Mapping the Geographies of Black Girl Fugitivity and Refusal in Fugitive Black Girl Spaces

• In Event: Thinking Spatially About Black Schoolgirls' Geographies

Abstract

Objectives
Because educational institutions remain foundational, geographic sites of anti-Black suffering for Black girls, we must continue to explore how Black fugitive educational spaces and Black girl spaces aid in Black girls’ survival (ross, 2020; Price-Dennis et al., 2017). Merging these articulations, I describe fugitive Black girl spaces as physical and theoretical sites where Black girls escape and seek refuge from violent schools. This paper describes how middle school Black girls use Black Girl Magic (BGM), a fugitive Black girl space, to shape their acts of refusal to anti-Black-girl violence at two predominantly white, suburban schools.

Theoretical Framework
I use anti-Black-girl violence, which draws on theories of Black feminism and afro-pessimism, in addition to literatures on anti-Blackness in education and Black girlhood studies to understand the specificities of Black girls’ experiences (Baldridge, 2020; Dumas, 2014;2016; Hines & Young, 2020; Lindsey, 2018; ross, 2019;2020; Shange, 2019; Smith-Purviance, 2021; Wun, 2015).

Methods and Data
This study draws from critical ethnographic data including interviews with twenty-eight Black girls age 10-14, and five BGM facilitators; over 300 hours of participant observations in BGM and day-to-day school interactions with Black girls, and document analysis of student produced work in BGM and disciplinary and academic records.

Results
Because BGM exists within a traditional school building, Black girls often faced violence from peers and school actors as soon as they exited the space. As a result, they often navigated moments of “fugitivity” and respite in BGM, while “not yet being free” in the school building. In this paper, I illustrate the comparative ways Black girls come together to experience joy, play, love, and “freedom” during and after school in BGM, and in the exact same locations (i.e. the gym, classrooms, hallways, etc.) that they simultaneously experienced anti-Black girl violence from non-Black peers and school actors during the school day. This paper not only centers the ways Black girls use BGM to escape school violence, but also how they collectively begin to shape marronage and fugitivity by asserting what their presence or absence means for their well-being (Butler, 2018). In addition to mapping their varying experiences of violence and fugitivity at these different sites (i.e. being surveilled in the cafeteria by teachers during lunch, yet after school hanging a Black girlhood mural in the cafeteria during BGM), I also illustrate the specific ways they begin to resist school violence outside of the BGM space as an archetype for their survival.

Scholarly significance
There is greater emphasis placed on the ways teenage Black girls or adult Black women engage in resistance or refusal (Shange, 2019; Cook Bell, 2019), which can overshadow how Black girls, as young as middle school, also engage in “waywardness and the refusal to be governed,” in the afterlife of slavery (Hartman, p. xv). Therefore, this paper suggests fugitive Black girl spaces situate Black girl fugitivity as an act of geographic refusal to sites of suffering and offers opportunities to imagine and redefine [educational] liberation with and alongside Black girls.

(References removed due to word count.)

Author

• Ashley L Smith-Purviance, The Ohio State University