Abstract
Media culture is exploitative and damaging. It reinforces both racist and sexist stereotypes, which places Black young women’s unique racialized gender in a position to be overidentified in derogatory ways. The bodies of Black young women, as an example, are labeled with social stigmas that make them identifiable to society at large as deficient. Furthermore, their lives have been devalued and dehumanized in the public eye as their stories are often left untold, falsely reported, or overlooked in the wider media landscape. Using qualitative interview methods, we examine the current state of Black girlhood and womanhood and the racism that pervades their lives in the United States. With this backdrop, we also investigate the ways in which Black young women have responded with their writings when we, as Black women researchers, created spaces for them to use language to fight back and resist assaults against their humanity. Specifically, we illustrate the historical literacy practice of (re)claiming print authority through writing and how Black young women used their pens as a means to claim authority of language in ways to assert their voices, ideals, and truths. We conclude with a discussion of how educators can advance print authority within learning spaces for identity meaning making and empowerment so that Black girls and young women have an expressed voice in our current social and political context.
Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old woman, was arrested for allegedly assaulting a police officer, and found dead in her cell 3 days later. Say her name. Natasha McKenna, a 37-year-old woman, died days after being shocked 4 times while restrained with handcuffs and leg shackles in a Fairfax County, Virginia jail. Say her name. Rekia Boyd, a 22-year-old unarmed woman, was shot in the back of the head by an off-duty police detective. Say her name. Aiyana Stanley-Jones, a 7-year-old, was shot and killed during a raid conducted by the Detroit Police Department. Say her name. Pearlie Golden, a 93-year-old woman, was fatally shot during a confrontation with police at her home. Say her name. Tyisha Miller, a 19-year-old whose car had a flat tire, called her family for help. Upon their arrival, Tyisha was unconscious and within minutes of police arrival, she was shot 12 times. Say her name.
This is not an exhaustive collective of narratives of Black girls and women, yet their stories call for the pressing interrogation of justice. The #BlackLivesMatter movement started as an expression and stance of resistance that illuminates institutional and interpersonal injustices against Black men, women, and children. The need for this sociopolitical movement carried similar purposes when compared with other civil rights movements led by earlier African Americans who devoted their lives to ameliorate the conditions of others (Grant, 1968). Still, there remain numerous assaults on Black bodies and justice is not coming swiftly. By September 1, 2015, the year the authors first began to conceptualize this article, 776 Black people were killed by the police, of which 161 were unarmed. Since then, according to multiple data sources, like a Guardian database on people killed each year by the police, “The Counted” reports that Black people remain 52% of all murder victims of police, whereas they remain only 13% of the U.S. population. Whether in police custody or on private or public property, many of the officers involved were not indicted for their actions.
While there have been little to no indictments for police officers for Black men, women, or children, rallies against the police brutality of Black men have occurred across the nation. There has been a quieter revolt, mainly by Black women scholars, such as Kimberle Crenshaw and Brittney Cooper, and through various media outlets operated by Black women, like For Harriet and Crunk Feminist Collective. These women and spaces are speaking out against the police brutality of Black women. Consequently, #SayHerName was developed as a resource to draw attention to the violence against unarmed Black women and girls. Although, “Black Twitter”—which is where this and other hashtags like it have traction—is a “digital counterpublic” that allows for this type of political organizing and resistance to anti-Black violence (Hill, 2018), Black girls are still largely overlooked or forgotten (Lindsey, 2018). It is our belief that justice begins in knowing, remembering, and honoring their lives and continues with a plan of action to bring about change. It is imperative to say their names and never forget their existence with hopes of rectifying unjust policies and creating safe spaces for our girls in schools and classrooms. The substantial numbers of Black people murdered by police with impunity, called us to ask, what does justice look like for Black lives in the United States? What does justice look like for the lives of Black women and girls?
The purpose of this inquiry is to understand how Black young women make sense of the racism that pervades their lives in the United States by investigating the ways in which three Black young women 1 have responded when we asked them to use their voices to discuss this issue. We (Black women educators and scholars) have participated in the development and facilitation of racial and media literacy collectives for Black girls over the past 8 years, providing an avenue for them to use their pens to write against social injustices and the various assaults projected onto Black girlhood in society. We define a literacy collective as socially constructed spaces developed to practice and advance reading, writing, speaking, and thinking. We have led and facilitated literacy collectives that have focused on responding to media representations, writing and identity development, and youth action participatory research. These were also critical spaces where Black girls could think through current social issues and how those issues affect their racialized identities. This article is a call to action for Black girls and young women to claim authority of language in ways to assert their voices, ideals, and truths. While this study emphasizes the voices of Black young women, they were once Black girls when they participated in the summer literacy collectives and the call to action we are issuing is for Black girls and young women of all ages.
To present the young women’s conceptions of race, we asked them to think across their knowledge of media reports, public cases, and stories that have not fully represented the complete vision of Black girls’ lives. We then asked them to engage in writing a “pens down, don’t shoot” piece, communicating what they felt needed to be told in any literary genre of their choosing. The request for this type of writing was connected to the death of Michael Brown, a Black teenage male who was murdered by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2015. It is alleged that at the time of his shooting, his hands were up, demonstrating to the officers that he was unarmed. From his death, community activists have used the expression, “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot.” The title of this study has been influenced by that tragedy and resulting protests, and the overwhelming number of unarmed Black girls and women who are victims of police brutality also provide the background narrative for the necessity and significance of this work.
