Towards Black Gaze Theory: How Black Female Teachers Make Black Students Visible
Diamond Howell
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Aaminah Norris
Sacramento State University
Krystal L. Williams
The University of Alabama
*In this paper, we choose to capitalize Black because we refer to Black as a race of people who are connected by a shared history and culture. Through capitalizing Black, we are taking a political stance against an ever-shifting category of domination and we aim to decenter whiteness.
Damage-centered research (Tuck, 2009) dehumanizes Black people by focusing on disparities rather than cultural capital. Moving away from theories that frame blackness as a deficit, we turn to Black women teachers and educators and their humanizing pedagogies as experts in cultivating cultural wealth of Black children, youth, and families. Building on Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 2014), Community Cultural Wealth (Yosso, 2015), and Black Feminist Thought (Collins, 2000) we look towards Black female teachers and the ways that they mentor and humanize Black students to lay the foundation for Black Gaze Theory as a framework that 1) shifts conceptions of Black children away from a white gaze laden with “amused contempt and pity” (Du Bois, 1994, p. 2) to sociopolitical consciousness and 2) describes the cultural wealth of Black children and youth.
Keywords: Black girls, Black female teachers, culturally relevant pedagogy, community cultural wealth, Black feminist thought
Deficit models that include sociopolitical and sociohistorical structures which have diminished Black people’s history and culture are prevalent in social science and education research (Carrol, 2017; Howard, 2013; Milner, 2008; Nasir, 2012). One notable framework that helps us understand the influence of racism on the lived experiences of Black people is the concept of double consciousness written by W.E.B. Du Bois (Bruce, 1992; Du Bois, 1994; Vickery, 2016). Du Bois (1994) explains:
It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking
at one’s self through the eyes of other, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a
world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness – an
American, a Negro, two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two
warring on one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn
asunder. (p. 2)
Du Bois’ depiction of double consciousness illustrates that white gaze is a process that negatively influences the lived experiences of Black people who remain at war with its dominant impact. Through double consciousness, Du Bois addresses the complexity of white gaze on the Black experience: the influence of white supremacist ideology on the production of stereotypes; de facto segregation; and racist policies that hinder and construct the daily existence of Black people as outside of normative culture. In the more than 100 years since Du Bois’ framing of double consciousness, the detriment of white gaze on Black experience has been researched and theorized within the literature (Burt, Williams & Smith, 2018; Dumas, 2016; Howard, 2013; Moynihan, 1997; Seldon, 1999; Vickery, 2016; Williams, Burt, Clay & Bridges, 2018). We used Du Bois’ conceptualization to inform our understanding and lay a foundation for how to articulate white gaze. In this paper, the authors discuss the pervasiveness of white gaze and how it renders the experiences of Black girls and women invisible. More importantly, in contrast to white gaze which erases Black lived experiences, we propose Black Gaze Theory as an approach to seeing Black student’ behaviors as cultural assets that are both understood and valued by Black women teachers who foster sociopolitical consciousness. To define sociopolitical consciousness, we draw on Ladson-Billings (1994, 2014) who frames it as the ability to connect curricular content to real-world problem solving. Since Black girls and women have been rendered invisible in education and social science research (Johnson, 2015), we focus our attention on the ways that exemplary Black female teachers, identified in the literature, have mentored and humanized Black students to lay the foundation for Black Gaze as a theoretical framework. Through this effort, we hope to disrupt the pervasiveness of white gaze in traditionally dehumanizing institutions of education as we provide possibilities for what schools can and should do for all students, specifically Black students. We turn towards the expertise of Black female teachers and educators as trailblazers in this work.
