I Am to Be Sexual Not Sexualized

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

Abstract

Objectives
Titled “I Am to Be Sexual Not Sexualized: A Call to End the Cumming-of-Age Miseducation of Black Girls in Schools'', this chapter serves as a space for the author to share a small tenet of her own emotional and intellectual journey of healing from sexual shame and to begin re-imagining with readers what it means to live as one’s authentic self. By expanding upon Queen Mother Audley Moore’s original call for Black women and girls to receive reparations for experiences of sexual violence during and after slavery, the author explores: (1) why we (educators, decision makers, and advocates) need to specifically discuss Black women and girls when discussing reparations for slavery, (2) reparations for the social and sexual deaths of Black women and girls during slavery through the national implementation of a comprehensive, age-sensitive, PreK-12 sexual health education curriculum rooted in an intersectional, queered, Black Feminist/Womanist framework and pedagogy, and (3) a potential set of resources that young Black women can utilize in their own process of (un)learning what is Black female sexuality.

Frameworks & Modes of Inquiry
The U.S. system of education is heavily complicit in perpetuating systemic physical, emotional, and sexual violence against Black women and girls, and this violence often pushes them out of classrooms/academic spaces and into spaces of punishment/surveillance. Therefore, crucial to the argument of this chapter are the framings of Black Feminist/Womanist Thought, intersectionality, and the “after-life” of slavery to explore body politics and the relationship between racial capitalism and sexual exploitation. As sites of “citizenship” development, U.S. schools consistently socialize students to take part in the maintenance of white-supremacist systems of captivity and violent misogynoir through institutionalized and “hidden” curricula. Today’s sexual violence against Black women and girls in school/academic environments across the African diaspora stems largely from centuries-old slave-legacies demonizing and exploiting Black female sexuality. Thus, at the heart of this chapter is a fusion of academic research and the author’s own lived experiences navigating sexuality as a Black girl and a young Black woman.

Conclusions & Significance of This Work
The argument presented in this chapter will hopefully encourage educators, parents, students and other education advocates to push for a world where cultivating equitable educational systems inherently includes increased access to sexual health education and resources for students and their families. Reflecting on the conditions brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic this past year, especially the uptick in domestic and sexual violence against women and girls, it is vital to implement a sexual health curriculum with our most vulnerable groups of students in mind. There exists a lack of information and resources streamlined and made easily available to help Black girls develop a healthy/shame free sexuality and sense of self, and an institutionalized sexual education curriculum in school environments could serve as a critical space to focus on boundary setting, self-preservation, and self-care.

Author

• Taylor Monique Tucker, Swarthmore College