From the voices of the participants in the current study from the interview and within their writings, we discuss ways in which classrooms can become “spaces of resistance” for young writers to fight back against oppression and falsehood projected upon their lives. We highlight these young freedom writers to argue for the use of racial literacy as a means to educate, empower, and encourage Black girls to deconstruct their social, political, and economic conditions and use their pens to advocate for social change. Furthermore, the significance of this study resides in its effort to advocate for educators’ creative action with their students to challenge injustice. To do this, first, we highlight Black women who have used writing as a political tool for social change. Second, we explore the conceptual framework of racial literacy. Third, we explain the methodology and introduce the Black young women who participated in this study. Fourth, we detail the findings where we explain how Black young women make sense of their racialized gender in light of the racism that pervades their lives. Last, we conclude with implications for curriculum and instruction, particularly in the wake of a racially violent society.
Historical Foundation of Black Women’s Racialized Writings
The experiences of Black girls and women have been shaped by our individual and collective histories. For Black women and girls, our intersecting identities of race and gender (among other salient factors such as class, sexual orientation, ability, and ethnicity) have rendered our needs, voices, and experiences at the bottom of the tiered realities of American society. As society has been immersed with multiple assaults against Black people, Black women have been at the forefront of resistance through their many ways of activism. One of these forms has been with their pens. Historically, literacy has been a major tool that Black women have used (and continue to use) in the fight against racism and violence in the United States. Royster (2000) found that Black women have written historically to express their multiple identities, to counter oppression such as racism, and to write for social change, recovery, and healing. Within this section, we provide examples of Black women who wrote to bring attention to injustice. Following the wide lineage of Black women activist writers, we highlight four key literary figures who used their pens to speak truth into existence and used their voices toward social change. The literary figures we share maintained and exhibited the intellectual capacity to name, critique, interrogate, and understand power, oppression, and privilege. These writers are model examples of what it means to write to resist oppression and toward social change.
Historical Writers
Ida B. Wells-Barnett is considered an early leader in the Civil Rights Movement and used her journalistic talents to educate and engage readers in the fight against lynching violence toward people in the Black community and to strengthen the women’s suffrage movement (Watkins, 2008). Wells-Barnett’s anti-lynching campaign focused largely on standing up for Black men who were wrongly accused of raping White women and/or committing other crimes. Although not widely known, Wells-Barnett also called attention to the repeated incidents of Black women and girls who were violently raped by White men, yet received no media attention or justice from the law (Pinar, 2006). However, the assaults Black women and girls experienced were ignored, largely, as they are today and there was significantly smaller public effort for their protection. Wells-Barnett is among Black women scholars of her time to use her influence as a journalist to present a Black woman’s perspective on the topic.
Over a 12-year span, from 1882 to 1894, Wells-Barnett notes 1,115 lynchings, 30% of which were the result of accusations that those Black men raped White women. Although we do not know the official merit of these accusations, we do know that Black men were oft, unjustly, accused of inappropriate actions toward White women, like in the case of Emmitt Till whose accuser, Carolyn Bryant, has since recanted her entire story. Wells-Barnett wrote to highlight how race and racism perpetuated and validated injustices based on identity. Her work as a scholar and an activist layers race and sexuality through a critical examination of the limitations of justice when this violent act was committed against Black bodies. Neither an accusation of rape nor violence of rape attempts received the justice of due process. Wells-Barnett’s writing on rape and lynching deconstructed the realities of injustices when we consider race and gender.
In another example, Fannie Lou Hamer, who was a voting rights activist and civil rights leader in the 1960s, served as a voice to the movement. Hamer’s activism during Mississippi’s Freedom Summer with Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (Hamlet, 1996) was influenced by the citizenship rights for Black Mississippians. She worked to register Black voters through the implementation of literacy workshops in the South. Hamer, too, was a victim of police brutality. After being arrested with a group of activists for teaching literacy workshops to Black people who were unable to read print, Hamer was beaten severely by Black male inmates who were taking orders from White police officers (Brooks & Houck, 2011). She suffered permanent injuries but worked relentlessly to continue registering Blacks to vote (Bramlett-Solomon, 1991). In her speech, “I’m Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired,” delivered in 1964, Hamer wrote, We have made an appeal for the President of the United States and the attorney general to please protect us in Mississippi. And I can’t understand how it’s out of their power to protect people in Mississippi. They can’t do that, but when a white man is killed in the Congo, they send people there.
In Hamer’s speech, she reminds listeners of ways in which Blacks were denied protection and service from the U.S. government on conditions of their race. The legacy of writing to draw attention to racial injustices and advocate for the needs of the Black community continues with contemporary Black female scholars and activists. This legacy of Black women writers also serves as a caution to always remember the causes and the stories before us. As scholars continue the legacy, they add greater nuance, challenging the status quo’s attention to racialized gender politics (Collins & Bilge, 2016; Crenshaw, 1997).
Contemporary Writers
A collection of Audre Lorde’s essays in Sister Outsider highlight race as one of many oppressions that subject Black and other marginalized populations to injustices. In addition to race, gender, and class, scholar-activists such as Lorde consider sexuality (Collins & Bilge, 2016) nationality (Gutiérrez, 2008), and age (Cammarota & Fine, 2008), among the many ways in which women of color navigate society. Her essays narrate life experiences as she writes to define herself and provide a critical analysis of current society. In her short essay Poetry Is Not a Luxury, Lorde (2007) writes, “Poetry is not only a dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundation for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before” (p. 38). Her writing is evidence of those words. In times of social unrest, writing can provide a vision of what we cannot yet see. Traversing her analysis of American society to move the needle of the status quo is to critique American society by analyzing that which seems irrelevant. For example, her essays, Use of Anger and The Master’s Tools call for a redirection in the use of our pens, anger, and logic to dismantle racism and oppression.
