Lemonade and #Melaninmagic: Sustaining Young Women of Color's Acts of Survivance and Dreams Toward Freedom

• In Event: Pray You Catch Me: Dreaming Possibilities for Freedom Through Critical Feminist Epistemologies, Methodologies, and Pedagogies

Abstract

In What is Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy? Paris and Alim (2017) invoke Morrison and ask, “What kinds of transformative experiences can we offer our students, such that a ‘whole world’ of learning opens up for them, one that, like Morrison, they would never want to give up (versus one that continually gives up on them)?” (p.3). Taking up this question, I embarked on an applied ethnographic research project where I introduced an after-school program (“Critical Feminisms Club” / CFC) designed to honor, envision, and extend critical feminisms as culturally sustaining pedagogy (i.e. Black feminism, intersectional feminism, Xicanx feminism, hip hop feminism, etc.). In this paper I will explore the breakthroughs, difficulties, and possibilities that emerged as I sought to create a democratic and community-based “freestyle” pedagogy that could adapt, complicate, and sustain the organic feminist practices of the young women in the program (Brown, 1999). What does it mean to enact critical feminisms as culturally sustaining pedagogy? And further, what does it look like to do so as a racially East Asian and working-class man who identifies as a Black and intersectional feminist scholar?

The data for this paper comes from over 500 hours of applied ethnographic research at a public charter high school in the California Bay Area. Research included semi-structured interviews, participant observation in the classroom of a performing arts teacher, and participatory action research. I began three different after-school programs based in hip hop, boxing, and critical feminisms. I made use of discourse analysis from linguistic anthropology to holistically code for salient patterns in my data (Alim, 2005; Hill, 2009). I consulted with the youth in my study to help triangulate and cooperatively think through recurring themes.

Throughout the process of coordinating the CFC, I was guided by the young women in the program, their mothers and sisters, and feminist mentors from across the spheres of my life in learning the epistemologies of Black, Latinx, and Polynesian womanhood. These epistemologies became the foundation for a critical feminist pedagogy. A critical feminist pedagogy meant that I was charged with taking up the knowledges, care, and support that could accommodate each of the young women’s intellectual desires, hopes, and needs, and nourish their survivance in the face of daily transgressions on the value of their personhoods (Vizenor, 2008). As a result, I sculpted the CFC into the embodiment of this pedagogy, as the Black, Latinx, and Polynesian young women came to develop the space as a temporal and symbolic maroon. They encountered the institutionalization of rape culture in their school’s dress code; took up texts as Beyonce’s Lemonade and Frida’s evolving repertoire of paintings to build paths toward healing; theorized and built collective community; and sought to (re)imagine pathways toward freedom that contested racial futures based in Whiteness and toxic heteropatriarchy.

This paper shows the importance of considering the voices of youth when thinking about how to pedagogically decolonize our imaginations. I call attention to the invaluable contribution that young women of color must play in theorizing freedom-making.

Author

• Casey Philip Wong, Stanford University