Literature Review
The Impact of White Gaze on Black Girls and Women
Before we attempt to understand the potential contributions of Black Gaze Theory, we must first demonstrate the impact of white gaze. We begin by paying homage to Linda Brown who epitomizes the impact of white gaze on Black girls’ struggle for racial justice and inclusion. In March, 2018, at the age of 76, Linda Brown passed away. As a child, Brown was denied entrance into an all-white elementary school in Topeka, Kansas (Biography.com, 2018; History.com, 2009). The landmark case brought by her father, Brown vs. Board of Education, ended de facto racial segregation in United States’ schools. Despite nearly seventy years since Brown first attempted to integrate her elementary school in Kansas, there is still no pedagogical agenda for the education of Black girls (Johnson, 2015). Moreover, research on Black women in the social sciences and related fields is severely lacking (Alexander-Floyd, 2012; Crenshaw, 1991; Johnson, 2015). In fact, according to Johnson (2015) who conducted a thorough analysis of social science, policy, and education literature, Black girls have been rendered invisible. Johnson (2015) points out, “until recently, many researchers (who were primarily White, male, and middle class) had the assumption that all Blacks were alike and so are women” (p. 29). As a result, researchers neglected to conduct research on Black schoolgirls, and educators failed to develop best practices for their educational success. Thus, focusing on a perceived monolithic experience of Black girls has afforded research to center white gaze on Black girls’ educational journeys. This has led to the development of disciplinary polices that criminalize Black girls in schools. The research centers on the ways Black girls are pushed out of school and into the criminal justice system (Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality, 2017; Johnson, 2015).
We posit that white gaze erases Black girls from educational literature and social science research because it stereotypes them for not conforming to white standards of femininity and criminalizes them for their blackness. Since the enslavement of Black people in the United States, Black girls have been viewed as adults who need not be loved and nurtured (Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality, 2017; Nyachae, 2016). This false concept causes adults to strip them of their childhood by either punishing or ignoring them (Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality, 2017; Johnson, 2015; Nyachae, 2016; Wun, 2015). Researchers and practitioners have elected to disregard the need for supportive practices and services for Black girls. Johnson (2015) asserts:
There has been no special educational research agenda, nor national consensus amongst scholars and practitioners regarding the girls’ particular educational needs. No standard profiles of African American female students circulate throughout the field; or a set of recognized pedagogical practices identified as being most effective with this group, despite more than twenty years of contemporary school reform, and the fact that Black girls have attended American schools in one form or another for roughly two hundred years. (p. 20)
White gaze renders Black girls invisible in literature and practice. When they do not conform to white standards of femininity, they are adultified, hyper-sexualized, and criminalized for their blackness (Epstein, Blake, & Gonzalez, 2017; Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality, 2017; hooks, 1992; Johnson, 2015; Wun, 2015). For Black schoolgirls, what this means is that as early as preschool, they are punished at alarming rates (Johnson, 2015; Wun, 2015). Throughout their educational trajectory, Black schoolgirls are increasingly pushed out of school and into the criminal justice system. Thus, “Black girls are recognized as being the fastest growing prison population in the juvenile justice system nationally today” (Jordan, 2015, p. 25). Collectively, these phenomena illustrate how white gaze stereotypes and erases Black girls’ potential for an educational agenda that focuses on their success and, instead, pushes these students into the school-to-prison pipeline.
Black girls are not the only ones who experience erasure. White gaze also obscures and diminishes the lived experiences of Black women (hooks, 1992; Johnson, 2015; Lorde, 1983). According to Epstein et al. (2017), Black women are stereotyped into “three dominant paradigms of Black femininity that originated in the South during slavery” (p.5). These are defined as:
● Sapphire--emasculating, loud, aggressive, angry, stubborn, and unfeminine
● Jezebel--hypersexualized, seductive, and exploiter of men’s weaknesses
● Mammy--self-sacrificing, nurturing, loving, asexual.