Black female writers continue this legacy, taking up the mantle of literary advocacy as a response to their current times. Countless scholars’ works expand across needs within the Black community, including prison reform (Alexander, 2012; DuVernay, 2016), defining ourselves and sharing our stories (Hooks, 2010; Owens et al., 2019; Royster, 2000) and pedagogy (King & Swartz, 2014; Ladson-Billings, 1994; Love, 2012, 2019). Recently, The Hate U Give (Thomas, 2017), a realistic fiction novel inspired by the events of our current times, was subsumed into popular culture depicting police brutality. Angie Thomas’s work addresses relationships of Blacks with police, Black families, and double consciousness. In The Hate U Give (which was also released as a film), Thomas (2017) writes from the perspective of a young African American girl telling the modern day story of lynching that can be likened to Wells-Barnett’s anti-lynching crusade. The central character to the novel and film, Starr, witnesses the murder of her friend, a Black young man. As the sole witness, she becomes vital to a movement calling for justice in his wrongful death. Thomas’s writing recreates reality, bringing attention to not only police brutality but also the role that Black women play in the crusade for justice for the Black community. Thomas’s narrative is placed on the timeline continuation of struggle for equity of Black people.
Wells-Barnett, Hamer, Lorde, and Thomas have responded to the sociopolitical conditions of their time with their pens. Black females in the Black literary tradition write from a perspective that considers the most oppressed group of people. Intergenerationally, Black women have written to transform society. The historical and contemporary writers highlighted, compose with a unique style—journalistic writing, narration, short essays and realistic novels—serving as vehicles to educate and advocate for change. These literary figures, just as our study participants, represent identities that have been traditionally ignored but whose layered perspectives urge a national conversation. Writing to advocate has been a part of a quieter revolution. However, newer generations of Black women have continued to use their pens and voices for equity. These civil rights activists used their racial literacies and today, Black women continue to stand on the front lines of social and political movements to fight against social injustices such as racism, sexism, classism, and state violence. Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi, and Patrisse Cullors, the co-founders of the #BlackLivesMatter movement in 2012, continue the legacy provided by Black women in the past. Contemporary Black women activists reflect Wells-Barnett’s and Hamer’s sentiments to speak out against the assaults against Black men, women, and children within our society. There have been consistently larger efforts to address what has, and is happening to Black men and boys but fewer efforts to aid Black women and girls. Unfortunately, the erasure and disregarding of Black women’s and girls’ stories is a continuous problem which served as the catalyst for developing the #SayHerName movement within the #BlackLivesMatter movement (Butler, 2017; Rickford, 2016).
Racial Literacy Framework
This inquiry is undergirded by a racial literacy theoretical perspective (Horsford, 2014). Put simply, by Horsford (2011), racial literacy is “the ability to understand what race is, why it is, and how it is used to reproduce inequality and oppression” (p. 95). We used racial literacy as a framework for organizing the Black Girls WRITE program and as a theoretical perspective for the current study to examine Black women’s racial-centric writings and interviews. Race is a symbol that has gained meaning through the multidimensional impact and influence of history, oppression, and control, all of which are vital to understanding that symbol (Bell, 1989, 1992; Guinier, 2004). As a cultural, social, and political symbol, race is pervasive. As such, racial literacy is a perspective that enables one to understand race in regard to its impact to a broadness of oppressions and social inequalities related to race (Guinier, 2004). Guinier (2004) implores educators to consider and utilize racial literacy because it requires us to “rethink race as an instrument of social, geographic and economic control of both Whites and Blacks” (p. 202). Therefore, racially literate approaches to reading the fabric of this country, and the narratives therein, disrupt hegemony and highlight the role race and racism has played in the United States, and abroad. We also acknowledge and discuss how the effects of race and racism are made more complex by the intersections of identity markers such as gender, class, religion, and sexual identity.
It becomes imperative, specifically in classrooms, that students become racially literate, offering students’ opportunities to become critical readers of the world around them and critique the social and political position of their everyday lives (McArthur, 2016). Taking from Muhammad’s (2018) conception of criticality, we take up the conceptualization of Critical (capital C) to denote an understanding of power, equity, and anti-oppression. This is opposed to critical (lowercase c) that denotes critical thinking. This ability to read the world (Critically) better prepares students to navigate the racial and racist terrains they are situated within (Jackson et al., 2014; McArthur, 2019). We use the lens of racial literacy by understanding and viewing the participants as racially literate beings—who are able to name and discuss racism in the context of history, oppression, and control. In this study, we take up a racial literacy lens to examine interview data and participant writings to understand how Black young women discuss how various social, economic, political, and educational framings shape their racialized lives.
Method
Black Girls WRITE
From 2010 to 2018, during each summer, Muhammad (2018) created a space for the practice of racial literacy, or the acts of reading, writing, thinking, and speaking with a racialized-conscious lens. This space was named Black Girls WRITE and girls learned to read societal contexts and consequently responded to these contexts with their pens. WRITE stands for Writing to Represent our Identities, our Times, and our Excellence. Throughout the summers, typically 8 to 15 girls participated. During Black Girls WRITE, participants met each weekday for 3 to 5 weeks during summer months on urban university campuses, to read, write, and think across social issues and movements. We read from authors such as Harriet Jacobs, Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison, and Toni Cade Bambara. We also read from contemporary Black women writers such as Jacqueline Woodson and Ebony Wilkins. We encouraged girls to think about power, oppression, and privilege in society and asked them to use their pens to respond to those social injustices. Such pieces included poetry, narratives, short stories, editorials, essays, and open letters. Each of the young women in the current study previously participated in one of these when they were between the ages of 12 and 17 years old. Pedagogically, Black Girls WRITE used the HILL framework for teaching and learning (Muhammad, 2018). This framework centers and values student Histories, Identities, Literacies and Languages while teaching four learning goals of identity development, skills, intellectualism, and criticality. One premise of the HILL framework that the summer literacy collective focused on was providing opportunities for the Black girls to explore facets of their identities by situating our instruction in Black women’s literature related to their selfhood. We charged them to think across issues that were critical to shaping their identities while also honoring the girls’ multiple expressions and practices of literacies and language.
