Black Girls' Feistiness as Everyday Resistance in Toni Cade Bambara's: Gorilla, My Love

Reviewed by: Investing in the Educational Success of Black Women and Girls ed. by Lori D. Patton, Venus E. Evans-Winters, and Charlotte E. Jacobs Emerald Templeton Investing in the Educational Success of Black Women and Girls Lori D. Patton, Venus E. Evans-Winters, and Charlotte E. Jacobs (Editors) Sterling, VA: Stylus, 2022, 312 pages, $37.50 (softcover) In her seminal work, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, Hill Collins (2000) described the "hidden space of Black women's consciousness" (p. 98) that includes self-definition; self-determination; and resistance to racism, sexism, classism, and white supremacy. Lori D. Patton, Venus E. Evans-Winters, and Charlotte E. Jacobs's work is an embodiment of this consciousness. Much like how Hill Collins designed Black Feminist Thought, the editors of this volume created an accessible text grounded in Black women and girls' experiences, knowledges, and existence. As a Black woman scholar whose research underscores the experiences of Black women in higher education while uncovering the logics of valuing diversity, I recognize the authority of this work and find that it aligns with and informs my scholarly interests. As a former Black girl who has trudged through misogynoir throughout my educational experiences, I feel incredibly affirmed, seen, and celebrated through this work. Written from the vantage point of women and girls across the spectrum of Black womanhood and girlhood, the authors of this edited volume artfully describe how we navigate the American system of education while maintaining our meanings and intonating our expressions (Hill Collins, 2000). This text is organized into four sections: (a) Mattering for Black Women and Girls in Schooling Contexts, (b) Naming and Challenging the Violence and Criminalization of Black Women and Girls, (c) Navigating Politics and the Politicization of Black Women and Girls in Higher Education, and (d) Still We Rise: Black Women and Girls Lifting and Loving Black Women and Girls. The chapters in these sections provide the reader with context, discussion questions, further reading, and additional resources. These sections weave together narratives that illustrate the depth, breadth, and rigor of scholarship about Black women and girls. Each section sheds light on multiple experiences and voices, which I will describe below. In the first section, Mattering for Black Women and Girls in Schooling Contexts, Patton et al. set the tone for this volume and lay a foundation for understanding the ways of knowing (epistemologies), being (ontologies), and thinking (ideologies) that influence Black women and girls' efficacy in school. Chapter 1, "Mid-Twerk and Mid-Laugh," uncovers how Black girls' ability to express themselves through laughter and dancing in culturally situated ways is stifled and criminalized. Further, the author posits that this level of expressiveness provides an opportunity for learning that schools can engage for transformation. In Chapter 2, readers are presented with ways to enact the Black girls' literacy framework, which allows schools to expand learning and literacy beyond simply reading and writing to a nuanced practice that situates learning in sociopolitical, historical, and cultural contexts. Similarly, Chapters 3 and 4 discuss the ways myths and stereotypes depict Black girls as older than they are, disrespectful, and underachieving. Such myths must be dispelled so that Black girls can find belonging and safety in spaces that were not intended for them. Together, these chapters encompass why [End Page 250] Black girls matter and how schools can begin to embrace that fact. The second section, Naming and Challenging the Violence and Criminalization of Black Women and Girls, begins by situating the education of Black women and girls within a political context that surveils, polices, and arrests them. Chapters 5 and 6 detail the ways in which schools are failing Black girls—pushing them out and deeming them "nobodies"—by highlighting compelling cases and data related to their involvement with school discipline and the legal system. Further, the ways in which a lack of care and value for Black women and girls persist through higher education are explicated in Chapters 7 and 8. The authors herein urge educators and administrators to challenge their biases about gender and race and interrogate how the intersection of those identities reveals the ways they characterize and value Black women and girls...

