Tag Archives: Black girls

One Step Back, Two Steps Forward: Black Girls’ Memory and (Re)Vision as Agency

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Image of the Sankofa bird whose name in Twi translates to “Go back and get it” in English.

In my quest to deepen my understanding of the significance of Black girls’ memory, I am lingering over the notion of what it is to remember and its possibilities for creation and agency. I presently see it as a process of spiritual reconstitution of the mind, body, soul of self and community in the present for future and forward movement based on elements of the past. In her article, “Turning the Ships Around: A Case Study of (Re)Membering as Transnational Endarkened Feminist Inquiry and Praxis for Black Teachers,” Cynthia Dillard argued that (re)membering is an endarkened feminist praxis (Dillard 2016) and is important for Black teachers, researchers, and students to employ. For Dillard, an endarkened feminist epistemology (EFE) articulates an understanding of reality or truth grounded in the historical roots of global Black feminist thought, which is markedly different from that of mainstream and dominant cultural narratives and standpoints (Dillard 2016). The five parts to (re)membering, include: (re)searching, (re)visioning, (re)cognizing, (re)presenting, and (re)claiming (Dillard 2016:411). In her case study of university students traveling abroad from the United States to Ghana, Dillard sought to answer the following questions: 1) what happens when undergraduate and graduate students from the United States have encounters, dialogues, and interactions with African heritage knowledge, culture, and peoples in West Africa (Ghana)? 2) What does Ghana have to teach about African American education and personhood? (Dillard 2016:410-411). One of Dillard’s most significant conclusions is that for Black women, (re)membering can be a means of refuting white supremacist and patriarchal lies taught by dominant culture and education.

I feel hopeful about the potential efficacy of (re)membering for Black women and its potential uses. (Re)membering as a choice and internal process of connecting to and recreating Africa does not depend on external legislation, department meetings, town halls, or so-called allies. This is something that many Black women do intuitively, but there is power in naming and having a language to articulate the process of coming back to oneself and together with others of African descent. Jacqueline’s rebirth and internal liberation is tangible through Dillard’s storytelling.  

Black Girls Are Magic Image taken from Wikimedia Commons website.

(Re)membering and memory are epistemological and ontological. Through Dillard’s case study, I could see and feel the young American Black woman Jacqueline, who Dillard focused on, becoming or (re)coming the subjectivities of mother, auntie, and sister. Jacqueline was able to (re)vision/(re)member herself based on the how the Ghanaian people saw and named her along with her ability to accept, embrace, and take on those identities. According to Dillard, Jacqueline took up those identities during the study abroad experience and carried them forward afterward. Although Dillard and her students were able to physically travel overseas to the continent of Africa in order to (re)search and (re)member their cultural roots as members of the African diaspora, this endarkened feminist praxis does not require physical transit. Black women in the U.S. perform their identities in ways that mark and signal a (re)membering of Africa and other Black diasporic social locations that serve as homeplaces for them. These practices take place both offline and online. On social media spaces, Black women and girls (re)member and reconstitute community and kinship from across different geographic locations. Some examples of this include hashtags like #CarefreeBlackGirl, #BlackGirlMagic, and #DaughtersOf.

GirlTrek’s social media call to participation for Black History Bootcamp

The #DaughtersOf hashtag, started and circulated by co-founders of the international Black women’s organization GirlTrek, is perhaps the most recent and definitely one of the most salient movements and hashtags that encourage Black women and girls to (re)member who they are and who they are descended from. T. Morgan Dixon and Vanessa Garrison used the hashtag to launch the Daughters Of campaign which they describe on their website as: “a multi-media campaign [that] will examine the immediate and critical importance of self-care and healing for Black women through the lens of their matrilineal traditions.”[1] This examination of Black women through their maternal ancestry, or as Alice Walker might say, their mother’s gardens, is a contemporary example of (re)membering as endarkened feminist inquiry and praxis that is desperately needed in these times in which our general sense of time and truth seem to be in constant flux.

