Pens Down, Don’t Shoot: An Analysis of How Black Young Women Use Language to Fight Back

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.

Human Rights Violations Through Structural Violence: A Case Study of Human Rights Education in New York City

“…In contrast to recent work that demonstrates the capacity of structural thinking to increase students' ability to historicize exclusionary and violent practices (see Hope et al, 2014;Schensul & Berg;2004) and make sense of how society is organized (see McArthur & Muhammad, 2020Seider et al, 2016, this research shows that the curriculum offered little feedback or opportunity to expand students' understanding of the structural and social conditions that produce human rights abuses. The curriculum did not support instruction related to the current systems of oppression-capitalism, colonialism, racism, sexism, nationalism-that connect apparently isolated events across time and space.…”

“…Both studies highlight structural violence as a productive avenue to historicize exclusionary practices and decode personal experiences of racism and discrimination. In racial Rodrı ´guez-Go ´mez and Russell literacy workshops, McArthur and Muhammad (2020) examine how three young Black women make sense of racism in the United States. Among other points, the study finds that in a space where girls thought and wrote collectively about ''power, oppression and privilege'' (p. 9), they recognized racism's historic and systemic dimensions and the direct implications it had over them and people who looked similar to them.…”

Humanizing Student–Teacher Relationships for Black Children: Implications for Teachers’ Social–Emotional Training

“…A growing number of scholars in the field of urban education compellingly argue the myriad ways U.S. schooling for Black youth is dehumanizing. A significant portion of this scholarship has been published in Urban Education (Coles, 2020;Dancy et al, 2018;Dumas & ross, 2016;Lindsey, 2015;McArthur & Muhammad, 2020). Dehumanization deprives human beings of the very qualities, attributes, or necessities that make them human beingsthe capacity to feel, to dream, to think or act autonomously, and to express their desires without fear of judgment or punishment.…”

Black Parade: Conceptualizing Black Adolescent Girls’ Multimodal Renderings as Parades

“…The girls in my study exhibited this same type of expression on their website, authoring narratives of Black girlhood that were informed by their understandings of their experiences both past and present. Their collective reading and writing practices led them to render articulations of themselves that were more than mere regurgitations of knowledge, but knowledge production (McArthur & Muhammad, 2020). Allowing Black girls to create without the constraints of rigid grading standards or teacher interference allows opportunities for collective authorship and learning experiences (i.e.…”