Uncovering Black Girlhood(s):Black Girl Pleasures as Anti-respectability Methodology Porshé R. Garner (bio), Dominique C. Hill (bio), Jessica L. Robinson (bio), and Durell M. Callier (bio) Black girlhood is a site of pleasure, often overlooked, yet visible to those committed to allowing Black girls to just be. It is through our varied work and training in Saving Our Lives, Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT) that we, the authors, are reminded and understand Black girls to be creators and innovators working from pleasure.1 Envisioned by Ruth Nicole Brown, SOLHOT, an intentional and intergenerational practice of Black girlhood celebration, creates space for middle-school-aged Black girls to be teachers and collaborators of freedom practices, presence, and what it requires to hold space and the weight of brilliance. Knowing how to create and hold space for Black girls is important because too often Black girls are not allowed to show up whole and with a self-awareness that magnifies their genius and ingenuity. The creation of space for Black girlhood in our research and practice necessitates an anti-respectability methodology rooted in centering Black girlhood pleasures that centers the ways we are in community with each other and what manifests from the community we create. Pleasure, as we know it to be experienced and expressed through our organizing work with SOLHOT, is produced when we dismantle systems of power that seek to infringe on our ability to be our whole selves. Black girlhood pleasure as a method of anti-respectability, then, must move us away from dominant desires to only know Black girls through deficit frames or to name Black girls' vulnerabilities due to their social locations within a society that has never cared for or about Black girls. To do so, we argue, requires a rootedness in Black girls' aesthetics of love, reliability, funk, and performance. Arriving at this mode of anti-respectability methodology required individual and collective unlearning that allowed us to hear Black girls differently. And it is through our listening to Black girls differently and generating theory and praxis based on who Black girls say they are that we have moved away from dominant and [End Page 191] simplistic ways of hearing and attempting to guide Black girls. In this essay we employ those listening practices to reverb what we know differently because of the community we have created with Black girls. Here, we do not claim to speak for all Black girls; rather, we speak to and about the Black girls we have worked with and what they have shared with us. We believe this understanding gives us and social justice advocates a starting point to better comprehend the material conditions for Black girls everywhere while attuning specifically to an often undertheorized population. To think of pleasure as inclusive of but not limited to sexuality, we turn to Jessica Robinson, who in Wish to Live: The Hip-Hop Feminism Pedagogy Reader, asks a very important question: "Can we be for Black girls and against their sexuality?"2 Robinson pushes readers to consider sexuality through the lens of comprehensive education and not as demonized actions reserved for adults. We, those who love Black girls, are urged to consider that Black girls themselves have agency and possess the tools necessary to make decisions about their bodies. By understanding the autonomy that Black girls have over their bodies when they are equipped with comprehensive sex education that does not shame their bodies or situate them as receptacles for the pleasures of others, we are able to see Black girls and Black girlhood as whole and complete—emotionally, mentally, physically, and spiritually. This is significant because it opens conversations that are typically closed off from Black girlhood or are often engaged in a way that polices the bodies and decisions of Black girls and views them as "bad," "immoral," or trauma-centered. Her work leads us far from conversations of respectability and challenges us to consider the ways that a more anti-respectability approach would allow Black girls to be central to their own experiences. Anti-respectability has been considered by fields such as Black studies3 and Black girlhood studies.4 When engaging anti-respectability as a methodology...