Me on my first day walking as a part of GirlTrek’s Black History Bootcamp.

While I had been a participant in GirlTrek campaigns in the past, it was GirlTrek’s 21-day walking meditation, Black History Bootcamp, inspired by the Daughters Of campaign that allowed me to more fully (re)member the strength, courage, and wisdom (India Arie been knowing) that I come from and that I can call on to come through in these difficult times of anti-black antagonism and violence and the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the social, political, economic,  and educational implications it will have for Black people in the weeks, months, and years to come. Journalist and scholar Sherri Williams began to recount the incalculable and rising toll of these intersecting crises for Black America in The Crisis last week. When Black women’s ways of being and knowing are consciously connected to those who we are the daughters of, we are able to (re)vision the futures we want and deserve. Perhaps the greatest contribution of transnational endarkened feminist inquiry is (re)membering that we deserve when everything outside of us tries to convince us that we do not. It is time to (re)create from this space. As our futuristic foremother Octavia Butler once wrote: “So Be It! See To It!”

Dillard, Cynthia B. “Turning the Ships Around: A Case Study of (Re)Membering as Transnational Endarkened Feminist Inquiry and Praxis for Black Teachers.” Educational Studies 52.5 (2016): 406-23. Print.

[1] https://www.daughtersof.com/

Sometimes It’s Where You’re from *and* Where You’re At: Bettina Love’s Hip Hop’s Li’l Sistas Speak

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Love, Bettina. Hip Hop’s Li’l Sistas Speak: Negotiating Hip Hop Identities and Politics in the New South. Ed. Shirley R. Steinberg. 399 Vol. New York: Peter Lang, 2012. Print. Studies in the Postmodern Theory of Education.

hip-hop-s-li-l-sistas-speakBettina Love’s Hip Hop Li’l Sistas Speak shows that Black girls’ bodies are a major landscape of Southern Hip-hop music. In this ethnographic project born out of Love’s dissertation, she explores the lives of six teen-aged Black girls in Atlanta, Georgia (ATL), also known as the Motown of the South, and their relationship to Hip-hop music and culture. One of the most intriguing aspects of Love’s project is her focus on methodology and her positionality as a Black girl researcher from the North, from an earlier Hip-hop generation, who is also lesbian.

Black girls, positionality, agency, and identity

In chapter two: Hip Hop, Context, and Black Girlhood, Love demonstrated how age, geographic location, and sexuality necessarily play important roles in the context of her research as well as her and her research participants’ lives. Continue reading →

Power Carter – “She Would’ve Still Made That Face Expression”: The Use of Multiple Literacies by Two African American Young Women

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Power Carter, Stephanie. “”She Would’ve Still made that Face Expression”: The use of Multiple Literacies by Two African American Women.” Theory into Practice 45.4 (2006): 352-8. Print.

In this article Stephanie Power Carter advocates for a multiple literacies approach in education. She argues that teachers who use a more traditional (autonomous) literacy approach are more likely to view underrepresented students as “powerless, failing, struggling, and/ or having low literacy abilities,” whereas teachers using multiple literacy approach were more likely to interrogate power relations, understand students of color’s use of multiple socio-cultural frame and create spaces of agency within the classroom. While Carter Power does not present any evidence to prove that the use of a multiple literacies approach could achieve these outcomes, she does present enough evidence to show the detrimental outcomes for Black girls in her study when an autonomous literacy approach was used.

