School as a Hostile Institution: How Black and Immigrant Girls of Color Experience the Classroom

Abstract

The paradox of girls’ academic gains over boys, across race and class, has perplexed scholars for the last few decades. Through a 3-year longitudinal ethnography of two predominantly economically marginalized and racially minoritized schools, I contend that while racially marginalized girls may have made academic gains, school is nevertheless a hostile institution for them. Focusing on the case of Black girls and recent immigrant girls of color, I identify three specific ways in which school functions as hostile institution for them: (1) gendered racial harassment from teachers, (2) erasure of intellect, and (3) estrangement within their communities. Furthermore, the denigration of immigrant girls becomes the conduit for misogynoir. I find that the gains of some racially marginalized girls in school often justify hostility against all of them. Bringing into conversation a feminist analysis of schooling that rejects girls’ educational gains as ubiquitous evidence of a gender revolution with a Black-colonial education framework that emphasizes schooling as a technology of oppression, I explore the current role of school as a hostile institution for Black girls and immigrant girls of color.

Constructing Latinidad as a constrained credential: Anti‐Blackness and racialized inequities in a majority Latinx middle school

“…Even as "good Latinx" narratives legitimated Latinx youths' access to greater resources, including mental health services, educators mobilized other discourses that not only homogenized Latinidad but also cast Latinxs as deficient in some way. While extant literature highlights that newcomer immigrants often exhibit "better" behavior or appear more "deserving" than native-born peers (Ray, 2022;Valenzuela, 1999), this study reveals educators linking Latinidad with emotional excessiveness in newly arrived non-Black Latinx youth, striving to mold them into the "good Latinx" subject. While similar to the racialized depiction of Black youth as unmotivated or aggressive, the key difference is that even the perceived deficiency of Latinidad allows access to resources, albeit with simultaneous marginalization.…”

Understanding the assignment: the lived experiences of Black girls at a predominantly white independent school

“…Black girls also encounter misunderstandings and invisibility in STEM education, impeding their participation and success in these fields (Wang, Henry, Wu, Del Toro, and Huguley, 2020). Furthermore, they are often subjected to sexual harassment and their intellectual contributions are erased or devalued in the classroom (Ray, 2022).…”

An Exploratory Investigation of the Experiences of Navigating Campus Resources of Black Immigrant Women in Engineering

“…The idea of monolithic Black female identity needs to be de-constructed. A specific focus on the Black immigrant women's college experience in engineering appears to be lacking within the literature even though there are some studies dedicated to Black immigrant students' experiences in education [10,11] Even though this space is not much explored, recently, a research study revealed that Black and immigrant girls of color experienced gendered racial harassment, erasure of intellect, and hostility in school [12]. The research questions guiding this study are: What are the experiences of utilizing available on-campus support of the Black immigrant women pursuing Engineering?…”

“…According to a study, Black girls and immigrant girls were twice more likely to repeat a grade, be suspended, and be expelled than their White female and White male peers before even acquiring a high school diploma [10]. We expanded on the Critical Race Feminism framework and introduced immigration status and socio-economic status as marginalized intersectional identities that interact with race and gender.…”