When the Sistas Ain't Alright: Resurrecting #BlackGirlJoy in the Marathon District of South Los Angeles

• In Event: Keys to the City: Nipsey Hussle, Marathon Education, and the Celebration of South Central

Abstract

Extensive literature promotes culturally affirming pedagogies, which teaches to and through the strengths of students from non-dominant backgrounds (Gay, 2000). However, these methods are scarcely employed in U.S. schools, and are especially difficult to sustain in institutions that are low-functioning due to high teacher and administrative turnover, scripted curriculum, limited academic resources, and heightened student disengagement. Previous scholarship reifies the evaded notion that public schools are failing young Black women, specifically. Academic literature examining declining high school graduation rates, urban Black girl resiliency, and disparate life outcomes among these learners substantiate this claim. African American female students are typically (a) excluded from advanced placement (AP) and college preparatory courses, (b) less likely to graduate from high school on time, (c) overrepresented in community colleges, and (d) register with and matriculate from four-year institutions at lower rates than other racialized women (Archer-Banks & Behar-Horenstein, 2010; Evans-Winters, 2011; The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund & The National Women’s Law Center, 2014). Alarmingly, the lack of parity that persists between the overall educational attainment of African American women and girls and their female counterparts is reflected in Black women’s subjugated labor positions and resulting racial and spatial isolation in urban ghettos.
The bleak educational and socio-political landscape depicted above poignantly underscores the need for schooling interventions that challenge rather than perpetuate the liminal space in which society positions Black girls.

Accordingly, this paper draws from data from an extensive study of a girls’ empowerment program at a public high school —to elucidate the concept of #BlackGirlJoy. Cooper (2018) contends that for Black women, joy “arises from an internal clarity about our purpose” (p. 274). Contrary to happiness, which is predicated on external circumstances, #BlackGirlJoy is tied to Black women and girls’ conscious unfolding— and particularly, the journey to self-define and evolve in the face of abundant systemic injustices. Day after day, African American girls enter schools with a strong sense of cultural pride and a distinctive standpoint gifted by maternal elders in their families and communities (e.g., grandmothers, mothers, aunts, older sisters, play cousins, and community othermothers; Collins, 2000). However, when these youth cross the threshold into P–12 classrooms, this specialized knowledge is suppressed by practitioners’ malignant disregard for the worldviews and social literacies that African American women have historically relied on to survive in oppressive locations.

Offering #BlackGirlJoy as a theoretical anchor and pedagogical imperative, this paper extols twenty-first century schools to equip Black female students with the tools to locate, analyze, heal from, and ultimately thrive through the suffering they experience inside and outside of academic contexts. To alleviate African American girls’ persistent disenfranchisement and disparate school outcomes, it is critical that stakeholders designate spaces within educational institutions to resurrect the joy that is necessary to combat social inequities and restore these learners’ well-being. The analysis concludes with implications for teacher education research and Black feminist pedagogical visioning.

Author

• Monique Lane, Saint Mary's College of California