Therefore, for this study, we employed a qualitative interview methodology to interview Black young women who had previously participated in Black Girls WRITE to respond to the following research questions:
Participants
To recruit participants, we sent out emails to previous alumni of Black Girls WRITE who were in (or recently graduated from) college and three responded, sharing an interest in participating in the study. Below, we describe each of the three participants. We believe the descriptions of the young women provide better understandings of the writings we present later in the article.
Angela
Angela participated in the first summer literacy institute and at the time was a 17-year-old girl from the South side of Chicago during the year of 2010. At the time of this study, she was a recent graduate from a historically Black college with a degree in psychology and was energized about the opportunity to look back at her experiences from the literacy institute and college to discuss the current state of Black girlhood. Angela, who was 22 years old during the study, reflected upon her experience in Black Girls WRITE, stating, I loved the space and being around other Black girls who loved writing as much as I did. It was really refreshing to hear other Black girls and their different forms of writing and their stories. We have to tell our stories.
Kathleen
Also from the South Side of Chicago, like Angela, Kathleen participated in the first literacy institute at age 17 and during the time of the study was a recent liberal arts college graduate with a degree in Black studies and education. Kathleen has embraced his transmasculine identity and now self-identifies as a young Black man. When Muhammad (2018) first met Kathleen (who was 23 years old during the study), he struggled with identity and did not have a strong grasp on selfhood. For Kathleen, writing became the means toward self-discovery, and through his participation in the institute, it was affirmed that Black girlhood is complex.
Harriet
Harriet, from Dallas, Texas, was the youngest among the participants and was 21 years old during this study and a recent graduate from a large, southern research university, with a psychology degree. Unlike the other two participants, Harriet’s schooling was in predominantly White schools where she was one of few African American or Black students. Therefore, being involved initially in the literacy institute was a unique experience of sharing a space with girls who looked like her and shared many of her experiences associated with race.
Data Collection
Interviews
As a qualitative interview study, engaging the participants in interviews allowed us to capture the voices of the young women. Furthermore, interviews allowed us to gain rich and descriptive data from the women about their viewpoints and positions of the world to respond directly to the research questions. Bogdan and Biklen (2007) contend, “the interview is used to gather descriptive data in the subjects’ own words so that the researcher can develop insights on how subjects interpret some piece of the world” (p. 103). While this is the general nature of interviews, we chose to broach the interviews with these participants as a conversation. We used a semi-structured interview protocol that was necessary to allow for discussion and space to ask about experiences based on the participants’ responses. Some questions asked during the interview included the following: How do you define racism? What is it like being a Black woman in today’s society? What stories about Black women and girls do you think are left untold or are falsely reported? What was your experience like in the literacy collective?
We chose to interview each Black Girls WRITE alumni about their writing and experiences in Black girlhood to better understand their racial literacy and how the literacy collective aided in fostering that literacy as they advanced into Black young women. The participants were interviewed via video chat and it was audio recorded from the computer because each was in a different state than the researchers. Each interview lasted on average 35 min. In addition to their poetry writing artifacts and interview data, we also drew upon curricular documents of the Black Girls WRITE program.
Writings
In addition to each interview, we asked each participant to submit a piece of writing connected to the current state of Black girl- and womanhood. This piece of writing was written after participation in Black Girls WRITE and we asked them to submit either a recently written piece or a newly written piece that responded to the prompt. We asked for a piece on the state of Black girlhood because we wanted to explore how Black girls use writing to push back against racism, especially because they had received teaching and learning, through the literacy collective, which situated racial literacy. We did not provide guidelines on the writing besides it talking about the current state of Black girlhood. The participants all chose to submit poetry.
Data Analysis
Initial analysis involved reviewing the transcribed interviews 5 times and highlighting potential codes (Corbin & Strauss, 2008) that related to the ways in which the participants defined or responded to racism. We took up open, axial coding and through the final coding pass used in vivo coding. During the initial passes through the data, we employed open coding and wrote extensive theoretical and analytical memos in the data. Open coding involves “breaking down, examining, comparing, conceptualizing, and categorizing data” (Strauss & Corbin, 1990, p. 61). This process first allowed us to submerge in the interview and writing data to begin to develop general categories connected to how the participants talked about racism and their perspectives on Black girl- and womanhood as well as how they talked about how writing is used to “talk back” against racism. In the first sweep through the data, we came to general categories such as “society still has racism,” “Black girls experience racism,” “society negatively represents Black women and girls,” and “writing is important to resist.”
In the second and third pass of the data, we then moved to axial coding and we categorized the participants’ words and phrases into themes, as this method allowed us to find patterns of messages and stances that girls took through their words (interview) and their writings (poetry). Axial coding allowed us to look for connections and relationships from the open coding and the participants’ language use. We took multiple reviews to code each interview. During each review of the data, we reduced, clarified, and combined themes that were similar and connected to each other. Some of the axial coding included “single profiles of Black girlhood,” “institutional racism,” and “the objectification of women.” Finally, in the fourth and fifth pass through the data, we engaged in in vivo coding (Saldana, 2013; Strauss & Corbin, 1998) because we sought to center the voices of the participants. In vivo coding allows researchers to use the actual words and language of participants to honor their voices and experiences (Saldana, 2013). This method also draws readers closer into the lives and perspectives of the participants. After reviewing the axial codes, we found consistent patterns so each code is supported by interview and writing data. In the findings, we present those codes that carried vigorous data supporting them and that the participants spoke of frequently. This led to developing a coding scheme where we listed, defined, and provided a data example of each theme (see Table 1). After our coding scheme with final codes, we did a final review to confirm our codes and engaged in constant discussion through each coding review to understand how members of the research team interpreted the data. Finally, we compared the final themes in the coding process with their submitted writing artifacts to look for commonalities. Because the participants were asked to submit writing pieces that spoke to racial (in)justice, we were able to align their words from the interview with their written thoughts. Hirshfield (1997) notes that poetry has the capacity to clarify and magnify existence, and proved as an excellent source, within this study, to emphasize the themes in this article. Furman (2007) notes, At its best, poetry honours the subjective experience of the individual, and presents it in a manner that is “metaphorically generalizable” (Stein, 2004). The notion of metaphoric generalizability is not the same as it is in the traditional sense of the term, but instead it refers to the relationship between the author of a poem and his/her audience. A poem that expresses an author’s emotional “truth” can elicit a powerful empathic reaction in its reader. (pp. 1–2)
Coding Scheme.