Dominant stereotypes limit conceptions and result in bias toward Black females. While stereotypes of Black women abound, Black womanhood is being consumed and appropriated by white people. bell hooks (1992) argues that white people appropriate Black culture consuming it out of lust for the other. White commodification and cultural appropriation results in an erasure of blackness. As hooks (1992) contends, the consequence of erasure is the eventual death of Black culture. hooks calls the process of cultural appropriation “eating the other,” arguing “[black women] are acutely aware of cinematic racism--its violent erasure of black womanhood” (p. 291). We would add that “violent erasure” of Black womanhood is more than cinematic. We argue that violent erasure is white gaze on Black females who are abused by a power dynamic that strips lived experiences through a process that ignores, stereotypes, and dehumanizes.
In 1983, Audre Lorde wrote “An Open Letter to Mary Daly” in which she details ways that Daly and other white women erase the experiences of Black women and other women of color (WOC) by using our stories for mere “decoration” or viewing us through a lens of “victimization” (p. 96). Lorde (1983) articulates, “The history of white women who are unable to hear black women’s words, or to maintain dialogue with us, is long and discouraging” (p. 96). Black women have painful experiences with both sexism and racism that white women do not. As Lorde (1983) contends, “for non-white women in this country, there is an 80% fatality rate from breast-cancer, three times the number of unnecessary eventurations, hysterectomies, and sterilizations as for white women. These are statistical facts, not coincidences nor paranoid fantasies” (p. 97). Lorde wrote her open letter more than three decades ago. More recent insights from Shreffler et al. (2015), in the US National Library of Medicine Institutes of Health, note that Black women are 40% more likely to die of breast cancer and twice as likely to be sterilized than white women. These numbers reflect that racism inflicted against Black women is detrimental to physical well-being (Lewis, Williams, Peppers, & Gadson, 2017; Williams, 1999). Yet, the lived experiences of Black women and girls continues to be neglected.
Asset-Based Understandings of Black Students, Families and Teachers: An Exploration of Existing Analytical Lenses
To undo the erasure of white gaze, Black girls and women’s experiences need to be represented in the literature and uplifted in such a way as to provide a path forward. To do so, we highlight the work of model Black women teachers and how their perceptions of Black students and their role in developing sociopolitical consciousness provides evidence of Black Gaze. We build on Yosso’s (2005) Community Cultural Wealth, Ladson-Billings’ (2014) Culturally Relevant Pedagogy, and Collins’ (2000) Black Feminist Thought to establish an analytical framework for understanding how students’ behavior might be viewed as cultural assets. Yosso (2005) posits six areas of capital that students of color bring to educational settings. She defines these types of cultural capital as follows:
● Aspirational capital refers to the ability to stay focused on hopes and dreams for the future, even in the face of real and perceived barriers.
● Linguistic capital includes the intellectual and social skills attained through communication in more than one language or style.
● Familial capital refers to cultural knowledges nurtured among ‘familia’(kin) that carry a sense of community history, memory, and cultural intuition.
● Social capital can be understood as networks of people and community resources.
● Navigational capital refers to skills of maneuvering through social institutions.
● Resistant Capital refers to the knowledge and skills fostered by oppositional behaviors that challenge inequalities. (p. 77-79)
The conceptual guidance offered in Yosso’s (2005) cultural capital framework provides a mechanism for understanding Black Gaze Theory and teachers’ view of Black students and their families. For example, contrary to what white gaze proposes, Black families invest in their children’s education. Black female teachers know that Black parents and communities view education as a means to navigate a racist country (Ware, 2006). Accordingly, Yosso (2005) provides a context for understanding 1) the resistant capital of Black families in their desire to employ education as a tool to challenge racist societal structures and 2) the value of education to Black families as it relates to acquiring the navigational capital necessary to be successful in United States’ schooling. Furthermore, as we discuss in the next section of this article, the pedagogical techniques employed by illustrative Black female educators and teachers evidence how they are attuned to students’ resistant and aspirational capital.
