Schools, Black Mothers, Black Children, and the Tenets of Disillusionment

• In Event: Standing With Youth, Parent, and Community Educational Leaders: Case Studies in Subverting Systemic Oppression

Abstract

Contrary to the common rhetoric regarding Black people’s lack of value for education, the Black community has long-held hope in the possibilities for communal uplift via schooling. Yet, an excavation of the disjunction between faith and evidence, reveals cracks in the foundations of that hope. In this paper, the author discusses the findings of a year-long critical ethnographic study following the work of a grassroots organization led by Black natural and othermothers challenging the policies and practices contributing to Black student exclusion. Through the group’s use of organizing tools, they traverse successes, challenges, collaborations, and disappointments. The author asks whether these experiences support and contribute to their continued confidence in the potential of the education system. Or will it disrupt their conviction and convince them that the schools charged with educating their children will never become just and equitable spaces? In this examination, what role do school leaders play in impacting the mothers’ position towards possibility or disillusion?

Theoretical framework
This analysis utilizes a latticework of theories inspired by segments of BlackCrit (Dumas & Ross, 2016), Motherwork (Hill-Collins, 2016) and ideas of Black disillusionment as forwarded by Ray Block Jr. (2011).

Methods
The study is culled from a 13 month critical ethnography which employed participatory observation, counter narrative through in-depth interviews, document analyses, and artistic expression pieces.

Selected Results
The mothers volley multiple strategies in an effort to challenge the policies and practices contributing to student exclusion. Yet, the repetitive, intractable nature of education denial in combination with the policy setbacks in the face of majoritarian opposition to equity efforts, move the mothers towards more serious consideration of the value of evacuating from the U.S. educational project to begin crafting a “place of our own”.

Scientific or scholarly importance
This study adds to the growing research amplifying the voices of Black mothers confronting educational systems on behalf of their children (Davenport, 2019; Dow, 2019; Edstrom, 2018; Killen, 2019; McClain, 2019) and challenges designations of who should be included as educational leaders. This research has implications for teachers, school administrators and other education advocates committed to making educational institutions truly equitable spaces for Black children thus, realizing the necessity of an equalized collaborative arrangement, respective of the voices and experiential knowledge of Black parents as integral to that goal.

Author

• Dawn M. Demps, University of Arizona