In This Autoethnographic Narrative Study, I Relay My Lived

Both, Brown and Pilar Brown, help to bring the Black woman narrative forward in these recent exhibitions. When I see their work I see myself. I follow the clues of their contemporary aesthetics to read the narrative of objects,understanding that the littlest things have the biggest significance. That those old pictures and junk found in granny’s house are actually

(p 64). The author states, “This interior space of self-definition draws us into the complicated gender and class spaces of racial othering. Thus, conceiving of Black people, men and women, as historical and material subjects,” (p 64).

Throughout American history, people have been categorized based on what gender they are, and what their race is. In order to explore these ideas and come to terms with their importances many musicians, film makers, and authors have described the inner-workings of this societal construct. Indeed, both racial and female identities have been at the epicenter of many works of art throughout American culture as can be seen in: Maggie: A Girl of the Streets by Stephen Crane, film “Modern Times,” Bessie Smith’s “T’ain’t Nobody’s Bizness If I Do,” and James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.

More specifically, how intersecting identities, that previous studies have neglected due to a lack of focus on intersectionalism, affect the way in which African Americans girls experience education and how their educational environment responds to them.

bell hooks is motivated to write Seeing and Making Culture: Representing the Poor based on her experiences of how they have been misrepresented. She knows firsthand what it is like to be poor and how difficult it can be. During her college years, she spent a great deal of her holidays with black women who knew hooks came from a poor family and were poor as well. These women were the ones to support and affirm to become educated in order to move beyond the world they lived in and the one she came from (hooks 432).

My mother’s valuable life lessons made me an analytical young scholar and a head-strong campus leader and activist. Now as a graduate student and an educator in an urban school district, I often reflect on the ways my voice was criminalized and stifled voice during my K-12 experience. Watching my Black female students endure the same type of pushout from their teachers like I did, I began to question what our educational systems are doing to our girls. Seeking answers, I soon grew frustrated with the lack of gender and race based studies for Black girls in urban school settings. We were trapped in the juncture of race and gender—where studies on Black youth focus primarily on issues encountered by Black boys and the studies on girls gives attention to the challenges faced by White girls. Because of the absence of information on Black girls, many often make the assumption that Black girls are not up against some unique challenges of their own—which is far from the

During the third season of When Calls the Heart, I became the unofficial interviewer of the Hope Valley Kids, probably because I interviewed so many of them. And Jaiven Natt was definitely in that group. With his return to the series this year, we have continued to see his skill and character expand and deepen, so I recently had the supreme opportunity of chatting with him yet again, and this time, we had a decidedly different, but engaging interview covering a wide variety of topics.

In the Africa American culture, there has been a longstanding discussion of the black woman’s physical appearance and how they identify themselves in society. Though there are many themes of the Black experience in the media that discuss the standard of beauty Black women should have. However, theatre has a creative and tactful way of exploring these topics that are considered taboo in the African American culture. During the Black Arts Movement, topics such as black empowerment and self-identity were the blue print for what the movement stood for. In reference to, A Brief Guide to the Black Arts Movement Writers, “African American artists within the movement sought to create politically engaged work that explored the African American cultural and historical experience” (A Brief Guide to the Black Arts Movement Writers.1). Prolific writers such as, Ntozake Shange 's, Amari Baraka, and Nikki Giovanni, just to name a few, were revolutionary in a creative and political movement, which allowed for writers and poets to demonstrate the pains and qualms of what African Americans faced in Western society. Two African American playwrights, Lorraine Hansberry and Adrienne Kennedy, expounded on these topics in their plays A Raisin in the Sun and Funny House Negro. In the further exploration of stigmas of African American female hair and self-identification through theatre, these plays will be used as a platform to

Current Black feminists concur with the intersectional analysis approach to provide a crucial lens for reframing and creating new knowledge in recognizing the variations within marginalized groups to assert new ways of studying power, inequality, and ignorance (Collins & Bilge 2016; Collins, 2000; Lorde, 2014; Smith, 1982; Thornton-Dill & Zambrama, 2017). In order to bridge this tension between the White K-12 institution and Black women in art education, there is a need to better understand intersectional lens of race and gender that ignores race and gender. In this dissertation proposal, I question how White ignorance provides a deeper understanding concerning the multidimensionalities of Black women, and how these multidimensionalities are translated in the field of art education. As I question the biases between race and gender, I am viewing