Feminist Studies 47, no. 1. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 175 Ashley L. Smith-Purviance Masked Violence against Black Women and Girls In May 2020, mass media outlets widely reported the murder of twenty-seven-year-old Breonna Taylor in Louisville, KY.1 Two months later, in July 2020, some news outlets also reported the story of Grace, a fifteen-year-old Black girl in Michigan who was incarcerated during the COVID-19 pandemic for not completing her online schoolwork.2 These two incidents are connected: violence against Black girls in schools and classrooms is inextricably linked to the anti-Black state violence that Black women and girls face in society and in their homes. The violence that Breonna Taylor, Atatiana Jefferson, Korryn Gaines, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, and many more have experienced results from the same interlocking systems of oppression that marginalize the suffering of Black girls in 1. Taylor had been killed two months earlier, in March 2020. See Errin Haines, “Family Seeks Answers in Fatal Police Shooting of Louisville Woman in Her Apartment,” Washington Post, May 11, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com /nation/2020/05/11/family-seeks-answers-fatal-police-shooting-louisvillewoman -her-apartment. 2. Brande Victorian, “15-Year-Old Black Girl Sent to Juvenile Detention Center for Not Completing Her Online Schoolwork during the Pandemic,” Madame Noire, July 14, 2020, https://madamenoire.com/1176948/15-yearold -black-girl-sent-to-juvenile-detention-center-for-not-completing-heronline -schoolwork-during-the-pandemic. 176 Ashley L. Smith-Purviance schools.3 However, there is a lack of exploration about how these systems —schools, criminal justice, juvenile justice, law enforcement, and media—operate together and simultaneously shape and enact violence against Black women and girls. Assault and violence against Black women and girls that result in murder are masked forms of Black death.4 Information about their deaths is rarely shared across mass media platforms. Brittney Cooper argues that there is much less outrage surrounding Black death when it is Black women and girls who are murdered. She suggests that one reason is that they are often killed in their homes rather than in public spaces and therefore there is less public recognition.5 Because their murders often occur in containment and confinement, Black women and girls’ narratives become hidden, covered up, and written off in ways that deny their victimization and justify the violence they face.6 I have come to understand these kinds of “erasures” as endemic to the structure of this antiBlack world, which only sees us when we are “dead and dying.”7 Indeed, we would not know about Breonna Taylor’s life and that she was an “essential” worker if she had not been killed. A recent 20/20 documentary segment about her murder shows how Breonna Taylor was at first considered a suspect in her own murder case for months, which diminished 3. Treva Lindsey, “The Lack of Mobilized Outrage for Police Killing Black Women Is an Injurious Erasure,” Bustle, June 3, 2020, https://www.bustle.com /p/the-lack-of-mobilized-outrage-for-police-killing-black-women-is-injuriouserasure -22953764. 4. Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). 5. Brittney Cooper, “Why Are Black Women and Girls Still an Afterthought in Our Outrage over Police Violence?” Time, June 4, 2020, https://time.com /5847970/police-brutality-black-women-girls. 6. Beth E. Richie, Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation (New York: New York University Press, 2012); Kimberlé Crenshaw, Andrea Ritchie, Rachel Anspach, Rachel Gilmer, and Luke Harris, Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women (New York: African American Policy Forum, 2015); Lashawn Harris, “#SayHerName: Black Women, State Sanctioned Violence & Resistance,” Organization of American Historians, https://www.oah.org/tah/issues/2020/history-for-black-lives /sayhername-black-women-state-sanctioned-violence-resistance (accessed April 12, 2021). 7. Patrice D. Douglass, “Black Feminist Theory for the Dead and Dying,” Theory & Event 21, no. 1 (January 2018). Ashley L. Smith-Purviance 177 the availability of accurate information about her death.8 Criminal legal systems, law enforcement, and mass media outlets mask the violence against Black women and girls when they withhold or...

