge, and resist the daily physical and spiritual assaults they face in school. As a Black Girl Cartographer (Butler, 2018) and Black Feminst scholar from the hood (Kendall, 2020), I argue that Black girls’ sociocultural and geopolitical locations are central to their lived experiences and ways of knowing. Thus, the purpose of the stories presented in this research serve to disrupt the bidimensional ways (our) lives are written about in much of the scholarship by elaborating on the unique ways Black girls in the hood experience and resist oppression along the lines of race, gender, sexuality, class, and space/ place towards imagining liberation along those very same lines (Butler, 2018).

Author

• Jamelia Nicole Harris, University of California - Los Angeles