Therefore, poetry served as a vehicle to emotionally connect to the participants’ racialized experiences. We shared the findings (final codes) with the three participants to engage in member checking to ensure we accurately represented their voices and words. Each of the three participants felt that themes captured their voices and views in response to the interview questions and writing task. They unanimously agreed with the quoted text we used as the final, in vivo codes.
Findings
The purpose of this interview study was to understand how Black young women make sense of and respond to their racialized gender in light of the racism that pervades their lives. The significance of this study resides in its effort to advocate for educators’ creative action with their students to challenge injustice. This findings section consists of three subsections that reflect the findings from the writings and interviews, as named and defined in Table 1. The first theme, “Racism as a System,” expresses how the young women defined racism in society and their lived realities in both their interviews and writings. The second theme, “Society Can’t Conceptualize the Free Thinking Black Girl,” shares the young women’s reflections on society misrepresentations of Black girl- and womanhood grounded in racism. The third theme, “Writing as Active Resistance,” shares expressions that demonstrate the young women’s politicized agency and racial literacy. Overall, we found that these findings or themes of writing about racial justice are consistent with content of Black women historically (Peterson, 1995; Sule, 2013; Yee, 1992) and Black girls today (Muhammad, 2012, Muhammad & Haddix, 2016).
“Racism as a System”
The participants in this study articulated personal experiences they have had with microaggressions in their daily interactions and school experiences. However, this finding emphasizes their recognition that structural racism exists and shares the ways in which the oppressive realities for people who look like them—Black women and girls—impacts them. As a response to what the participants witness through engagement with racist factions in their lives and their engagement with the media, Angela wrote, “How can she walk when her legs are chained down to the system of oppression because she is woman?” Her experiences witnessing the assault on Black women in this country impart the indelible awareness that Black people are under attack. She specifically refers to the system of wrongdoing placed upon Black women.
Angela explicitly defined racism as “a system.” This system, according to Angela, is in place with the unequivocal intention to “make them [people of color] feel less than.” Kathleen also spoke to this same finding and continued this notion of racism as a system by defining it as a “systemic discrimination on the basis of phenotypic differences that disenfranchise one group while empowering another” in her interview. Throughout their interviews collectively, they juxtaposed the historicized violence against Black people, especially women in the United States, to current attacks on the Black female body, specifically by the police state. Their writings reveal the tensions created for them by learning the history of Black people and witnessing that history through racially motivated assaults in the 21st century. Like the excerpt from Angela’s piece, above, Harriet’s poem articulates the experience and feelings of these girls as they witness, mourn, and resist in this post-Civil Rights movement. Harriet wrote, “It’s like we’re back in the 60s, it’s like we never left the 60s in the first place. I’m walking through miles and miles of historical footage to see those against me.” Here, she speaks to the unchanged system of racism and further to the ways that Black people encounter similar oppressions experienced nearly 60 years ago. All three participants had a grasp on historical oppression. It is important that youth have a contextual understanding of our current social situation. The attack on Black women bodies going uncontested locally and federally communicates the message that Black women’s lives do not matter.
The participants’ writings further interrogate justice. In her interview, Angela shared her thoughts on realizing that she has civil rights, despite observing news coverage, throughout varied media outlets, depicting the disregard of human rights to Black women and girls nationally. She shared, When I read about my own civil rights as a Black woman, I didn’t know I had as many rights as I’m supposed to have. But with certain cases that have happened, like the Sandra Bland case, she followed protocol in that situation.
In the current state of Black girlhood and the racism that pervades their lives, the role the media plays in transmitting political messages—that is often falsified stories of Black women and girls’ assaults—is implicit in racism as a system. The participants wrote words and phrases like “News reports on news reports on news reports speaking of the deaths of my sisters” [Harriet] and “I see the images you are bombarded with every day dictating false stereotypes” [Kathleen]. These youth are inundated with messages that instill fear and anger, and they understand the larger issue to be how racism and sexism play[s] a part. Although he recognizes that Black women are complex and brilliant and worthy of celebration, what remains at the forefront of his mind is the constant image of violence and states, “the thing I’m most worried about would have to be the Sandra Blands and the people that suffer from [the] hands of police brutality.”
These Black women like other Black women and girls nationwide are finding tension in the hopes and dreams they hold for themselves juxtaposed with the lived realities of Black girls in the 21st century. Kathleen wrote, Sometimes I don’t know whether or not to be filled with rage or to let the ducts of my eyes flow freely. In the faces of each of these sisters I see a reflection of myself.
They recognized that racism is systemic and intelligently interrogated the ways in which their civil rights should not be, but are, violated. However, they also used their pens to fight back against the oppressive elements within society and encouraged future generations of Black girls to “Use the sisters of the past as your foundation, the sisters of the present as your reinforcement and the sisters of the future as your motivation” (Kathleen’s writing sample). This foundation, reinforcement, and motivation are necessary to react in the face of systematic racism in the world.
