Revisiting My Own Black Queen RYTES (Resilient Youth Transforming Educational Systems) of Passage to Name the Spirit of My Work

• In Event: (Re)Centering Our Blackness and Ourselves: Black Women's Research as Responsibility to Our Spirits

Abstract

Objectives
Most of the research examining anti-blackness and the impact on Black girls in school focus, primarily, on disproportionate discipline rates and the school-to-prison pipeline. My research findings shed light on the oppressive experiences of Back girls within the Education Industrial Complex (EIC)—i.e. high levels of emotional, psychological, and physical trauma as a result of discriminatory practices stemming from anti-blackness enacted through adultification, hyper-regulation, microaggressions, and zero-tolerance school discipline rhetoric. Drawing connections to and reflecting on these findings, I illuminate the power of Black women’s research and call attention to how the ability to research and understand the experiences of Black girls on a spiritual level, as well as create healing spaces for Black girls, was rooted in my own lived experiences as a Black girl turned Black woman.

Theoretical Framework
Black Feminist Theory (Crenshaw, 1989; Hill Collins, 2016) was used to examine how the intersecting identities of Black girls led to systemic oppression and trauma in the Educational Industrial Complex (EIC). Fugitive Pedagogy (Givens, 2021), which embraces Blackness as an asset, and was used as a tool to enter, move within, and exit collective spaces throughout this study. Though I positioned my research within two theoretical frameworks: Black Feminist Theory (Crenshaw, 1989; Hill Collins, 2016) and Fugitive Pedagogy (Givens, 2021), undergirding this positioning was/is an Endarkened Feminist Epistemological (Dillard, 2000) knowing (and being) that frames my research, facilitating, and learning.

Methods
Employing Yoon’s meta-autoethnography, I revisit and reflect on my study, in which the voices and humanity of Black girls via counternarratives and testimonials were centered. A combination of both exposition and action, my research was designed to identify and disrupt the root causes of racialized trauma experienced by Black girls within the education industrial complex; specifically, root causes grounded in white supremacy culture and anti-blackness. The overarching qualitative methodology used for my study was portraiture (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997), as a method of critical inquiry and documentation. This method was used to capture what transpired within participant “circles,” which brought together high-school aged Black girls to engage in a process of self-portraiture; a methodology that intersects portraiture, autoethnography, and critical self-love theory.

Findings and Significance
Through the manifestation of self-portraits and self-love letters, participants wrote counternarratives and cultivated radical self-love as acts of social justice, resistance, and healing both individually and collectively. Though at the time I centered the participants’ letters of love, affirmation, and appreciation to themselves as a form of praxis, unexplored were the ways this research also became my own healing methodology of the spirit (Dillard and Bell, 2011). For Black women in particular, race and gender are not mutually exclusive identities, but rather compounding and influencing all aspects of their lived experiences (Hill-Collins & Bilge, 2020) including education. Reflecting on my study, in addition to my own experiences navigating similar oppressive experiences as a former Black girl now Black woman, contributes to the literature of understanding and centering the ontoepistemologies of Black women researchers, educators, and leaders.

Author

• Rachel Vatannia, San Leandro Unified School District