In addition to Yosso’s (2005) Community Cultural Wealth, Ladson-Billings’ (2014) Culturally Relevant Pedagogy also provides conceptual underpinnings for understanding the value of Black women teachers. Ladson-Billings (2014) offers the following description of three major components of this theory - academic success, cultural competence, and sociopolitical consciousness:
Briefly, by academic success I refer to the intellectual growth that students experience as a result of classroom instruction and learning experiences. Cultural competence refers to the ability to help students appreciate and celebrate their cultures of origin while gaining knowledge of and fluency in at least one other culture. Sociopolitical consciousness is the ability to take learning beyond the confines of the classroom using school knowledge and skills to identify, analyze, and solve real-world problems. (p. 75)
Black female teachers have implemented Culturally Relevant Pedagogy as a pedagogical approach to support Black students’ success. For example, Vickery (2016), conducted a multiple case study of two Black women social studies teachers finding that they drew on their cultural knowledge to develop curriculum that connected to students’ lived experiences. Black women teachers have employed culturally relevant practices because of their desire to connect Black sociocultural experiences with Black students’ classroom experiences (Coffey & Farinde-Wu, 2016; Vickery, 2016; Williams, 2018).
Completing our theoretical development, we turn towards Black Feminist Thought to examine how Black female teachers and educators use this framework in their practice. Collins (2000) defines Black Feminist Thought as a framework that:
fosters a fundamental paradigmatic shift in how we think about unjust power relations. By embracing a paradigm of intersecting oppressions of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation, as well as Black women’s individual and collective agency within them, Black feminist thought reconceptualizes the social relations of domination and resistance. (p. 273)
Black female teachers and educators are integral in impacting institutional and educational injustices (Bass, 2009). They are open and honest about teaching their students about discrimination, the sociohistorical construction of inequality and use this as the foundation for their pedagogy (Vickery, 2016). Therefore, we use the conceptual clarity offered by Community Cultural Wealth, Culturally Relevant Pedagogy, and Black Feminist Thought to reveal ways that exemplary Black teachers perceive Black students’ behaviors as cultural assets and to inform our framing of Black Gaze Theory.
The previous discussion outlined the concept of white gaze, and its detrimental impact on Black girls and women. We also detailed existing asset-based conceptual frameworks for reframing discussions concerning Black students and families, as well as the contributions of model Black women teachers. In the following sections, we outline the procedures we employed to review existing literature which informed our development of Black Gaze Theory. We also discuss the benefits of this framework for 1) understanding how Black female teachers’ pedagogical practices support Black students; 2) countering the impact of white gaze on the lived experiences of Black students in general and Black girls in particular, and 3) providing a foundation for how Black Gaze Theory can be practiced by critical educators and practitioners irrespective of their racial or ethnic identities.
Methodology
To develop a conception of Black Gaze Theory we conducted a selective literature review as a means to uncover examples of Black female teachers educating Black students. We reviewed articles from the electronic databases: Google Scholar, Ebsco Education Database, JSTOR, and ERIC using a search string with combinations of keywords including: Black Female Teachers, African American Female Teachers, Black Female Educators, and Black Students. The table below lists criteria for literature selected to help us understand Black Gaze Theory:
Table 1
Literature Review Selection Criteria
|
Provides examples of teacher-student interactions |
Published in peer-reviewed journals dated between 2008-2018 |
Analysis conducted within the United States |
Study discusses Black Female teachers |
To exemplify Black Gaze Theory, we chose to select examples of Black female teachers’ support of Black students. In doing so, our goal was to contribute to the literature that focuses on the experiences of Black girls and women within the United States. We also decided to focus on instances within the past decade, between 2008 and 2018, to look at the most recent scholarship. However, we also cited seminal research that provided significant contributions and predated 2008. For example, Evans (1992) provided concrete empirical data of Black female teachers as role models who positively influenced achievement of Black students. Qualitative studies were prioritized to give tangible examples of teacher perceptions. One unfortunate consequence of school integration was the loss of Black teachers. Fewer Black teachers can be found in schools educating Black children (ross et al., 2016). Hence, there is a dearth of literature on Black Female teachers (Bristol, 2018; ross et al., 2016). Thus, one goal of this paper is to exemplify how Black female teachers’ gaze can be beneficial for Black students. Researchers have found that educating Black people means honoring their experiences and connecting education to liberatory principles (ross et al., 2016). Therefore, we look towards the process of Black teachers teaching Black students to conceptualize Black Gaze Theory.