“Society Can’t Conceptualize the Free Thinking Black Girl”
Black youth, specifically girls, are viewed as older and seen as less innocent. Because of this, our youth are highly criminalized. As was the case of Sandra Bland and as spectators, these participants, and the authors, believe that it is Sandra’s perceived demeanor that ultimately led to her untimely demise. Black girls, and women, are often judged based on how others think they should act, or be. In her writing artifact, Kathleen wrote, “I see the times the world prejudges you because of aesthetics you can’t control. I see the instances where limitations are put on your brilliance.” Here, she talks about how people in the world judges Black girls and rather than see their brilliance and intellect, they focus on other factors—factors that do not define Black girlhood/womanhood. The participants are aware of the respectability politics surrounding their racialized gender. However, they also articulate the reality that Black women and girls are uniquely diverse. Angela added, “I’m not sure if they [society-at-large] are open to that free spirited Black women that is not just tied down to that one specific lifestyle.” The media perpetuates specific tropes about Black women. Limiting stereotypes that depict Black women and girls as “loud mouth, slick, slick talking Black girl; the sexually promiscuous Black girl, and you have the welfare queen.” Harriet’s perspective aligns with Angela’s, stating that Black girls are viewed as “loud, angry, slutty, rude, not successful, always looking for a man. These are very negative connotations.” While these messages about Black women and girls are pervasive, the participants were clear that these images limit the world’s view on the complexity and intelligence of Black girls. Despite the rampant assault on their bodies, specifically due to police brutality, Angela exclaimed, “I think it’s awesome to be a Black girl!” Therefore, regardless of how society views us, they are claiming power and agency and the findings from their interviews also reveal that they view Black girlhood as indefinable. Angela explained, Society can’t conceptualize a Black girl that isn’t tied to a certain genre of music or a certain hairstyle or wearing certain clothes. I think that’s just the freethinking Black woman. I think that story is untold and I feel people consistently try to fit you [Black girls] in a box.
Similarly, Kathleen said, I think that there is an idea that being intelligent and being a Black woman are mutually exclusive and in order to be a successful Black woman you have to code switch and assimilate and I think that is inheritably racist because it’s saying that how these women exist in the world and how they identify is inheritably antagonistic to their success.
While there is a lack of a balanced narrative of Black women in the media, the participants see this as limiting others’ perception of them but not as having an impact on their perception of themselves. Harriet stated, “It makes me really sad. It doesn’t make me wish I wasn’t Black, but it makes me wish the world viewed me in a more positive way.” All three participants were able to point to positive Black women figures that break society’s mold of Black womanhood. Angela shared that the current number of Black women as primary characters on prime time television “portray that strong, confident, ‘I’m ready for the world’ Black woman.” While they were able to identify these women, their interviews constantly juxtaposed the dichotomy of being successful as a Black girl running in contrast of being their authentic selves. Kathleen wanted the ability to listen to hip hop while also thriving in a career and wanted to watch television shows like The Real Housewives of Atlanta while concurrently being “socially conscious about political issues.” For all three of these participants, experiencing the dichotomy between the box the world puts Black girls in versus the free-spirited Black girls they wanted to be provided the space for them to fight back by using their pens to resist false views of Black girlhood.
“Writing as Active Resistance”
The participants discussed writing as a tool for participation in active resistance. Rather than solely conceptualizing writing as a task to respond to a teacher’s assignment or for personal joy, they connected writing to the need to dismantle the social, economic, and political structures that enable racism. The need to draw toward writing to resist falsehood or misrepresentations is important because it allows Black girls to put their voices on record to tell their personal accounts, as the world is not always focused on their truths. Kathleen explained writing as active resistance by noting that Black girls are more inclined to call out racism when they experience it in any form, including through microaggressions. Kathleen also called attention to the purpose and power of language and particularly to the importance for Black girls to take ownership of language and not feel a need to assimilate to other perceptions of language use. She said, I think Black people in general, and Black women as well, are starting to take ownership of our language. I’ve noticed the use of language as a tool. There was this meme that I saw the other day that said, “I say ‘y’all’ not because I speak Ebonics or because I’m less intelligent but say ‘y’all’ in everyday life because I understand that the way I speak is not a reflection of my intellectual abilities.” I think in that way we are starting to understand language is a tool for identity building and writing is also active resistance. We can actively resist in language by changing the conversation about respectability politics regarding language and also resisting the desire to assimilate to language, to some white normative standard. I feel like Black people are starting to create and demand their own space to exist as we want to exist and not necessarily as a counter narrative and not necessarily as in contrast to someone else’s way.
During this part of the interview, Kathleen stated with agency that when Black girls use their own language, it builds confidence and is also a tool for identity development and resistance toward dominant discourses. At the same time, Kathleen spoke to the importance of creating and demanding our spaces to exist in the world and to combat the ideal of always providing a “counter narrative” as that is still existing and being compared with others’ ways of knowing and being.
Writing as a form of resistance happens through the use of traditional and digital forms of writing. This strongly connects to the ways Black women have traditionally written (Royster, 2000) and the ongoing revolt of Black women and girls in contemporary media spaces. When asked whether he sees Black women speaking out against oppression in their lives, Kathleen responded, “Oh yeah, all day long, that’s what we do.” We followed up and asked about ways this occurs in which Kathleen also explained that social media is an open space to fight back against assaults: We resist vocally through writing and spoken word to something as simple as a Facebook post and it’s necessary especially for millennials because we spend a lot of time on social media and use it to define a space for self. In this space women can be protective of one’s self and of one’s identity when someone threatens that. And Black women create solidarity in the fact that other people can comment, like and share. I think that Black girls are actually resisting in that way.
