The Struggle for Black Girl Voice: A Story of Three Generations

• In Event: Strong Black Girls: Reclaiming Schools in Their Own Image

Abstract

Objectives/Purposes
This paper details three generational narratives of Black women’s K-20 schooling experiences spanning both temporal and geographical locations. This work not only provides us with insight about Black women’s schooling experiences across generations, but also a framework for how to engage in healing conversations about generational gendered and racial trauma.

Perspective(s) or Theoretical Framework
I employ both Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Black Girl Cartography to consider how temporal
context has impacted racialized schooling experiences over time. I take up the CRT tenet of counter-storytelling (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002) to detail the educational experiences of three generations of women in my family. Black Girl Cartography (Butler, 2008), focuses on “how and where Black girls are physically and socio-politically mapped in education” (p. 30). Expanding Butler’s notion and in accordance with CRT’s insistence that we consider historical context in our analyses, this paper considers not only geographical, but also temporal context to account for the ways oppression both shifts and remains the same over space and time.

Methods, Techniques, or Modes of Inquiry
I take up storytelling as a critical race methodology (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002) and a life history approach (Dhunpath, 2000) in order to detail, analyze, and challenge stories of generational racial violence. However, heeding to Ladson-Billings’s (2005) warning to avoid an uncritical use of storytelling, I return to the aforementioned theories to analyze the racialized and gendered experiences of the three women in my family in schools.

Data sources, Evidence, Objects, or Materials
Data sources for this paper include the oral histories of my mother (a Black woman Baby Boomer) and grandmother (a Black woman from the Silent Generation), as well as my own personal reflections on my schooling experiences. The oral histories were collected through several informal phone interviews. The interviews were transcribed and coded. Coding revealed several major themes across all three stories.

Results and/or Substantiated Conclusions
Analysis of the three stories revealed that racism and sexism shaped my grandmother’s choices in raising my mother, and in turn, my mother’s choices in raising me. Specifically, because my grandmother’s and mother’s voices had been silenced, I was raised to learn that I need to silence myself, lest I threaten white folks’ comfort around and views about me.

Scholarly Significance
For Black girls and women, theory by us that centers and seeks to uplift our voices and stories has historically been a liberatory place of healing (hooks, 1991). In education in particular, we have used counter-stories to talk back (Decuir & Dixson, 2004; hooks, 1989) to the various false narratives written and told about us and our experiences. Thus, this paper not only works to speak back against misrepresentations of Black girls’ experiences in school, but also to highlight and provide nuance to the authentic narratives that do exist.

Author

• Autumn Griffin, University of Pennsylvania