"We Were Never Allowed to Be Children": Understanding Black Girlhood in Predominately White Schools

• In Event: Theorizing From the Intersections: Understanding Education Policies and Practices Through Critical Feminist Theories

Abstract

This paper explores various ways Black middle school girls are not granted access to childhood and what we understand to be the category ‘girl’. Recent scholarship has begun to explore the educational experiences of Black girls, much of which suggest they have negative, harmful, and violent experiences in schools today (Smith, 2016; Wun, 2015; 2016). Much of this is related to high rates of school discipline and pushout, experiences with racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, etc., in addition to being overlooked and ignored in schools (Hines-Datiri and Carter Andrews, 2017; Morris, 2016). Therefore, this paper examines interviews with school district leaders, school staff, administration, and teachers to gain insight on how Black girls are being perceived that ultimately results in these negative experiences. Scholars suggest many of these issues are inherently tied to Black girls not being seen as girls or as children and therefore they are then forced to navigate both society and schools in a mode of survival (Epstein, Blake, and Gonzalez 2017; Jones, 2010; Sharpe, 2016). Additionally, educational policies and practices fail Black girls with their expectations to shift, change, and mold them into stereotypical docile, silent, non-ebonics speaking, tamed- haired, culture-less individuals. School officials therefore discipline, punish, and criminalize Black girls for being themselves as well as their resistance/tactics to survive these forms of school violence, which sends harmful and damaging messages about what it means to be a Black girl or to represent Black girlhood (Smith, 2016).
Additionally, drawing on interviews and weekly ethnographic fieldnotes with middle school Black girls, this paper explores the ways Black girls internalize the spoken and unspoken messages about who they are and as a result struggle to define what it means to be a Black girl in an identity-centered Black girl space, called Black Girl Magic. Researchers have explored the ways in which mass media and images impact Black girls’ images of themselves, but this paper aims to take this a step further to explore how educational leaders’ understandings, responses and interactions with Black girls cause them to internalize their identities as being a ‘problem,’ and something they should not be proud of (Jacobs, 2016; Price-Dennis, et al, 2017). Black girlhood scholars, including myself, advocate for Black girls to have spaces created just for them to explore and reimagine their (intersectional) Black girlhoods (Brown, 2009; Cox, 2015; Jacobs, 2016). However, using Black feminism, Black girlhood studies, and scholarship on antiblackness in education, this paper will explore and question what we may ask of Black girls when we push them define this space of antagonism and non/existence as a Black non/girl and non/child (Sharpe, 2016).
This paper will push scholars to reexamine their use of an intersectional lens to understand Black girlhoods via identity categories that are not truly available to them, and in ways that will not grant them access to humanity, childhood, girlhood, or ‘student’ in American schools and society.

Author

• Ashley L Smith-Purviance, The Ohio State University