Urban Girls Revisited: Building Strengths

11. Uncovering Truths, Recovering Lives: Lessons of Resistance in the Socialization of Black Girls

11 Uncovering Truths, Recovering Lives Lessons of Resistance in the Socialization of Black Girls Janie Victoria Ward For more than 10 years I have collected stories from parents of Black daughters and sons. Taken together, these stories provide a rich mosaic of ingenious resistance strategies that Black folks infuse into their daily routines of child rearing. In 2000, I published The Skin We’re In: Teaching Our Children to Be Emotionally Strong, Socially Smart and Spiritually Connected, based on research from a core set of qualitative interviews conducted in four cities in the United States. In this data set, which took place in the early and mid-1990s, about 70 African American parents of Black adolescents (though not necessarily in the same families) were individually interviewed in Boston, Massachusetts; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Raleigh, North Carolina; and Albuquerque, New Mexico. They were recruited through a number of formal and informal means, including recruitment letters sent to local Black churches, after-school programs, professional organizations (i.e., Jack and Jill, Black Women’s Service Clubs), and word of mouth. The primary focus of the interviews centered on the questions, “Do you speak to your Black daughters/sons (or do your parents speak to you) about racial matters and why?” I asked parents (and adolescents) to talk about why and how these conversations take place in their families, and what was learned in these discussions. Interview topics included generational differences in perceptions of racial matters, racial identity, gender socialization, and race-related moral development. I interviewed each adult and teenager for 60 to 90 minutes. These interviews were audiotaped and later transcribed. A wide range of parenting experiences was represented in this group. Parents ranged from 35 years old to more than 65 243 years old at the time of interview. A few of the parents that I talked to were also grandparents, and some of the teenage women interviewed were also mothers themselves. Socioeconomically, they ranged from Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) recipients to high-salaried corporate executives. Parents’ educational status was similarly diverse, ranging from high school dropouts to university doctorates. In analyzing the interviews, I employed a grounded theory approach (Strauss & Corbin, 1998) in which I looked for trends and patterns in interviewee responses that I thought might contribute to an understanding of how parents of teenage children and teenagers themselves understand , enact, and communicate the experience of race-related socialization in African American families. Adopting an integrative approach, I sought to uncover the respondents’ interpretations and understandings of racial socialization expressed in their own words and on their own terms, using a process of cross-participant analysis in which I compared participants’ responses to reveal what I call narratives of resistance. These are a compilation of stories, directives, and pronouncements about the importance of resistance to the psychological and social well-being of Black children and youth. Since the mid-1990s, I have continued to collect data from African American, Afro-Caribbean, and African girls. The young women I have taught, in my role as a college instructor, have contributed a variety of written materials to my studies of resistance, including autobiographical statements and essays and reports based on their own research findings exploring the topic of racial socialization in Black families (see Garrod, Ward, Robinson, & Kilkenny, 1999). More recently, I have been in conversation with Black girls (and other girls of color) in an urban, communitybased girls sports program. These preadolescent and adolescent girls have broadened my understanding and appreciation of the constructive connections made between adults and girls that enable girls to interpret dominant , mainstream knowledge claims about race, gender, and social class and to challenge them when appropriate. Raising Resisters: What Have We Learned? In my 1996 chapter “Raising Resisters: The Role of Truth Telling in the Psychological Development of African American Girls,” published in the first volume of Urban Girls, I provided examples illustrating the centrality 244 c h a p t e r 1 1 of resistance in the psychological development of African American girls. Building on the work of social psychologists studying racial socialization in youth (e.g., Thornton, Chatters, Taylor, & Allen, 1990; Bowman & Howard, 1985; Branch & Newcomb, 1986; Marshall, 1995; Spencer, 1983; Spencer & Markstrom-Adams, 1990; Spencer, Swanson, & Glymph, 1997), I argued that the refusal to allow oneself to become stifled by victimization or to accept an ideology of victim blame requires the development of a critical perspective on the...