Feminist Studies 47, no. 1. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 175 Ashley L. Smith-Purviance Masked Violence against Black Women and Girls In May 2020, mass media outlets widely reported the murder of twenty-seven-year-old Breonna Taylor in Louisville, KY.1 Two months later, in July 2020, some news outlets also reported the story of Grace, a fifteen-year-old Black girl in Michigan who was incarcerated during the COVID-19 pandemic for not completing her online schoolwork.2 These two incidents are connected: violence against Black girls in schools and classrooms is inextricably linked to the anti-Black state violence that Black women and girls face in society and in their homes. The violence that Breonna Taylor, Atatiana Jefferson, Korryn Gaines, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, and many more have experienced results from the same interlocking systems of oppression that marginalize the suffering of Black girls in 1. Taylor had been killed two months earlier, in March 2020. See Errin Haines, “Family Seeks Answers in Fatal Police Shooting of Louisville Woman in Her Apartment,” Washington Post, May 11, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com /nation/2020/05/11/family-seeks-answers-fatal-police-shooting-louisvillewoman -her-apartment. 2. Brande Victorian, “15-Year-Old Black Girl Sent to Juvenile Detention Center for Not Completing Her Online Schoolwork during the Pandemic,” Madame Noire, July 14, 2020, https://madamenoire.com/1176948/15-yearold -black-girl-sent-to-juvenile-detention-center-for-not-completing-heronline -schoolwork-during-the-pandemic. 176 Ashley L. Smith-Purviance schools.3 However, there is a lack of exploration about how these systems —schools, criminal justice, juvenile justice, law enforcement, and media—operate together and simultaneously shape and enact violence against Black women and girls. Assault and violence against Black women and girls that result in murder are masked forms of Black death.4 Information about their deaths is rarely shared across mass media platforms. Brittney Cooper argues that there is much less outrage surrounding Black death when it is Black women and girls who are murdered. She suggests that one reason is that they are often killed in their homes rather than in public spaces and therefore there is less public recognition.5 Because their murders often occur in containment and confinement, Black women and girls’ narratives become hidden, covered up, and written off in ways that deny their victimization and justify the violence they face.6 I have come to understand these kinds of “erasures” as endemic to the structure of this antiBlack world, which only sees us when we are “dead and dying.”7 Indeed, we would not know about Breonna Taylor’s life and that she was an “essential” worker if she had not been killed. A recent 20/20 documentary segment about her murder shows how Breonna Taylor was at first considered a suspect in her own murder case for months, which diminished 3. Treva Lindsey, “The Lack of Mobilized Outrage for Police Killing Black Women Is an Injurious Erasure,” Bustle, June 3, 2020, https://www.bustle.com /p/the-lack-of-mobilized-outrage-for-police-killing-black-women-is-injuriouserasure -22953764. 4. Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). 5. Brittney Cooper, “Why Are Black Women and Girls Still an Afterthought in Our Outrage over Police Violence?” Time, June 4, 2020, https://time.com /5847970/police-brutality-black-women-girls. 6. Beth E. Richie, Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation (New York: New York University Press, 2012); Kimberlé Crenshaw, Andrea Ritchie, Rachel Anspach, Rachel Gilmer, and Luke Harris, Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women (New York: African American Policy Forum, 2015); Lashawn Harris, “#SayHerName: Black Women, State Sanctioned Violence & Resistance,” Organization of American Historians, https://www.oah.org/tah/issues/2020/history-for-black-lives /sayhername-black-women-state-sanctioned-violence-resistance (accessed April 12, 2021). 7. Patrice D. Douglass, “Black Feminist Theory for the Dead and Dying,” Theory & Event 21, no. 1 (January 2018). Ashley L. Smith-Purviance 177 the availability of accurate information about her death.8 Criminal legal systems, law enforcement, and mass media outlets mask the violence against Black women and girls when they withhold or...

This article explores and analyses the production and representation of Black (British) girlhoods in Sarah Gavron’s film Rocks (2019), and the effects this has had on Black women and girl actors, film-makers, and audiences. Adopting a critical Black (British) girlhood framework that is rooted in Black feminist theory, it explores how Black girls’ interior worldbuilding in British screen media and beyond can be a source of empowerment and affective memory work for these groups. Centring the voices of Black girls and women, this article locates the interiorities of Black (British) girlhood within practices of resistance and self-definition, the formation and maintenance of girls’ intimate friendships, and their intergenerational solidarities. Methodologically, it analyses the film’s narrative alongside interviews from the actors and creatives, Black women’s written memories of their girlhoods, and essays from young Black girls living in Britain to reveal how Black (British) girlhood is relational, embodied, and emotionally affective.

Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth CenturyAmerican Tomboys, 1850–1915

This dissertation utilized a qualitative collective case study (Stake, 1995) to examine four Black adolescent girls' science identities within the context of an afterschool science program featuring a culturally sustaining science curriculum. Employing a qualitative research design, the study utilized semi-structured interviews, video observations, reflective journaling, and Black girl cartography to examine how four Black girls perceived themselves in relation to science as they engaged with a culturally sustaining science curriculum and how their engagement in the afterschool program influenced how they perceived their science abilities. The analysis drew upon the theories of Critical Race Feminism (Berry, 2010; Wing, 1997) and Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies (Paris, 2012) to explore the intersections of race, gender, culture, and science education. Findings suggest that the centering of participants' interests and perspectives within the curriculum played a significant role in fostering a sense of belonging, empowerment, and confidence in scientific abilities. The findings also underscore the impact of culturally sustaining practices on Black girls' attitudes towards science, illuminating how such approaches can shape their identities as science learners and practitioners. Central to these findings is the recognition of Black girls' intersectional identities and the significance of valuing these identities within science education settings. By honoring Black girls' multifaceted identities, the study advocates for utilizing a strengths-based approach that enhances understanding of how Black girls actively participate in and contribute to the science community. This research contributes to both theoretical understandings and practical applications in science education of how culturally sustaining educational practices support and empower Black girls engaging in science, offering implications for educators, researchers, and policymakers interested in promoting equitable access and engagement in science among Black girls.

Black girl magic: Empowerment stories of black dual status girls

In this article, we argue that the humanity and mattering of Black people have always lived in Black girlhood, but the potentiality of Black girlhood as a creative space for designing Black approaches in educational research has yet to be fully realized. Therefore, we (re)turn to Black girlhood frameworks and theories in our contribution to Black approaches in educational research. Looking to where Black girls live and be (re)defines notions of human, humanity, humanness, and living for it begins at Black girl epistemes. Following Wynter’s call for a new humanness, one that promises liberatory futures, we offer Project-Praxes of Black Girl Otherworld-Making to scholars and researchers occupying educational space, considering their/our responsibility and answerability firstly to Black people, and secondly, to the fields of Black Studies, Black Girlhood Studies, and education in a transdisciplinary sense. Project-Praxes of Black Girl Otherworld-Making includes the following seven pursuits: (1) humanness outside the white gaze and after Man; (2) remembering where Black girlhoods lived; (3) ethical engagements with Black girl(s)/hoods; (4) Black girlhood approaches in educational research; (5) reflexivity in doing freedom work in unfree places/spaces; (6) transdisciplinary intellectual rendezvouses that seriously read and cite Black women; and (7) writing with regard for the spectrum of legibility. Through Project-Praxes of Otherworld-Making, Black girls can show up as their most authentic selves and fully expect the same of us as researchers. This framework is not invested in projects of changing, fixing, or colonizing young Black girls. We instead acknowledge that they already have the language to express how they feel and what they know. We hold their descriptions as truth and learn from them to honor their/our lives in the work. Project-Praxes of Otherworld-Making makes possible Black girls’ humanity and freedom dreaming.

Black girls are regularly exposed to physical, emotional, and psychological violence in schools. Spaces intentionally created for and by Black girls can offer them psychological safety, where they can feel comfortable being their authentic selves. In the current qualitative study, we explored Black adolescent girls’ sense of psychological safety using individual, semi-structured interviews with 16 girls ( Mage = 17.36 years) who participated in Black Girl Magic Crew (BGM), an after-school program in the Southeastern United States. This program was created for and with Black girls and focused on their identity development, mental health, and academic preparation. Drawing on the psychological framework of radical healing and Black feminism in qualitative inquiry, we depicted the practices and curricular elements that enabled the girls to feel psychologically safe in BGM. Findings demonstrated that within BGM, participants (a) were validated, (b) seen in their glory, and (c) freely expressed themselves. The authors discussed the implications of study findings for Black girls’ psychological safety and co-creating Black girl spaces that prioritize liberation and healing.

