Lessons From a Debutante: Using Oral History to Repair Deficit Perspectives of Jim Crow Blackness

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 8:00 am Four Seasons Ballroom 1
  In Roundtable Session: Preserving Narratives: The Intersection of Oral History and AI Innovations (Table 12)

Abstract

This presentation defies textbook depictions of tragedy as the sole African American experience, affirming the Black community’s astonishing, enduring capacity for joy. Through an oral history exercise with my mother, a former 1960’s Black debutante, I explore her ways of knowing and being as a daughter of Jim Crow’s violent and vicious reign, an unexpected onto-epistemology of hope and pride. We discuss the community of her adolescence, one so fiercely intent on resisting messages of inferiority, it established elaborate programs of distinction, such as that of the cotillion. We work together to carefully recover the poignant memories of her past that have indelibly shaped who she is and, ultimately, who I am.

Author

• Talia Dow, University of Georgia