PIP [Power, Identity, and Privilege] was my foundation for activism. It gave me the knowledge,
-Shauna
the strength, and even the power to be able to advocate for my community on a larger scale
What does it mean to be a Girl of Color (GoC) activist in light of today’s socio-historical and political contexts? Shauna speaks to this through the ways that she translated the knowledge she gained into her activism. When GoC can challenge narratives that position them as deviant or deficit, outright denying them of their humanity, it sparks a consciousness that fundamentally shifts the way they see themselves, each other, and the world. The passion and purpose generated through this awakening play a crucial role in the will and determination to engage in individual and social change. Mariame Kaba proclaims, “The most important thing you can do to transform the world is to act. Taking action is a practice of hope.”[1] For Shauna, a course on Power, Identity, and Privilege (PIP) served as a catalyst and a compass, guiding her to seek further knowledge, strengthen her commitment to justice, and take action.
The girls we feature in this piece, like other GoC, contend with a host of issues in the current political landscape–ICE raids in their communities, travel bans against their home countries, regressive laws that strip girls and women of their bodily autonomy, bans on teaching truths about people of color, policies that control gender expression, threats and harms to their physical, emotional, and psychological safety, and the list goes on. These historical issues have been particularly exacerbated under the current U.S. administration, and as scholars committed to justice and the holistic well-being of GoC, we understand the value of educational spaces for girls to discover, explore, and grow in their activism. These settings are where GoC can gain a lens that both widens and narrows the scope of their socio-political critiques, allowing them to see clearly the factors, actors, and ideas that shape the material conditions of their lives.
We are Women of Color (WoC) who educate, research, and learn from, with, and alongside GoC and strive to create educational spaces like these for them and for us. This journey and our partnership have taken shape in many ways. In the learning spaces through our research projects, we have been honored with the trust of girls to share their stories and build theories upon their knowledge. Our relationships are grounded in reciprocity, calling us to share our own stories and truths with the girls as we weave a collective understanding of a world that often feels unsafe and that we struggle to navigate, yet still manage to believe in its inherent goodness. We take heed of the words of Alice Walker, who said, “I believe the Earth is good. That people, tortured by circumstance or fate, are also good. I do not believe the people of the world are naturally my enemies, or that animals, including snakes, are, or that Nature is.”[2] The girls we work with continue to teach us this very thing and move us to engage with one another with the assumption that people are good and worthy of dignified, healthy, and safe lives. We value a dynamic sense of care and community, which we have cultivated through our research (the Sadie Nash Leadership Project’s course on Power, Identity, and Privilege for Tashal[3] and the Lavender Girls Project for Shena[4]). Our scholarship is grounded in collaboration with GoC, who prioritize justice, liberation, solidarity, and joy.
This particular piece centers Tashal’s work with GoC participating in the Sadie Nash Leadership Project, where she sought to understand how they conceptualize and engage activism in their everyday lives. We envisioned this art piece as a tribute to the brilliance and truths of GoC and as a contribution to existing intersectional feminist theories and pedagogies developed by WoC artists, scholars, and activists. In it, we shine a light on their critical consciousness and examinations of oppression, as well as how they act as change agents to address injustice. In our work with GoC, we have had countless opportunities to bear witness to their transformations, including each other’s and our own. We grew alongside the girls in our understanding of the layered and interlocking nature of oppression as we applied theories to our lived experiences. Womanhood has given us a certain vantage point to understand much of our own experiences as girls, and we often observe, listen, and offer comfort and validation as the girls unpack similar types of pain and confusion from the silencing, exclusion, and erasure they face regularly.
This piece elevates how the Sadie Nash girls, through the PIP course, translate the knowledge they have woven together and mapped onto their realities, decisions, and commitments. We focus on how four girls enter dialogue and grow as activists through their engagement with social media, where they are able to raise their concerns about issues of injustice that impact them and girls like them. This piece is dedicated to Shauna and Rene, who both identify as Black/Jamaican American, and Ameena and Sabina, who both identify as South Asian, specifically Bengali American (include endnote stating that all names are pseudonyms). At the time of the study, Rene was a college junior and Shauna a high school senior; both were attending predominantly white institutions in the Northeast. Ameena and Sabina were high school juniors attending racially diverse schools in New York City. Their ideas are collectively featured to demonstrate their sensemaking, theorization, and solidarity around the harms they face, as well as their dreams for liberated futures for all GoC.