Black girls and women are disproportionately impacted by sexual health disparities, including an increased risk of HIV and sexually transmitted infections (STI). Early sexual development among Black females heightens their risk of HIV/STI. Utilizing the Becoming a Sexual Black Woman (SBW) framework, this study sought to understand how early sexual development and stereotype messages may underpin HIV/STI risk, building on and furthering the discussion of the consequences of the SBW schema. To better understand this phenomenon, we conducted a secondary thematic data analysis from two previously completed grounded theory studies with Black girls and women ranging in age from 11 to 62 (N = 40). Findings revealed that Black women have been socialized to be strong and independent and yet are highly vulnerable to HIV/STI. This clash between Black girl's and women's ideals of strength and heightened vulnerability to HIV/STI presents a paradox that may help explain disparities in HIV/STI risk. Four themes emerged among both Black girls and women: complex construction of the SBW schema, burden and consequences of strength, pressure to be strong, and being strong and sexual. Findings also highlight how becoming both a strong and sexual Black woman occurs over the life course and is inherent to Black female sexual development. We discuss the implications of these findings for parents, healthcare providers, educators, and researchers with the aim to improve sexual health outcomes for Black females across the life course.

Parents can promote the sexual health of adolescents in a number of well-established ways, such as through sexual communication and parental monitoring. Another unexplored avenue through which parents might influence sexual decision-making among Black girls is gendered-racial socialization-the process through which parents send messages to their Black daughters about what it means to be a Black girl, in part, to improve their self-esteem. In a national, U.S.-based sample of 287 Black girls (Mage = 15.4) and their parents (87.8% female), we examine how two dimensions of gendered-racial socialization (gendered-racial pride socialization; gendered-racial oppression socialization): (a) are related to adolescents' intentions to have early sex and (b) moderate the association of parental communication and monitoring with adolescents' intentions to have early sex. We found Black girls who are exposed to more empowering messages about Black girls and women are less likely to intend to have early sex. Additionally, gendered-racial pride socialization moderated the relationship between parental monitoring and intentions to have sex, such that more monitoring was associated with lower intentions to have early sex among girls low in gendered-racial pride socialization. For girls high in gendered-racial pride socialization, there was no relationship between parental monitoring and sexual intentions. Gendered-racial pride socialization is an important asset in Black families, which can be leveraged to improve the sexual health of Black girls. Future studies are needed to examine the causal, temporal pathways between gendered-racial socialization and sexual health. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Journal Article Maria W. Stewart’s “The First Stage of Life”: Black Girlhood in the Repository of Religion and Literature, and of Science and Art Get access Nazera Sadiq Wright Nazera Sadiq Wright University of Kentucky Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar MELUS, Volume 40, Issue 3, Fall 2015, Pages 150–175, https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlv034 Published: 07 August 2015

Focus groups as counterspaces for Black girls and Black women: A critical approach to research methods

Studies centralizing youth responses to literature have changed the landscape of literacy classrooms and continue to shape literature instruction. Still, there is limited scholarship that explores the intricate ways in which Black girls respond to literature which inhibits curricular possibilities for Black girls in literacy spaces. Considering the dearth of research on Black girls’ reading responses, this article builds on the theoretical foundations of Culturally Situated Reader Response and the Black Girl Literacies Framework to ground the following research questions: (1) What culturally situated positions did Black girls assume as they transacted with a speculative short story? and (2) In what ways do Black girls’ responses highlight the complexity of Black girls’ reading response practices? In centralizing these questions and theoretical framings, the author highlights how Black girls’ incisive responses to a literary text suggest the need for educators and researchers to expand how we consider culture in our pedagogical and curricular decisions, particularly related to Black girls’ literature engagement.