Alluding to the same point, Harriet also connected resistance forms of writing to social media. In her interview, she described what she regularly observes in online spaces and said, “I just see a bunch of social justice posts about standing with women and girls who have been attacked or gone missing. I see the hashtag, #staywoke.” She went on to explain that the writings of others become helpful to stay informed of what is happening in the world while at the same time providing comfort. The reference to #staywoke speaks to ability to remain social and critically conscious of what is happening in the world and the ability to “read” media to decipher between truths and facts. In Angela’s written artifact, she not only drew attention to social media and politicalized hashtagging but also demonstrated writing as active resistance. In part of her poem, I Don’t Want Her to Be a Hashtag, she wrote, Let her first steps be toward Spelman . . . Let her grow to be the change she wishes to see . . . But I am afraid—I don’t want her to be a hashtag . . . A space for immoral acts to the mind, body, spirit and soul she has carried the burdens of the world An unspoken secret that has been carried down from generation to generation The mules of the world that walks slow and steady but determined when put to the test Used, abused, and a vessel to love nurture and help others grow When you educate a woman, you educate a nation Black women are dying . . . a nation is dying . . .
Angela spoke to a historical oppression that is imbued on Black girl lives. She said she wrote this poem in response to the McKinney pool case. In this case, an enraged police officer threw a young Black girl to the ground after an exchange of words. He resulted in sitting on top of her while she screamed and cried in her bathing suit. Angela then said, “I wrote this piece to express my anger of the mistreatment of Black girls’ and women’s bodies.” She used writing to resist the assault on Black female bodies and said she wanted to bring attention to the reality that we are dying and are being mistreated mentally and physically. As a result, to this trauma, she expressed that it leaves a lasting effect globally because women are the nurturers of the world and asserts that if a society desires to educate a nation, and then educate women. Writing to resist, especially on social media, creates a wider space for others to hear the voices of young Black women. The participants’ need for consciousness through writing speaks to the compelling urge to cultivate racial literacy.
Summary
The findings reveal that the participants recognized the various microaggressions in their daily social and school experiences, and were aware of the respectability politics surrounding their racialized gender. These three Black, young women were cognizant that the world often judges Black girls, harshly, in lieu of seeing their intelligence, diversity, and ingenuity. Angela, Kathleen, and Harriet articulated, within their interviews and their poetry, their personal, racialized experiences and the ways structural racism, and other oppressive forces, shape and impact Black women and girls. All three participants’ awareness of the need for the eradication of systemic and systematic oppressions indicated that they had a grasp on historical oppression. They wrote about the “60s” and the Civil Rights Movement, which they juxtaposed to the racial violence they witness today. They discussed the role the media plays in transmitting political messages that are implicit in racist systems, and articulated how degrading images of Black women adultifies Black girls and shapes how the world views them. Within their interviews and their writings, the participants interrogated justice and suggested that writing allows them to create their own spaces, particularly within online platforms that social media allows. Having participated in Black Girls WRITE, each participant also recognized that writing could be a tool of resistance, observing writing as an instrument to dismantle the political, social, and economic structures that bolster racism. The three findings, “racism as a system,” “society can’t conceptualize the free thinking Black girl,” and “writing as an active resistance,” demonstrate the young women’s racial literacy.
Discussion
The participants in this study made sense of several examples of the multiple oppressions that are situated in racist views of Black girlhood. These included police brutality, falsehood in the media, language discrimination, and hyper-cremation of their bodies. These oppressions also relate to the finding that illustrated racism as a system or a set of parts that intricately work to make Black girls feel insufficient. Kathleen wrote about being judged based on “aesthetics you can’t control,” which aligns with the “Unlocking Opportunity for African American Girls: A Call to Action for Educational Equity” (2014) report that found that Black girls represent less than 17% of all female students but are 31% of girls referred to law enforcement and about 43% of girls with a school-related arrest. Researchers have found that educators focus more on the behavior and attitudes of Black girls than their academic development (Morris, 2007). This is problematic to the academic success of Black girls if educators judge them based on their presentation of self or others’ dehumanizing narratives instead of their intellectual abilities. Black girls should not be dismissed as “loud,” “ghetto,” or “sassy” (Brown, 2014). Educators should focus more attention on what youth are saying versus how youth say it. Our exploration of how Black young women use writing to push back against racism highlights the voices, ideas, and concerns of our participants.
These young freedom writers also expressed that society does not choose to center Black girls’ ways of knowing and being but instead seek to keep Black girls trapped in monolithic or false profiles that are negative in opposition to the ways they see themselves. Although they felt that the more positive images of Black girlhood have increased over the years and more Black women and girls are being celebrated for our brilliance, there remains countless numbers of assaults, verbal and physical attacks, and killings of Black girls and women. For example, the bodies of Black girls are labeled with social stigmas that make them identifiable to society at large as deficient. In a 2015 case, a Black high school girl at Spring Valley High School in South Carolina was physically assaulted by the school’s resource officer. With claims that she had her cell phone present in class, a fellow classmate recorded the assault in which viewers can see the young lady being choked, pulled, and slammed to the ground out of her desk, and then dragged on the floor by the resource officer. Many news outlets presented this camera phone footage with the following statement: “We do not know what she did before the camera began filming.” It is the stigmas that Black women and girls have on their bodies that would allow one to watch an adult male physically and aggressively assault a young girl and question what role she played in that assault.
One response to these onslaughts is through projecting their voices through resistance forms of writing. They discussed the need for Black women to write against misrepresentations related to racism by using our pens. Writing is one form of actively resisting and embodies the importance of Black girls to read their worlds with a critical lens (Janks, 2012). This is not new, as Black women have historically written to tell their truths and write the wrongs of false societal images. Writing becomes a site of social, political, cultural, and intellectual production as it has been among the literary traditions of Black women (Peterson, 1995). Young Black women need to document their experiences to help themselves and others to become more socially aware and racially literate as they remind us that we do not live in a postracial society. Unfortunately, “urban schooling can be colonizing projects that subject students of color to an onslaught of deficit practices . . .” (Matias & Liou, 2015, p. 602); thus, our participants’ voices in the interview and writing data reaffirmed the necessity of racial literacy as they were able to define racism and point to specific events in history (and in the present) where Black women and girls were subject to racial violence. Beyond this, they were able to analyze these events and interpret them by understanding the role of power and injustice in each event personally experienced or observed in the news media. Writing as a form of resistance further enables racial literacy as it ties injustice and literacy to action and social change. Rogers and Mosley (2006) contend that developing racial literacy among youth helps to advance a consciousness and activism-spirit of race, racism, and antiracism as students prepare for life outside their K–12 education.
