Race-Based Epistemology

Since the early stages of the desegregation of United States schools in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the unique challenges of black females have given researchers unique challenges, posed fundamental questions, and necessitated debate over the treatment of gender and race-based two-tiered patriarchies (Fordham 3). Despite the increased focus on the black experience in public schools due to the civil rights movements of the 1960s and increasing focus on racial equality in United States public schools, black females were often either misrepresented or unclassified as a distinct group. Because feminist epistemologies tend to be concerned with the education of White girls and women, and raced-based epistemologies tend to be consumed with the
educational barriers negatively effecting Black boys, the educational needs of Black girls have fallen through the cracks (Evans-Winters 2010). The black female experience in United States schools is characterized by inequalities perpetuated by social stigmas, misrepresented archetypes, and fundamental patriarchies. This review examines the different literature on the black female experience in United States schools. Shortcomings are qualified, recommendations are discussed, and questions that still remain in the field are asked.

Signithia Fordham, one of the leading education scholars in the country, largely pioneered the growth of the race-based epistemology, focusing specifically on black females, with her experiences at “Capital High School”.
In 1993, she published a scholarly article that focused on the consequences of a fundamentally discriminatory school system for black females. Directly, she finds that the existence of a subversive, diverse womanhood among African-American women, juxtaposed with a two-tiered dominating patriarchy, influences and often adversely affects academic achievement (Fordham 5). She justifies this assertion through the line of reasoning that gender is repeatedly constructed and negated in culturally and racially stratified social systems. The desire for academic success combined with the negation or suppression of gender diversity among African-American females at Capital High compels them to silence and/or emulate the male dominant “Other” (Fordham 6). Fordham is arguing that because of the social stigmas, misrepresented archetypes, and fundamental patriarchies surrounding black females in United States schools, they are compelled to “pass”, or to impersonate White males and females, to achieve academic
success.

In 2010, Venus E. Evans-Winters & Jennifer Esposito counter Fordham’s assertion that “passing” is inherently negative or generates a two-tiered patriarchy. They argue, instead, that black females positively embrace the strong positive black female identity or male “Other” (Evans-Winters 14). The central proposition of the scholarly article is that the scholars studying black females often make comparisons to other race or gender-based groups, ignoring the fundamental problems facing black females. The use of comparisons has effectively defined black femininity, which results in further implications (Evans-Winter 18). Jamilia J. Blake, Bettie Ray Butler, Chance W. Lewis, and Alicia Darensbourg in January 2010 found that many of the behaviors Black girls were cited for seemed to defy traditional standards of femininity and closely paralleled the behaviors of stereotypical images of Black women as hypersexualized, angry, and hostile. This resulted in Black girls’ risk for exclusionary discipline being far greater than White girls, with Black girls more likely to receive discipline practices that remove them from the classroom than other girls (Blake 100).

A practical example of these gendered and racialized stereotypes negatively affective black females would be the “good girl” and “bad girl” dichotomy chronicled by Monique W.
Morris in Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools. Black girls are seen as “bad girls” because of what they wear, how they speak, and how they behave. In a 2013 scholarly article, Morris further articulates that the struggle to remove the vestiges of segregation fro US schools often under-theorizes the separate and unequal nature of education for youth in secure confinement, and the potential relationship between these facilities and the school push-out that occurs among youth of color in district and community schools (Morris 5). She elucidates this dichotomy by arguing that while academic underperformance and zero tolerance policies are certainly critical components of the pathways to confinement for Black girls, a closer examination reveals that Black girls may also be criminalized for qualities that have been long association with survival (Morris 5). Because of the social stigmas, misrepresented archetypes, and fundamental patriarchies in existence in United States schools, black females are disproportionately disciplined because they exhibit characteristics correlated with “bad
girls”.

Part of the problem associated with analyzing the black female experience is that the methods to record misrepresentations and patriarchies largely doesn't exist. As Crystal Gafford Muhammad and Adrienne D. Dixson find in 2008, because there is little analysis of the educational performance of young Black females except for in comparison to White females and Black males, educational researchers have little research to explain who young Black girls are as students (Muhammad 164). This is due to the fact that currently, the best accounts contemporarily are rich, thick descriptive pieces, which in spite of their rigor are of limited generalizability due to their sample size (Muhammad 164). Until broader statistical analyses are completed, fundamental questions will still remain in the field.

Ultimately, the black females impacted by the inequalities created through misapprehensions understand the installed patriarchal structures that inhibit their success in United States schools. Carmen Kynard provides a window into the color-consciousness black females have in a narration and analysis of a website where black students share stories to fight against institutional racism. This is best represented by a sample of conversation Kynard observed from the website she calls hush harbor. “You know what, Americans think Black women don't know how to eat right … Now, I’m not one to talk since I eat from the truck, but … eating healthy required money and access to the right distribution venues … are these workshops gon teach us how to organize for this in our communities or just lecture us, yet again. on everything we be too dumb to do right [sic]” (Kynard 37). The discourse black females have about their experience in United States schools explicates many of the social stigmas, misrepresented archetypes, and fundamental patriarchies that exist.