Black Gaze Theory: An Emerging Framework for Conceptualizing the Cultural and Sociopolitical Impact of Black Female Teachers and Educators on Black Students
We define Black Gaze Theory as the following--to perceive Black student’ behavior as a cultural asset that is understood and valued by Black women teachers who foster sociopolitical consciousness. This definition of Black Gaze Theory stems from a detailed review of literature that exemplifies illustrative Black women teachers and educators’ gaze on Black students. We posit that to move towards sociopolitical consciousness within and beyond schooling, we need Black Gaze on Black children. Researchers have found that Black female teachers and educators employ a gaze which sees students’ experiences through a cultural lens unlike the deficit perspective of white gaze. Black women teachers are invested in their profession because they empathize with the discrimination that Black students face, understand the nuances of “straddling” two worlds (Carter, 2006) and have gained insight from being “outsider[s] within” (Bass, 2009; Collins, 1986; Hill, 2007). They challenge education programs that center whiteness and ideologies that align with dominant students (Hill, 2007). Black female teachers and educators’ understanding of educational and systemic disparities makes them experts at identifying mechanisms “to liberate other oppressed people within their sphere of influence" (Bass, 2009, p. 620). For Black women teachers and educators, teaching is not viewed purely as a job, but as a means to improve the lives of Black students, their communities and American society overall (Hill-Brisbane, 2007; Vickery, 2016). Black women teachers’ pedagogies illustrate how their Black Gaze influences the educational experiences of Black students in academic environments.
Pedagogically, Black female teachers employ methods and practices that allow students to reach their full potential without forcing them to assimilate to a schools’ hidden curriculum (Anyon, 2006; Apple, 2012). Black female teachers recognize themselves in their Black students. Thus, they are more apt to understand them. For example, in a recent study, Farinde-Wu (2018) found:
Due to a shared cultural background and often shared experiences, [Black female] teachers’ perceptions of [Black] students and students’ behavior often did not produce severe disciplinary actions. Rather than issuing students discipline referrals and contributing to the disproportionate over-representation of Black students in school suspensions and expulsions (Skiba et al., 2011), the teachers in this study viewed classroom behavior through a cultural lens, influencing their students’ school experiences and perhaps their academic outcomes. (p. 261)
Accordingly, while white gaze would characterize Black students’ behavior in ways that disconnects students from the learning environment, Black Gaze employed by Black teachers allows them to relate to students in positive ways that do not disrupt students’ academic participation.
Scholars have also found that Black female teachers foster dynamic learning environments where students have distinct vibrant personalities and that these teachers have higher expectations about what their students can achieve in comparison to the average teacher (Farinde-Wu, 2018; Ware, 2006). Black female teachers and educators are “warm demanders” (Ware, 2006) and “othermothers” (Dixon, 2003) in their classrooms. Warm demanders are defined as teachers that “provide a tough-minded, no nonsense, structured and disciplined classroom environment for kids whom society had psychologically and physically abandoned” (Ware, 2006, p. 436). Furthermore, Dixon (2003) provides a synopsis of “othermothering” stating that the notion stems from teachers’ “sense of connectedness to the community, use of kinship terms when referencing their students (more specifically, their Black students), and a subversion of the school curriculum” (p. 230). While the classroom structure of Black women teachers and educators is often viewed by white gaze as abrasive and hostile, studies have shown that Black female teachers and educators are reflecting the authoritarian norms of Black caregivers within their classrooms (Bass, 2009; Ware, 2006). This care also branches into the guidance that Black female teachers and educators provide for their students’ families and often acts as “cultural bridge[s]” (Ware, 2006, p. 445) because these teachers understand dominant ideologies and the needs of the community (Bass, 2009). Within these teachers’ classrooms, community and school are not viewed as separate entities, but as reciprocal environments (Berry, 2005). They create assignments that afford students the ability to: 1) apply subject matter to their lived experience, 2) complete assignments in ways where students can authentically express themselves without conforming to white standards of academic success, and 3) intertwine students’ culture into curriculum instead of treating it as supplemental knowledge (Berry, 2005; Hill-Brisbane & Dingus, 2007; Ware, 2006).
