Weight of the Crown: Anti-Essentialist Futures for Black Girls’ Identity Construction

Session Type: Invited Speaker Session

Abstract

Black girls’ resilience has inspired an iconography and aesthetic that informs politics, popular culture, and their (mis)representation across social institutions. Education psychology has yet to meaningfully interrogate what this means for Black girls’ racial and gendered identity construction, despite interdisciplinary precedents that warrant such examination. This
interactive session features the work of Black poets, artists, and scholars inspired by research
on Black girlhoods, anti-essentialism and positive racial stereotypes. Building from Carter
Andrews' et al. (2019) conversation about the impossibility of Black girls being perfect and
white, this session engages broad conceptual questions including: What precedents in the field of education psychology help to explain Black girls’ experiences with popular messages about their
resilience and magic? and, How might prioritizing Black girls as subjects of education psychology
research further what is known about identity construction, motivation, and stereotypes? Papers and artifacts simultaneously celebrate the personal empowerment that Black girls might draw from African queen, superwoman and Black Girl Magic mythologies, and the session explicitly advances research conversations in education psychology about stereotype threat and
imposter syndrome, specifically in the lives of Black girls.

Weight of the Crown engages the theme of “Dismantling Racial Injustice Across P-20 Systems”
through the rearticulation of demands for the childhood and personhood of Black girls.
Further, given that the 2024 AERA theme focuses on dismantling racial injustices and
constructing educational possibilities, we imagine what schools would be like if Black girls
had the freedom to be themselves instead of facing the pressure to be excellent in the name of
evading stereotypes. As a presidential session, this session models theoretical and radical
concern for Black girls’ futures, both collectively as a social and cultural intersection, and individually with concern to personal identity construction.

Sub Unit

• Spotlight on Philadelphia and the Region

Chair

• Ashley N. Woodson, Black epiSTEMologies

Papers

• I’m Not Your Superwoman: Ethnographies of Softness, Silence, and Healing for Black Girls - Ashley N. Woodson, Black epiSTEMologies; Kristen Duncan, Clemson University; Alexis E. Hunter, University of Colorado - Boulder; Brittany Smotherson, University of Missouri

• More Than Magic: The Art of A. Filomena - Alyssa Liles, Temple University

Discussants

• Theodorea Regina Berry, Bloomfield College of Montclair State University

• Venus E. Evans-Winters, The Ohio State University

• Dorinda Carter Andrews, Michigan State University