Power Carter uses two examples of classroom interactions between two African American students in a High School British literature class. Through Power Carter’s examples we can see that Pam and Natonya use nonverbal communication such as “eye squinting” and eye contact in their British literature classroom to combat its hostile and oppressive environment, and to support one another. Power Carter argues that because the teacher is focused on autonomous literacy, reading and writing in particular ways that typically favor Eurocentric, male, upper-class ways of knowing, she is unaware of the multiple literacies that the girls use, misunderstands them as “passive”, uninterested in learning and succeeding, and at times disruptive. These Black girls are stripped of their power inthis scenario:

“A traditional view of literacy also fails to take into consideration that Pam and Natonya are not powerless, sitting and waiting passively. They are acting, interacting, and reacting to their environment in ways that protect them and affirm their cultural ways of knowing and meaning making.” (356)

Power Carter points out that these epistemological differences have serious consequences for underrepresented students, such as Pam and Natonya. The negative perceptions of Black girls’ literacies, such as speaking with increased volume and passion, results in othering and can foster inequitable treatment and low expectations for Black girls (353). These nondemocratic and colonial pedagogical practices leave students like Pam and Natonya more vulnerable than other students and more susceptible to failure:

“When educators do not take into consideration the multiple literacies that ultimately influence how students make meaning of the world around them and are part of their everyday lives and experiences, we run the risk of dismissing their academic potential and relegating them to a dismal future that labels them as struglling, low performing, and unmotivated… it is important that educators value alternative interpretations within the classroom context and include multiple perspectives and multiple voices in curriculum planning.” (357)

Power Carter’s study elucidates the ways in which the use of multiple literacies of students and a multiple literacies approach on the part of teachers is rhetorical.

Lorde – From “There is No Hierarchy of Oppressions”

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From Homophobia and Education (New York: Council on Interracial Books for
Children, 1983)

I simply do not believe that one aspect of myself can possibly profit from the oppression of any other part of my identity. I know that my people cannot possibly profit from the oppression of any other group which seeks the right to peaceful existence. Rather, we diminish ourselves by denying to others what we have shed blood to obtain for our children. And those children need to learn that they do not have to become like each other in order to work together for a future they will all share.

In this passage Audre Lorde spoke specifically to the social intersections in which she stood: Black, lesbian, feminist, socialist, poet, mother, and interracial lover. However, her message is so profound and timeless that it can be extended to apply to a multitude of social realities to account for differences in ethnicity, age, class, geography, ability, etc.

Lorde emphasized that oppression regardless of it’s particular discrimination stems from the same place. She said, “I have learned that sexism and heterosexism both arise from the same source as racism,” and therefore, argued that they were all equally detrimental and deserving of equal and simultaneous resistance. Oppression, Lorde implied, knows no boundaries; if oppression against one group is allowed to thrive, it will sooner or later spread to oppress others. Consequently, no one can afford to pick particular battles:

I cannot afford the luxury of fighting one form of oppression only. I cannot afford to believe that freedom from intolerance is the right of only one particular group. And I cannot afford to choose between the fronts upon which I must battle these forces of discrimination, .wherever they appear to destroy me. And when they appear to destroy me, it will not be long before they appear to destroy you.

This is particularly significant as it relates to Hip-hop feminism, Black girlhood, and recurring manifestations of the cult of respectability in this generation of women and girls in Hip-hop culture because I am Black, female/ a girl (Brown, 2009), and socialized in Hip-hop culture.

Brown – Black Girlhood Celebration: Toward A Hip-Hop Feminist Pedagogy

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Brown, Ruth Nicole. Black Girlhood Celebration :Toward a Hip-Hop Feminist Pedagogy. 5 Vol. New York: Peter Lang, 2009. Print.

In Black Girlhood Celebration: Toward a Hip-hop Feminist Pedagogy, Ruth Nicole Brown attempts to chart out a pedagogy capable of recognizing the nuances and challenges of race, gender, sexuality, class, and hip-hop culture and how they intersect in the lives of “Black girls.” For Brown, “Black girls” is not an essential category describing African American only, but is also inclusive of Jamaican immigrants, Native Americans, and whites who identify as allies. Brown uses her project Saving Our Lives Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT) that works with teenage girls that identify as Black in a Mid-western town as a case study to illustrate how this pedagogy manifests as a Black girlhood celebration. Including her own autoethnographic reflections, field notes, news clippings and participant reflections and samples of work while in the program, Brown paints a picture of how such a pedagogy could be enacted and adapted in other settings.