Holistically, it is evident that Black women teachers have the capacity to be such influential educators because their practices are rooted in pride in their “cultural/racial identity” (Ware, 2006, p. 453). When honoring and staying true to their rich cultural backgrounds, the Black female teachers, we have highlighted in our review of the literature, afford Black students the same opportunity to stay true to themselves and be humanized in their classrooms. By exemplifying a process for making Black students visible, Black women teachers have shown us that it is possible to employ Black Gaze by supporting students’ ability to (re)claim the way that they want the world to view them, as well as create space to craft an authentic understanding of who they want to be. Our goal in evincing the processes by which Black Gaze Theory is modeled by Black female teachers and educators is to provide concrete examples of best practices for the education of Black children that can be taken up by critical practitioners and educators.
Conclusion
Black Female teachers and educators have shown us how to humanize Black students in their classrooms. Through acknowledging students’ culture as capital, creating learning environments that culturally align and affirm their students’ backgrounds, and continuing their legacy of being dedicated to transforming the lived experiences of Black people, Black female teachers and educators exemplify Black Gaze Theory. Black Gaze Theory is particularly important for (re)writing Black girls’ K-12 educational experiences. There is a dearth of educational research that provides implications for policies and practices that contribute to Black girls. Black Gaze Theory is an analytical tool that focuses on Black strength and problematizes structures that promote dominant ideologies.
The authors believe that it is also important to note that racial affiliation does not simply mean that a person employs Black Gaze. There are researchers, educators and practitioners that are blinded by white gaze, thus producing research that perpetuates marginalizing notions of Black youths’ worth, potential and behaviors. Therefore, one goal in proposing Black Gaze Theory is to exemplify ways that Black women teachers support Black students’ learning and disrupt the negative influence of white gaze. We contend that Black Gaze Theory has positive implications for the education of Black children because it focuses on Black students’ strengths and (re)imagines the future of Black youth.
As Black women critical theorists, the
authors acknowledge a need to follow Black female teachers and educators’ lead
in affirming the cultural assets and strengths of Black children and youth
through practical application of Black Gaze Theory. We recognize Black
women teachers and educators’ gaze as means of illuminating a path forward for
practitioners to draw on the powerful gifts of Black students in general and
Black girls in particular. Thus, we provide the following suggestions for the
practical implementation of Black Gaze Theory in both teacher
preparation and classroom instruction. Teacher preparation programs must
incorporate, culturally responsive pedagogy and Community Cultural Wealth as
frameworks that challenge future teachers to disrupt biases, engage
sociopolitical consciousness, and draw on the cultural assets of their students
(Howard, 2013; Paris & Alim, 2017; Yosso, 2005). Furthermore, teachers and
educators can replace the hidden and null curricula with explicit curriculum
that reflects the knowledge and contributions of Black students and acknowledges
the connections between communities and schools (Berry, 2005; Hill-Brisbane
& Dingus, 2007; Ware, 2006). Through application of Black Gaze as a
framework, practitioners can recognize and incorporate the strength and assets
of Black students in their classroom instruction. By taking up Black Gaze
Theory, critical researchers, practitioners and educators can embark on a
liberatory process that disrupts white gaze and its violent erasure of Black
students. Black Gaze Theory provides a path forward for critical scholars,
educators, and practitioners as they challenge white gaze and develop
pedagogical and research agendas that focuses on the lived experiences of Black
students in general and Black girls in particular.
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