When We See Us: An Endarkened Autoethnographic Approach to Excavating the Extraordinary Literacies of Black Women

Abstract

A frequent question amongst Black scholars and practitioners is how to succeed in institutions that thrive on our cultural erasure. How to unmask and survive. For Black women these questions are doubly significant. The questions we answer in our collaborative Blackgirl autoethnography have implications for how Black women scholars, and others navigating multiple social oppressions, must ritually turn inward to understand the rhetorical, spiritual, ancestral, and cognitive tools that we use to hold onto important parts of ourselves. Additionally, the field of qualitative research in education, steeped in its own complex settler colonial, and racially exclusive ideologies, has had little opportunity to be shaped by the extraordinary inner worlds of Black women. At the nexus of our orientations as Black and women, we utilize a collaborative approach to Blackgirl autoethnography, an endarkened feminist epistemological methodology, which insists on the epistemic shifts available to us when methodology is grounded in Blackgirl ways of knowing. Our autoethnographic excavation revealed the ways that our inner worlds offer blueprints for the kinds of social and pedagogical change necessary to agitate the colonial and carceral logics that mark the lives of Black women and girls in education.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Note: This writing style intentionally riffs off the opening quote.

2 U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights, 2014.

3 We rely on definitions of settler colonialism that emphasize its role as a structure that steals land to make it their home by “destroy[ing] and disappear[ing] the Indigenous peoples that live there” (Tuck & Yang, 2012, p. 6).

4 “Ratchet” derived from the term “wretched” is a derogatory term meaning ghetto or classless. The term is primarily weaponized against Black working-class women and refers to style of dress, linguistic choices, or modes of expression that are often coopted or caricatured in popular culture.

5 Italicized text in our life notes represent our metacognitive reflections through emotional recall memos about these documented experiences.