Thomas Jefferson once said, “Blacks could deliver themselves of spontaneous bursts of emotion, but were incapable of the intellect and concentration that great art requires.” (Cook, Tatum, 2010). It is widely believed that people of African descent could not read poetry or understand art, let alone create them. Both Alice Walker and Patricia Smith are two great examples of how far, not only as African American have come, but also as African American Women. Whether white, black, or brown we all want to fit in. That is why I chose Alice Walker’s short story, “The Welcome Table” and Patricia Smith’s poem, “What It’s Like to Be a Black Girl.” They both have similar, yet different of setting a tone, imagery, symbolism, and point of views of how it feels to be an outcast. The main theme is about racism. Another theme is about black women who long to escape and be free, but cannot have that freedom because of the society they live in.

I think that my family realized that I had crossed the threshold between childhoods when I began to form my own opinions. This first took hold when I took part in poverty stimulation at my local shelter. I was giving a character and a story behind the card I was given; the story made me become emotionally attached to this name I had been assigned and the family in which I came from. The experience made me question the prejudice of the society I was living in. How many times had I avoided eye contact with the people on the side of the road begging for money? I began a long journey of soul searching and questioning the beliefs my parents had raised me on. My thoughts were continually brought back to a book by C.S Lewis, it was called Out of the Silent Planet; a character named Weston believed that individual human lives don’t matter, they must be sacrificed to save mankind.

These racialized images and visual codes continue to produce a meaning placed by the gaze from the White American colonizers created for viewers to take part of the convoluted discussions comprised of the social process and practices of interpretation (Sturken and Cartwright, 2009). I theorize these fabrications of Black women only heighten stereotypes that depend on historical myths and the viewers’ cultural knowledge. The White gaze reproduces racial codes that have transformed into the classroom and school’s climate. I incorporate Jennifer Martin’s (2015) discussion of racial battle fatigue (RBF) of dealing with the daily environment of microaggressions whether intentional or not and its effects on Black female art educators’ identity. I plan to include Berry’s (2010) Critical Race Feminism (CRF) to explore my story as a teacher and artist to counter the master narrative of domination. I share Thorton Dill and Zambrana’s (2017) intersectional scholarship, examining the exclusion and constraints exhibited in the lives and experiences of Black women. I will explore the gap in feminist art education in the secondary education environment that excludes the Black female artists. I realize the importance of how graphic narratives can illustrate stories visually that may not communicate clearly through words. The significance of the study is to provide a critical feminist lens to interrogate the visual narrative of race, class, and gender disparities of Black female art educators in secondary

In an effort to change this objectification, O’Grady suggests that female artists must begin to reconstruct the subjectivity of black female subjects in art. They should reclaim the black female body as something to embrace and admire rather than just glance over. It is a slow and steady process but a necessary one. Furthermore, she strongly argues that the artist must do so even if her audience is uncomfortable with it because it is the best method to deconstruct a pre-existing idea of the black female subject.

As mentioned in the introduction, racial segregation exists in the educational area; not every black people has an opportunity to pursue a high degree but Tiana did. Tiana’s experience and cultural identity motivated her to explore the ways in which minority groups were formed in the U.S., figure out the social, economic, political and sexual realities of women of color, and understand how race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality intertwine and impact women of color. With knowledge about race and gender, Tiana finds her life goal, which is to devote herself to the feminism and racial

I chose to break the norm of either smiling at strangers or giving them a neutral look when you make eye contact. I decided to give every stranger I passed a confused look like they had just spoken to me in another language. I must admit, this made me feel a bit goofy. I was on the fence as to whether or not to do this in the first place but I decided I just had to. The responses I received were quite comical. A few people asked if I was alright, and one person even asked if I had a problem with them.