Brown has a joint appointment in Gender and Women’s Studies an Educational Policy. In this book, Brown’s voice is polyvocal; while this book is addressed primarily to other academics in her fields, it also reads as though it is a call to fellow Hip-hop feminists, Black girls and women to do the work of saving our lives. As a reader from a similar Hip-hop socialization and generation I laughed out loud and could relate when Brown described her experience dropping down low doing the “Cha-Cha Slide” and then having to take her time bringing it back up!

Brown’s work is informed by her previous experience as a researcher and “girl saver” in a “girls’ empowerment program” that operated on a colonial banking model that reinforced White middle-class patriarchal values of girlhood. Brown’s work challenges both “girl saving” and “girl empowerment” rhetoric which both exclude the culture and material realities of young Black girls, and operate on the ageist assumptions that girls in general are deficient and need fixing by adults. Instead of trying to “squeeze” Black girlhood into these limited models, Brown’s Black Girlhood Celebration and Hip-hop feminist pedagogy work to make Black Girls and their realities, needs, desires, and ways of being central in their own right.

Brown demonstrates how SOLHOT honors Black girlhood, it’s language, cultural productions (dance, poetry, music), and needs (to be accepted, have a place to express themselves and work out questions and complex feelings). Black girlhood is defined as:

the representations, memories, and lived experiences of being and becoming in a body marked as youthful, Black, and female. Black girlhood is not dependent, then, on age, physical maturity, or any essential category of identity (1).

SOLHOT, an “afterschool” program that meets twice a week for two hours each session over the course of one-and-a-half-years in the case study, also experiences challenges. Brown shares these challenges and how she works together with the SOLHOT girls (student participants) and homegirls (the “mentors”) in order to navigate perceived challenges and turn them into learning opportunities.

A part of crafting this “new” pedagogy, although Brown admits that similar work is being done by other Hip-hop feminist and community workers, is crafting a language for it. Since the Black girlhood experience is so unique and marginalized in Girls’ Studies, Hip-hop, and education/ youth programming, Brown carefully chooses her words and explains how they differ from their typical contexts. For example, she uses “homegirls” to describe “mentors” because mentors typically operate on the banking method of depositing information or values into mentees which Brown rejects.

Brown’s approach to pedagogy is similar to bell hooks’ ( ) approach in Teaching to Transgress in that Brown embraces the notions of passion and joy in the classroom, the necessity of self-actualization of the teacher/ leader/ homegirl, and the incorporation and recognition of the body and spirit in addition to the mind in the learning experience.

Brown’s pedagogy focuses on process and community building above an actual product or production as a result:

Saving Our Lives may appear on the surface as a nod toward that project of youth management, but it is not… when SOLHOT works, I do quite believe that lives are saved by collectively acting on our own behalf. How the “saving” happens is not in the logistics and activities, but in our coming together. In SOLHOT we acknowledge our common problems to each other. We feel it together. We walk through it together. While we walk, we talk about what’s real outside of this problem (64).

In true Hip-hop feminist form, Brown acknowledges the contradictions and gray areas involved with Black girls and women working together in such a dynamic and un-stable way. Like Friere, Brown does states and restates that she does not intend for Black Girlhood Celebration to be prescriptive and the model for Hip-hop feminist pedagogy, but an example and a possibility.

On a personal note, this book was an incredible read for me. It validated my frustrations as a Black woman working for a nonprofit organization as a program director for “at risk” youth and striving to provide nurturing programs for primarily Black and Brown boys and girls. I was constantly told that I did not need to spend as much time in the classrooms and programs with my students, but I DID. They needed me and I needed them. I needed to hear from them what it was that they needed. I needed to see when their eyes glazed over in boredom. I needed to check (and correct) “mentors” that were condescending to the youth. Ruth Brown also helped me to better understand my successes. I smile thinking of doing the Cha Cha Slide with my girls and them teaching me how to Cupid Shuffle. That was our “batty dance.” This further let’s me know – that we are on to something and change gon come!