Confessions of a Light-Skinned Black Girl: An Academic Misfit

Abstract

This interpretive biography, presented as an autobiographical performance, is an exploration of myself as a Black female who has come to this work through the power and refuge provided by Black feminist thought and curriculum theory.  Within this piece I use Taliaferro’s (1998, p. 94) question, “What is it that we learn about our ‘selves’ as we exist in the imagination of others� I position my 13-year-old self and 28-year-old self in a conversation in which they discuss the moves made to resist the “inner eye†of the dominant world.  I use the imaginations of others as the sites for where I learned and continue to learn to resist and “talk back†against the “inner eye†of the dominant White society.  I conclude the paper with an analysis of curriculum theory as a field and discourse that has given me the tools to write myself into existence as a racialized subject.