Imagining Black Womanhood: The Negotiation of Power and Identity within the Girls Empowerment Project

Conclusion

Conclusion Imagining Black Womanhood, Imagining Social Change I want to be able to have a free life. Some girls must think it is impossible . . . but I want to be able to reach my dreams and go right ahead and follow my goals. (Angela, GEP girl, age twelve) Where you live don’t make you be a different person, it’s how you want to picture yourself. (Alisha, GEP girl, age thirteen) I imagined this would be a really safe space to just be myself, and just be really valued and affirmed. (Cheryl, program coordinator, age twenty-five) Robin Kelley, in his book Freedom Dreams, suggests that our collective imagination may be the most revolutionary power available to us. Specifically, he writes “our imagination can enable us to imagine a new society, imagine something different, to realize that things need not always be this way” (Kelley 2002, 9). I titled this book Imagining Black Womanhood in an effort to highlight the powerful role of the imagination in Black women’s and girls’ identity work. Specifically, I wanted to emphasize the capacity of Black women’s and girls’ imaginations to “convert the given confines of here and now into an open horizon of possibilities” (Kearney 1998, 2) and to highlight the places where real girls must make sense of who they are in the midst of conflicting and often contradictory images and discourses of Black womanhood . I wanted to illustrate their desire and ability to dream their way to individual and collective freedom. Organizations such as GEP, while imperfect, are critical to the construction and maintenance of such dreams. They provide opportunities for youth 145 to “reframe and re-imagine not only the type of world in which we choose to live but also to reframe and re-imagine who we want to be in [the] world” (Ginwright 2008, 14). Through their work together, GEP women and girls created a space where they could step outside of dominant frames and representations of Black womanhood to construct nurturing bonds across lines of difference and imagine and articulate critical, albeit contradictory, race-classgender discourses. GEP served as a site of empowerment. Audre Lorde, however, cautions against one-sided celebratory tales of Black women’s support, connection, and empowerment and reminds us that Black women’s spaces of safety also can be fraught with tension. She writes: Often we give lip service to the idea of mutual support and connection between Black women because we have not yet crossed the barriers to these possibilities, nor fully explored the angers and fears that keep us from realizing the power of a real Black sisterhood. . . . We have not been allowed to experience each other freely as Black women in America; we come to each other coated in myths, stereotypes , and expectations from the outside, definitions not our own. (1984, 153) GEP was not an exception. Here Black women and girls had to imagine and negotiate who they were within the context of dominant and internalized representations that stereotyped them as sexually aggressive, deviant, and out of control—stereotypes that fostered the creation of GEP as a pregnancy prevention program and staff’s attempts to control GEP girls. In addition , GEP women and girls had to negotiate their class and generational differences and, consequently, power differences. The results of this negotiation had intended and unintended consequences that created opportunities for empowerment as well as experiences of increased marginalization. These contradictory results speak to the perfect imperfection of homeplaces. In this case study, I explored the “fragile and tenuous” nature of safe spaces in which groups come together to imagine and construct images of self across lines of difference. My claim that organizational context is critical in identity work has been borne out by evidence of GEP’s organizational power matrix reproducing and disrupting Black women’s and girls’ location within limiting discursive and power fields. I have attempted to move beyond essentialist arguments that suggest that race-gender sameness automatically creates spaces of empowerment. Instead, I have shown that Black women’s and girls’ identity work is about both empowerment and marginalization, shaped and structured not only by larger macro-structural forces but also by the organizational context within which their identity work occurs. 146 IMAGINING BLACK WOMANHOOD I found that while GEP was constructed as a space for girls’ empowerment , both women and girls made use of the organization to resist dominant representations of Black...