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NWSA Journal 13.2 (2001) 123-141



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Charting Ourselves: Leadership Development with Black Professional Women

Toni C. King and S. Alease Ferguson


Preface

Say the knowledge-holders, persons off base with the center cannot chart themselves.

--Peters 1983, 20

How African American female professionals learn to support individuals and groups in a healthy and catalytic fashion has everything to do with how they themselves are first willing to create and gain access to support vehicles that seed self-revelation and promote their own knowledge of self in relation to others. An ongoing commitment to developing the self is paramount to the establishment of an identity that is centered and grounded. The use of same raced, gendered, dyadic relationships, sister circles, therapeutic interventions, and mentoring relationships is a first step. This process is the precursor to obtaining analogs to optimize self-definition and relational positioning. Attending to such personal housekeeping allows for the dissolution of toxic interactions derived from stereotypes, negative interjections, destructive projections, character assaults, delimitations of opportunity, an absence of reciprocity, silencing, or relegation to a dominant-culture-defined placement. In short, it is the processing of raced-gendered and class-related interactions that serves as the nexus to both personal liberation and the capacity to teach others the process of uplift.

Over the last fifteen years we have hosted fifteen bonding retreats for African American professional women. Our collaborative blend is rooted in being African American women. Toni C. King is an African American associate professor of Black Women's Studies at Denison University who holds a joint appointment in Black Studies and Women's Studies. S. Alease Ferguson is an African American therapist and consultant who has extensive experience in organizational and community development. Each of us has attained licensure for clinical practice. In addition, we both hold Ph.D.s in organizational behavior and we began collaborating as professionals more than a decade ago while attending the same doctoral program.

The field of organizational behavior is an interdisciplinary one, drawing from psychology, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and management science. While our counseling backgrounds have provided us with paradigms to understand individual development across the life span, [End Page 123] organizational behavior guides our interdisciplinary analyses of individuals in the context of micro- (e.g., relationships, small groups) and macro-level (e.g., organizations, communities, and societies) systems.

Organizational behavior also has a strong tradition of action research and encourages scholars/practitioners to become change agents who work in and with communities for social change. These aspects of the discipline are congruent with our values and commitments, particularly our commitment to support black women's individual growth and actualization in society.

This article takes a glimpse into one of those retreats. Thirteen African American women of professional status from Ohio and Michigan gathered together in a cabin, in the woods of Camp Mueller, 22 miles outside of Cleveland, Ohio. Their careers spanned medicine, social service, legal services, and public relations. They discussed their early years and specifically their memories of bonding with other black girls prior to adolescence. The facilitators were struck by their attention to each other, as one woman's discussion easily led other women to respond with experiences of their own.

Prior to this discussion we placed familiar childhood objects around the lawn that surrounded the cabin. The objects included things generally associated with girlhood play such as a jump rope, jacks, a coloring book and crayons, bubble soap, paper dolls, and a hula hoop. We asked the women to move silently around these objects and interact with any item they chose and to also interact non-verbally with any of the other women. After 15-20 minutes, we gathered in the cabin to talk. Thus began the process we refer to as Deep Talk.

Maya Angelou has described Deep Talk as a West African concept that is an ever-deepening spiral of conversation (King 1998, 1). With Deep Talk, there is no end point or answer, but a sustained level of revelation and discovery. We use the concept here to refer...

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