Black Girls Can Be Anything: Misalignment Between Black Girls' Perceptions and Manifestations of Respect

• In Event: Black Girls Becoming: A Consequential Space for Interrogating Truth About Black Girlhood

Abstract

We use Black girlhood scholarship authored by scholars, artists, and activists for a lens in interpreting findings from a questionnaire that assessed Black Girls Becoming participants’ relationship and engagement with themselves, others, and the world. There were 19 girls that participated in BGB and all 19 gave their assent after parents provided permission. Thirty-seven items were constructed around perceptions of Black girls in STEAM broadly and identities in the classroom. These items were put in REDCAP, a secure web platform for building/managing online databases, and we used a 5-point Likert agreement scale. One item that had unanimous strong agreement (100%) was the statement, "A Black girl can be anything she puts her mind to." Another statement, “Being a Black girl is a good thing” also had strong agreement (94.7%). These responses are encouraging, as it suggests that all 19 Black girl participants firmly believed that they are limitless in their abilities.
However, despite the strong agreement with Black girls having high capabilities and seeing Black girlhood as positive, these sentiments did not translate to how Black girls are viewed in classroom contexts. When asked whether Black girls are taken seriously and respected in the classroom, participants were more ambivalent, with nearly half of participants reporting "neutral" responses on the Likert scales. When asked about their comfortability participating in class, ambivalence was again present. When asked whether they personally felt comfortable raising their hand in class or speaking/participating in class, 47% and 32%, respectively, were neutral in response to these statements. These findings suggest that middle school girls in the BGB program understand that Black girlhood is not celebrated in classroom and schooling spaces, and that their voices and what they bring to the learning process are not always welcomed. These findings could be explained by prior studies that have examined Black girls’ schooling experiences, including Carter Andrews et al. (2019) robust study whereby they listened to 70 high school Black girls describe and make meaning of their schooling experiences as racialized and/or gendered. Their findings showed that Black girls faced toxic racialized and gendered experiences with adults and peers in their schools. For example, Black girls pointed out that teachers and other educators considered them unmotivated and therefore unworthy of high-quality learning experiences. The girls described instances where teachers appeared to be uninterested in providing rigorous or engaging curriculum and instruction or dismissing their questions and concerns. This might explain why many girls in the BGB program were not confident in their opinions about feeling respected and safe participating in class.
BGB was an informal learning space where these negative experiences were dismantled. It aimed to meet the academic, social, and identity needs of middle school Black girls in ways that honored their full humanities and images of self. Black girls had opportunities to name, unpack and address aspects of oppression Black girls face within the school context. More educational policy works is needed to design and fund such spaces that offer liberation and healing for many Black girls.

Author

• Christy L. Erving, University of Texas at Austin
  Presenting Author