Poetic Collaging to Reveal Collective Visions of Justice and Freedom
Following in a long line of intersectional feminist thinkers, activists, and artists[5] as well as invoking and building upon the intergenerational knowledge that we crafted in a previous publication,[6] this piece is an offering to and a celebration of the critical consciousness, tenacity, and freedom fighting of GoC. In this poetic collage, we highlight the social media engagements of the Nashers related to their activism during November 2019 – January 2020 in resistance to oppressive forces that seek to dehumanize them and as an assertion of their humanity. Poetic collage is an arts-based mode of inquiry that blends collaging and poetry to illuminate the resistance, freedom fighting, and world-building of GoC and other historically marginalized peoples. We take part in this sensemaking process with our “participants” through the analytic lens that we bring as we collage their curations and offer up our poetic interpretations and readings of their experiences. Thus, in a way, our project is a co-construction/critique/analysis of the current state of affairs for GoC–through their social media engagements and our lens as intersectional feminist researchers and artists.
We began our collaging process by looking through each of the social media posts together and selecting those specifically related to social justice issues (e.g., sexism, racism, xenophobia), cropping sections that were meaningful and visually impactful to us. We then put the images together and collaborated to organize them according to our priorities as scholar-artists. Once we completed the collage, we examined individual sections as well as the entire piece and discussed patterns that we observed. We labeled sections of the collage with concepts and terms, such as “anti-capitalism” and “freedom fighting,” to convey the shared elements of the posts. While we did this, we themed the terms through a color-coding process to allow us to visually assess the prevalence of the concepts and determine their relationship with one another. At the end, we found that each theme was affirmed across multiple posts, with intersectional feminism being the most prominent concept throughout the collage.
Tashal wrote the poem by drawing on the themes present in the collage, along with statements gathered from the girls through their individual interviews. Shena then overlayed each stanza with sections of the collage to which they were relevant, ensuring intellectual coherence throughout the piece. Given their laser focus on issues impacting girls and women of color, we intentionally incorporated lines from intersectional feminist scholarship to situate the girls’ experiences, perspectives, and commitments within broader theoretical, empirical, and artistic conversations. Thus, the poem is an ongoing conversation between us, the girls, and other girls and women of color fighting for justice and humanity. It captures our critiques, sadness, anger, and fears while also holding fast to our joy, dreams, hope, and love for one another.
Feminist Praxis Embodied through the Activism of Girls of Color
As GoC who have participated in an educational space led by WoC and grounded in intersectional feminist praxis, Shauna, Rene, Ameena, and Sabina embodied a notion of leadership and activism informed by their lived experiences. The social issues they take on with ferocity are deeply connected to their racialized, gendered, and cultural experiences. At the same time, through sharing stories about their lives with girls and women of color in the context of Sadie Nash and the PIP course, a window was opened up, in which they could more clearly examine and articulate how social justice issues are intricately connected as power and oppression are woven into the fabric of society in the U.S. and globally. This transnational and intersectional perspective is evident in the ways they utilize social media to share and engage in conversations that encourage their peers to become informed and take action against injustices locally and beyond. Our poetic collage illustrates how the social media posts and words from the girls featured in this piece reveal a distinct approach to activism, world-changing, and freedom dreaming among today’s youth. From Shauna, Rene, Ameena, and Sabina, we learn how to be better activists – they teach us how to strengthen our solidarity, move more intentionally towards justice, and operate in radical care for all.
“Taking up Space——Imagining (Im)possibilities”
You, her, they, all of whom are intimately familiar with the resounding chorus of voices that
sayhername with disdain
Each of you serves as a witness to the wars raging within,
Along the streets outside your window
Across distant lands whose people and names resemble your own.
You ask
“What if I were living in China?”[7]
Iran–South Africa–Palestine
the U.S.
