An Analysis of Black Women's Place-Making in Colonized School Spaces

• In Event: Resisting Racist Sexism: Black Girl Literacies and Black Feminist Curriculum, Pedagogy, and Activism

Abstract

Progress towards the emancipation of Black women specifically and oppressed people broadly rests in an understanding of Black women’s sociohistorical and geopolitical positioning (Butler, 2018). In this paper, three Black women writers/researchers engage in critical autoethnography to discuss the impact of our geopolitical and sociohistorical positioning on our critical literacy development as Black girls who attended a predominantly white K-12 public school district in one of the most segregated suburbs in America. The colonial and racial history of this geographic region is pertinent to the narratives we share, as it reflects the authors’ experiences of “unbelonging” (Burman, 2007, p. 177) and liminality as colonized subjects in a white patriarchal school structure.

Butler argued that the physical and sociopolitical mapping of Black girls’ spatial existence is essential to understanding how they experience and respond to multiple forms of oppression. Thus, Black women’s struggle for belonging within white patriarchal, social, and geopolitical spaces represents a powerful act of fugitivity, “of resistance, escape, and survival” (Butler, 2018, p. 30-31). Through geography, including geographies of domination through racial and gendered hierarchies, Black women’s sense of place and spatial relations can provide an alternate lens to view our experiences as a geographic struggle (McKittrick, 2006, p. xviii). The intersections of Black women’s spatial positioning and experiences of misogynoir provide insight into how we navigate place-making and belonging within U.S. education.


In this study, the authors share their stories, name these shared forms of oppression, and find healing in our collective remembrance. For Black women, the process of remembering allows us to “return to that which was stolen, that which we have been forced or seduced into ignoring” (Toliver, 2021, xvi). According to Toliver (2021), Black women’s remembering through writing and storytelling is essential to reconnecting to our pasts and building our futures.


Thus, we share our stories and theorize our experiences of schooling as racialized and gendered “others” in a predominantly white, suburban, school in order to not only “know” but also to transform the world and those within it.

As Black women within a white colonial learning environment, the authors’ critical literacies developed within this liminal space, complicated by our enculturation into a white supremacist school community that actively invisiblized our histories and identities and required our silence and complicity as a mechanism for survival. Through analyzing our experiences of joy, dispossession, and marginalization, we identify structures for creating educational equity for students of color.


To eliminate the experience of displacement of Black students, the institution’s hierarchies of power and concepts of teaching must be deconstructed. Teachers must take on the responsibility of shaping the socio-historical foundations for students and aim to forge a sense of community while acknowledging how institutional oppression can hinder the educational growth of students of color. Educators whose pedagogy actively questions and seeks to abolish anti-Blackness within their environment can help produce a space of belonging that every student deserves.

Authors

• Kristen DeLatour, University of Massachusetts - Boston
  Presenting Author

• Morgan Jane Grant, Barnard College
  Presenting Author

• Lauren Leigh Kelly, Rutgers University
  Presenting Author