A Sociohistorical Lens on Black Adolescents' Identity Development: African American Girls in East Texas

• In Event: Race and Place: Youth Political and Racial Identity in Context

Abstract

Recent work has highlighted the dual yet related problems of anti-blackness and coloniality as part and parcel to the history of capitalist societies and their importance for understanding the lived experiences of African diaspora people (Gordon, 1995; Maldonado-Torres, 2017). To date, some research has addressed anti-blackness in the lives of African-American adolescents, with limited work highlighting the role of place (e.g. Dumas, 2014). From a sociohistorical perspective, identity development should be understood at the intersection of the local contexts reflected in place-based research and the primarily structural contributors discussed in studies of coloniality and anti-blackness. As such, the present study examined African-American girls’ narratives in East Texas to highlight region-specific lived experiences with and meaning-making about an anti-black world and present-day manifestations of coloniality. In light of the limited work tapping into the sociohistorical context of Black youths’ development, the present study addressed the following questions: 1) What local resources are implicated in African-American adolescent girls’ identity construction in East Texas? and 2) How do African-American girls understand local resources’ role in their identity construction?
A total of 6 African-American girls were participants in the present interview-based study. Participants were from an after-school program class for girls enrolled at an ethnically-diverse selective public urban middle school in East Texas in 2016-2017. The class was discussion-based and the discussions were facilitated by the author once weekly for a semester, each session lasting one hour. Topics discussed were developed with participants’ and site staff’s input. The final topics discussed included mental health, LGBTQ rights, Black Lives Matter activism, and cultural responsiveness in local schools. The researcher facilitated the discussions, encouraged generation of solutions, and encouraged exploration of points for social action. The author was on-site and interacted with the participants beyond the scope of the weekly discussions, as well, for a total of 1.5 additional hours before and after the discussion sessions. From the 10 total girls in the class, 6 African-American girls were interviewed; those interviewees were the participants for this study. Using a semi-structured interview protocol, participants were interviewed one-on-one by the author, but were given the option to bring a friend from the discussion class to sit in during the interview. All interviews were conducted in room separate from teachers and other official staff to provide confidentiality for the girls being interviewed and the interviews were paused and resumed in any case of an interruption by formal site staff/teachers, as the presence of an authority figure could interfere with girls’ sense of confidentiality. Verbatim interview transcripts were produced and qualitatively coded in a thematic analysis addressing the research question. African-American adolescent girls intimated the ways that middle school was a space of racialized surveillance criminalization of Blackness. Contradictions in local enactments of anti-blackness and class conflict informed girls’ goals for high school and decision-making about college. The range of meanings constructed by these African-American girls will be further discussed.

Author

• Karlyn R. Adams-Wiggins, Portland State University