A "Black Woman Oasis": A Healing Space for/by Black Women Navigating a Predominantly White University

• In Event: 34.045 - Healing Isn't a Metaphor: Centering Healing as Resistance Within Critical Racial Affinity Group Spaces

Abstract

In her canonical text, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, Katherine McKittrick (2006) argues that one’s geographic location “not only anchors our selfhood and feet to the ground, it seemingly calibrates and normalizes where, and therefore who, we are” (p. xi). Considering the intersections of race, space, and gender based institutional violence, Black women have always been relegated to schools as sites of injury and suffering (Dumas, 2014) which simultaneously serve as primary sites of self-knowing that threaten and refute their existence. My positionality as a Black PhD student, Fannie Lou Hamer Black Resource Center employee, and founder of a healing centered movement for Black women, situate my work at the nexus of Black feminist theory and praxis to illuminate tangible solutions to feelings of placelessness amongst Black women on campus. Paying particular attention to how Black women’s identities are at opposition to spatialized norms within their collegiate environment, I investigate how we reclaim our right to safe space within academic learning environments through a university-sponsored initiative for Black wellness. I examine how a critical racial affinity group (CRAG) approach provides possibilities for Black women to cultivate a self-anchoring praxis while navigating predominantly White university institutions.

This autoethnography (Chang, 2016) relies on participant observation (Atkinson & Hammersley, 1994) to describe the essence of the situated learning that unfolded within a university based CRAG over the course of one year. Relying on a Black feminist geographic lens (McKittrick, 2006), I analyze how the space fostered the development of curriculum and support that explicitly centered the exploration of Black women’s ways of knowing, loving, and caring for their body, mind, soul, ancestry, and spirituality.

My findings reveal how Black women’s access and participation within this CRAG afforded radical possibilities for spatial autonomy. I describe I, along with other participants mapped out a university’s space’s utility and transformed the student study area into a “Black Woman Oasis” through a collective process using various artistic mediums to illustrate the interwoven connection between Black women’s creative placemaking and the art of claiming space. I illuminate our experiences within this space and particularly how we rediscovered new modes of communal self-care inspired by radical Black feminist spatial imaginaries which made room for our stories, laughter, pain and healing, despite the institutional neglect and violence we experienced. Finally, I discuss implications this study has for supporting Black women within university campuses across the nation, particularly focusing on how university funds can and should be utilized for marginalized students to curate their own CRAG healing spaces.

Author

• Ree Botts, University of California - Berkeley