Teaching Black Girls: Resiliency in Urban Classrooms by Venus E. Evans-Winters (review)

At the heart of Evans-Winters’s fascinating treatise on the education of black girls lies one idea: just how compatible are the seductive aspects of postmodernist theory (with its rejection of binaries, universal truths, and meta-narratives) with the explicit and unapologetic politics of black feminist theory?

Evans-Winters finds postmodernist theory useful for criticizing the ways in which resiliency in educational settings has traditionally been framed. Historically, Evans-Winters argues, resilient students have been described as the students who have best been able to adopt the values of the white middle class. Thus, Evans-Winters refuses what she sees as the meta-narratives that have been developed around educational resiliency: she rejects John Ogbu’s widespread theory that African Americans necessarily adopted an oppositional stance towards education in order to protest oppression, and she points out that referring to African Americans’ educational outcomes in terms that imply a perpetual state of deficiency is problematic.

To truly understand resiliency and education, particularly as it pertains to low-income children of color, requires complexity, and Evans-Winters’s postmodern approach allows for insight; Evans-Winters’s three-year study of black adolescent girls neither victimizes them nor ignores the racism, classism, or sexism they face. Evans-Winters, by making it clear she both belongs to the community (she grew up in circumstances similar to those of Nicole, Zora, and Ysis, the girls whom she interviews) and is removed from it (towards the end of her book, Evans-Winters notes the importance of dressing professionally and using language that reminds the girls that while she understands the latest slang and style of dress, they are not quite peers). Thus, her ethnography reveals fluent and complicated acts of code-switching, as she juxtaposes the language of the girls she studies with academic-specific jargon.

Still, while Evans-Winters’s juxtaposition of voices, rejection of binaries, and personal acknowledgment that she can be both a researcher of and a participant within the community she studies, marks the book as postmodern, it becomes more difficult to maintain this postmodern approach as the book continues. At one point or another either Nicole, Zora, or Ysis experiences the loss of a caretaker, sexual harassment, or the imprisonment of a close relative, and the reality of the racial and sexual oppression these girls face seems to exist as indisputable truths rather than factions of a conflicted postmodernist debate about power and control. Furthermore, the book’s title suggests an over-arching narrative. It is true that the three girls Evans-Winters studies have different talents and personalities, but because the girls all come from the same place (the small city of Haven, Illinois), all appear to exhibit heteronormative behavior, and all have very similar economic backgrounds, the book at times elides differences and enforces a homogeneity upon black girls’ academic experiences that perhaps does not truly exist.

Evans-Winters’s proscriptions for creating resiliency attempts to address the problems of a “one-size fits all” solution by pointing out how educators, families, and the girls themselves can each do their part to promote resiliency. Teachers, Evans-Winters argues, must gain empathy, learn to recognize different forms of resiliency, and value the creativity existing in the communities in which they teach; students must utilize community resources and develop “muse” partnerships—in which the students identify their own mentors and participate in on-going conversations with them—rather than more typical mentor-directed relationships; families should strive for a low mobility rate (that is, move less), maintain strong bonds, and share with their children their strategies for combatting racism and oppression.

Some of these solutions may sound familiar and Evans-Winters’s proscriptions might be less than postmodernist, but this remains a worthwhile read for anyone interested in education and social change: the sincerity with which Evans-Winters wants to enact positive social change and guide these girls towards a happy, self-empowered womanhood can be felt on nearly...