Anti-Blackness and Spirit Murdering: Perspectives of Kenyan Immigrant Students Labeled With Dis/abilities and their Families

• In Event: Toward Inclusive and Equitable Education: Disrupting Deficit-Based Positioning of Families and Students Labeled With Dis/abilities

Abstract

Objectives

Anti-Blackness ideologies continue to justify oppression and discrimination of Black bodies (Dumas, 2016). Ongoing historical pathologies frame Black youth as problems in schools (Annamma, 2017; Howard, 2013). Black students continue experiencing schools as dehumanizing spaces imbued with physical and psychological attacks on their body-minds, including racial violence such as school pushout which intensify anti-Blackness and cause harm (Howard, 2013; Morris, 2016; Williams, 1987). Spiritual harm, together with systemic race-centered school violence, enacted upon Black children leads to spirit murdering. Love (2016) defines spirit murdering as denial of inclusion, protection, safety, nurturance, and acceptance, that may lead to cumulative symptoms of racial battle fatigue (Smith et al., 2007). I examine how these issues impact Kenyan immigrant students labelled with dis/abilities and their families.

Theoretical Framing

I draw from Williams (1987) and Love’s (2016) conceptualizations of spirit murdering; DisCrit, an intersectional theory that examines how racism and ableism work in tandem (Annamma et al., 2013); a raciolinguistic perspective (Rosa & Flores, 2017); and Dillard’s (2016), spirituality as foundational in healing the spirit through reclaiming long forgotten histories. These perspectives and theory enable me to examine myriad ways Black Kenyan immigrants students labelled with dis/abilities encountered spirit-murdering, and how together with their families resisted and navigated the prevalent racial and ableist violence of the U.S. educational system. These strategies together protected their souls and spirits from harm through spiritual healing and restoration.

Methods and Data Sources

I used data from a year-long critical phenomenological study in a large Midwestern city of the U.S. The participants included eleven Kenyan immigrant students labelled with dis/abilities and seven parents/guardians. Methods included critical phenomenological interviews, focus groups, and participant generated educational journey maps and eco-maps. I engaged in iterative data collection and analysis that consisted of multiple rounds of coding and meaning making within and across participants (Bhattacharya, 2017).

Results

Black Kenyan immigrant students labelled with dis/abilities and their families discussed how purposeful they were in engaging ways that would reduce harm in their lives. By employing appropriation, engaging rejection, and building community networks of support, they resisted the dehumanization of the U.S. schooling system that imagined them as less than because they were Kenyan and disabled. Moreover, participants in this study shared liberatory spaces that allowed them to thrive as spaces of spiritual restoration and healing.

Scholarly Significance

The significance of this study lies in its contribution in centering Kenyan immigrant students labelled with dis/abilities and their families as knowledge generators. This is one way of understanding how structural violence, linked to power can influence the lived realities of historically marginalized populations, and how to avoid replicating and reproducing the same systemic ideologies of domination and subordination. Though it is important that many participants in this study found their voices, this additional labor they had to do at school to remedy harm is tenable – a cost no child should pay to get an education.

Author

• Sylvia Nabwire Nyegenye, The University of Kansas