“I stayed just above the cusp so I was left alone”: Black Girls’ Experiences with School Counselors

An Antiracist Framework for Evidence-Informed School Counseling Practice

“…The fifth tenet, intersectionality, refers to the intersecting planes of oppression (i.e., racism, ableism, classism, sexism, transphobia, and homophobia) that individuals may experience due to their multiple minoritized identities (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995; Singh et al, 2020). For example, Black girls experience both racism and sexism in their schooling, which often subjects them to adultification with limited support from educators and school counselors (Byrd, 2021; Love, 2019; Mayes et al, 2021). Finally, the last tenet, counter storytelling, centers a joyful resistance and truth-telling for BIPOC youth.…”

“…Engage in implementing or teaching culturally responsive and antiracist school counseling approaches (Ladson-Billings, 2021). Approaches that center the narratives of BIPOC children and celebrate their cultural differences include but are not limited to: infusing an intersectional understanding of students (Mayes et al, 2021, 2022), postmodern career development approaches (Storlie et al, 2019), creative counseling approaches that center student voices (Byrd et al, 2021; Washington et al, 2021; Williams et al, 2019), and opportunities to dismantle racist policies (Cheatham & Mason, 2021). It is important that these approaches occur across school counseling training programs and at the practitioner level.3.…”

“When I Think of Black Girls, I Think of Opportunities”: Black Girls' Identity Development and the Protective Role of Parental Socialization in Educational Settings

“…One participant chose to end the interview during the first question and has been excluded from the analysis, resulting in a final sample of 12 adolescent Black girls (Mage = 13.66). Recent studies focused on Black girls' identity development and school experiences have been published with samples of a comparable size (Mims and Williams, 2020;Mayes et al, 2021;Rogers and Butler-Barnes, 2022), which further illustrates that this sample size (n = 12) is effective for examining our research aims. This investigation had an even split in which six of the participants were currently in middle school and six participants were currently in high school.…”

Liberatory school counseling practices to promote freedom dreaming for Black youth

“…simply because the results of their practices have been indistinguishable from the racist practices of the total society" (Smith, 1971, p. 348). While desegregation began nearly 70 years ago, school counseling practices continue to be indistinguishable from racism as counselors continue to overlook, exclude, and render Black youth as nonhuman bodies unworthy of support while perpetuating opportunity gaps and institutional racism (Drake and Oglesby, 2020;Gilmore and Bettis, 2021;Mayes et al, 2021;Washington et al, 2022). Anti-Blackness is particularly evident in the current literature that details the ways in which Black youth indicate the ways school counselors overlook their needs, refuse to work with them, and hold low expectations for their success rather than addressing the institutional policies and systems that trouble the waters (Gilmore and Bettis, 2021;Mayes et al, 2021).…”

“…While desegregation began nearly 70 years ago, school counseling practices continue to be indistinguishable from racism as counselors continue to overlook, exclude, and render Black youth as nonhuman bodies unworthy of support while perpetuating opportunity gaps and institutional racism (Drake and Oglesby, 2020;Gilmore and Bettis, 2021;Mayes et al, 2021;Washington et al, 2022). Anti-Blackness is particularly evident in the current literature that details the ways in which Black youth indicate the ways school counselors overlook their needs, refuse to work with them, and hold low expectations for their success rather than addressing the institutional policies and systems that trouble the waters (Gilmore and Bettis, 2021;Mayes et al, 2021). Anti-Blackness and the dehumanization of BIPOC students are a part of the troubled history of K-12 schooling which terrorized students through physical and psychological violence including forced assimilation [ (Miller, 2017;Gone et al, 2019;Peters, 2019;Austen and Bilefsky, 2021); e.g., residential schools for Indigenous youth, mass graves of Indigenous youth who were murdered in residential schools, inadequate resources and dilapidated structures for schools that serve high minority schools, and the model minority myth and anti-Asian violence].…”