“What could have happened to me?”[8]
In your palm lies the proof
Reels of pain and turmoil that close the distance
You don’t need to imagine
You know that no matter where your feet are planted
“Home is both refuge and where your most intimate betrayals happen.”[9]
In the classroom, an arena where battles of the mind and spirit are waged
False narratives and silenced histories conceal the force controlling the tides
Concerted attempts to convince you to endure suffering, quietly, without protest
There are no blues for girls like you, they say. No rainbows either.
Girls of color have to fight
To be seen and heard
To be taken seriously
To be found among the missing
To exist as they are or dare to be
And when nobody is paying attention
Whispers of wisdom from those who have come before you
Cultivate a knowing that must be shared
And when spoken aloud
Or brought to life through vivid images and characters illuminated on screen
Call attention to our humanity
The tragedy and beauty
A reminder to keep searching for each other and ourselves
To dismantle the labels assigned to keep us apart
A fracturing we must commit to repair
a protection
a commitment
to resist
teach
learn
and dream
What you are fighting for needs “every one of us to come into being. It needs us all, needs our
remembering, understanding”[10]
This is what it looks like to take up space in the world as it is
while imagining other possibilities.
Notes
[1] Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba, Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2023): 15.
[2] Alice Walker, Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer’s Activism (New York: Random House, 1997).
[3] Tashal Brown has published several articles describing the experiences of girls participating in the Sadie Nash Leadership Project, including: Tashal Brown, “‘To Be Our Best Selves’: Critical Dialogue with Girls of Color about Their Experiences in a Social Justice Leadership Program,” Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy 20, no. 1 (2023): 63–89; and Tashal Brown, “‘I Never Really Had the Right Words’: Critical Literacies and the Collective Knowledge Building of Girls of Colour,” Curriculum Inquiry 52, no. 5 (2022): 496–517.
[4] Shena Sanchez, “Intersectional Justice for Adolescent Girls of Color: An Educational Pursuit,”
In Handbook of Social Justice Interventions in Education, ed. Cathy A. Mullen (Cham, Switzerland: Springer International, 2021): 1–28.
[5] Some of the following individuals and groups have been influential in shaping our commitments and approaches, including bell hooks, Grace Lee Boggs, Angela Davis, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Ruth Nicole Brown, Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, the Combahee River Collective, and many others.
[6] Shena Sanchez & Tashal Brown, “Introducing Poetic Collage as Method: From the Voices of Girls of Color,” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 23, no. 2 (2023): 193–203.
[7] This quote is from Sabina, referring to her experience speaking out about the Uyghur concentration camps in China.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Tressie McMillan Cottom, Thick: And Other Essays, 1st ed. (New York: The New Press, 2019), 194.
[10] Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism, 1st ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989): 119.
Author Biographies
Tashal Brown is an Assistant Professor of Urban Education and Secondary Social Studies at the University of Rhode Island. Her research broadly focuses on race, ethnicity, and gender, with a focus on equity and justice in educational contexts, and contributes to theory and practice in urban education, ethnic studies, social justice education, and girlhood studies. She examines how cultivating and enacting critical literacies and liberatory pedagogies in K-12 schools, community-based spaces, and teacher education shape youth and educators’ perspectives, experiences, and actions. Her collaborations with youth, educators, and community-based organizations demonstrate an unwavering commitment to fostering critical and transformative educational spaces with an increased capacity for innovative teaching and opportunities for youth to engage critically and creatively. Notably, she seeks opportunities to work with youth to pursue inquiries into sociopolitical issues impacting their lives.
Shena Sanchez is an Assistant Professor of Qualitative Research at the University of Alabama. As a critical qualitative researcher, she uses an intersectional feminist lens to understand and center the experiences of Girls and Women of Color in K-12 schools. Her scholarship focuses on student identity and voice, education policy and leadership, and the social, political, and historical contexts of schooling. She is currently conducting two ethnographies about Women of Color principals in the South leading schools during politically challenging times. Shena holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles, an M.Ed. from Vanderbilt University, and a B.A. from Roanoke College.