“It really was My fault”: examining white supremacy and internalized racism through detained U.S. Black youths’ narratives and counternarratives

Abstract

This research project's initial purpose was to explore how Black youth who had been assigned to youth detention centers described their experiences with school-based racism, and how those experiences informed their experiences with school discipline prior to being detained in a correctional facility. Guided by the following research questions, (1) How do correctional facility-detained Black youth describe their experiences with racism in public schooling? and (2) How do these experiences shape their understandings of racism, relative to themselves and others?, the researchers found that there was consistent contradiction in the ways that youth described their personal experiences and the ways that they interpreted their contexts and circumstances. As they narrativized experiences, they readily considered White Supremacy in individual school experiences, but when asked to explore systemic racism, they instead blamed themselves in what Ladson-Billings and Tate describe as ‘self-condemnation.’