Small Revolutions: Methodologies of Black Feminist Consciousness-Raising and the Politics of Ordinary Resistance

Abstract

While small, midwestern towns across the United States have become the center of the battle against Critical Race Theory and identity politics in education over the past several years, one small town in Michigan became the launching pad for a grassroots gender-consciousness program grounded firmly in the experiences of young Black women. The Gender Consciousness Project (GCP) has flourished into a program co-facilitated by previous participants across several schools in the metro Detroit area, all while national- and state-level discourse became increasingly hostile towards any material or theoretical support of Black women's lives. In this paper, we—the three pilot participants of GCP and one co-facilitator—return to the recordings of the first iteration of GCP to examine how exactly a small-town consciousness-raising project took root amidst these circumstances. We explore how the project cultivated, and how its primary facilitator and founder conceptualized, a Black feminist consciousness-raising methodology which centered the agency and capacity for consciousness of young Black women, or Black girls, specifically. Through this analysis, we offer that one such Black feminist consciousness-raising methodology is to spark small revolutions through the everyday possibilities for resistance and refusal of cooptation.