Implications for Curriculum and Instruction in the Wake of a Racially Violent Society
It is significant to note what the participants gleaned from engaging in Black Girls WRITE. Angela explained that the institute gave her confidence in speaking out, which was helpful in her academic journey through higher education. Angela now has published her own poetry book and works in social work. When asked to think about his participation of the institute 6 years ago, Kathleen explained that the institute “laid a foundation for me in a way that I’m appreciative of. I think I’m more aware, more committed to and feel more responsible about knowing my own history and changing the way I see the dominant narrative.” The dominant narrative, as Kathleen described, involves derogatory views of Black girls. Kathleen now works as an elementary school teacher. When we asked Harriet about how it felt participating in the institute, she replied, “It was just great to work with a bunch of other Black women and feel empowered to see that we do have a voice and we can stand together as the media doesn’t portray our beauty and brilliance.” She went on to express that the institute helped her to learn more about herself and developed within her an openness to learn about her collective identity while celebrating the multifacetedness of Black lives. She now works in social work and human resources outside of the country. The implication of what these Black young women learned within Black Girls WRITE is significant for urban classroom teachers.
From their voices held in the interview and within their writings, we discuss ways in which classrooms can become “spaces of resistance” for young writers to fight back against oppression and falsehood projected upon their lives. We highlight these young freedom writers to argue for the use of racial literacy as a means to educate, empower, and encourage Black girls and young women to deconstruct their social, political, and economic conditions and use their pens to advocate for social change. The pathologizing of Black girls and women in the media influences how educators teach and interact with this unique group of students. Moreover, focusing on gender- and race-based myths and stereotypes diminishes teachers’ ability to research, call upon, and highlight the knowledge and lived experiences that Black girls and women possess. K–12 classrooms and teacher preparation courses should equally be spaces in which students and teachers can become racially literate together by promoting and producing literacy acts that can be used to advocate for social change. The affronts to the lives of Black men, women, and children happen in varied spaces across the country, while most of the reported cases are in urban areas. The significance of racial literacy becomes more critical to curriculum and instruction in K–12, urban schools. Racial literacy is not a concept limited to students, or, more specifically, students of color. Educators (of all races) must strive toward achieving their own racial literacy to create a curriculum and a classroom environment that pushes back against racism and empowers voices that have been made marginalized (Fuller-Hamilton, 2019); otherwise, urban schools and classrooms often become sites of racial–gender terror for Black girls (Lindsey, 2018). Furthermore, educators need to teach racial literacies in the classroom throughout their curriculum and instruction so that youth can make sense of their own identities and the world around them. It is our goal to advance racial literacy not only as a theoretical lens but as praxis as well.
To teach racial literacies, teachers must first understand and take up the importance of criticality. Criticality is defined as having the intellectual capacity to name, critique, interrogate and understand power, oppression, and privilege. Criticality must become a part of the learning goals just as most teachers focus on skills goals. Criticality within curriculum and instruction begs the following questions: How will I engage my students’ thinking about power, privilege (entitlement) and oppression in the text, in communities and society? (Muhammad, 2018).
It is vital to engage and educate urban youth with pedagogies that “begin with their realities, ideologies, and ways of communicating their understanding of the world” (Camangian, 2015, p. 425). Criticality pushes youth to consider historical, institutional, structural, and individual elements of oppressions. It helps them to read in between the lines and consider the perspective of marginalized populations.
Criticality becomes possible by selecting from a host of critical texts and authors to read in class. They need opportunities to read from authors who challenge the status quo and push them to think and resist wrongdoing in society. This means also reading and writing across multimodal forms of text, including media texts that misrepresent their lives. This gives them space to “speak back” and tell their truths against such texts. As youth are reading such texts, educators need to ask questions about power and race as they teach the content. Teachers can also teach racial literacy not just by the goals set or text selected but also by writing exercises. Black girls especially need to write back against the multiple intersecting oppressions such as sexism, racism, and classism that they face on a daily basis. In Black Girls WRITE, for example, girls were asked to write kinship pieces to the authors read in class, which meant writing a companion piece (Muhammad, Chisholm & Starks, 2017). They were also asked to write reflective pieces that mirrored the intellectual thought of the writers. Educators need to embed criticality, multiculturalism, and identities in their daily instruction, rather than sporadically during the school year. This then builds not just literacy skills but racial literacies as well.
Conclusion
Sadly, we did not have to look far to problematize the need for this work. The assaults on Black bodies are continuous and heartbreaking. The media exploitations and the recent political movements caused us to ask questions regarding the need for young Black women and girls to cultivate their own stories so they can begin to protect themselves against a racist society. Schools should be a safe haven and classroom spaces should provide refuge for identity and intellectual development. This also opens up dialogue on the role of teachers and ways they invite racial literacy and resistance writing into the classroom. The voices of the participants reminded us of the duality of language and its ability to function as both a tool of empowerment and destruction (Janks, 2009). While others who have a lack of a desire to know the lives of Black girls will use language in efforts to reduce their worth, we seek to understand how language is an apparatus for Black girls to claim their rights to language for self-empowerment and self-reliance. The participants shared their voices to resist the multiple verbal and physical onslaughts and demonstrated how language can be used to fight back. Spaces for this (re)voicing are applicable in the classroom so that Black girls, and other youth, can be at the forefront of a movement for social change.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
