How Black girls hurt: noticing and naming the t/terror narratives accumulated in schools and society [or, a call for a third wave new literacies education for all people, based on the dynamic, triumphant literate lives of Black girls and women]

A word on what hurts: a problem statement

We know what hurts Black girls (Arango Ricks, 2014; Black, 2016, Bonilla-Silva, 1997, 2001, 2017). We have learned that Black girls and women are hurt by a lack of representation in literature, curriculum, and policy; we also know they are hurt when their teachers do not see, understand, or respect them (Annamma et al., 2019; Crenshaw et al., 2016; The White House Council on Women & Girls, 2014). We know that Black girls are hurt by unresponsiveness in instructional practice, and an insistence on rigid, cumulative, high stakes assessments that do not meaningfully grasp their genius (Morris, 2007, 2016; Morris & Perry, 2017). We also know they are disproportionately surveilled and cruelly penalized in schools and society for looking, speaking, and behaving in ways that are perceived and named as deviant and threatening (Losen & Skiba, 2010; Staples, 2011, 2015, 2016). The private and public punishments they endure most often take place while they are, in fact, embodying multiple developmentally appropriate performances of personhood that are simply not recognized, understood, or respected by representatives of the white power structure. All of this is violent.

Yet we do not thoroughly understand the complexities of the effects of Black girls’ experiences with multi-level violences in schools and society. How do the aforementioned hurts affect a Black girl’s identity and self esteem? Her confidence in crafting social experiences? Her sense of academic possibilities? Her capacity to form deep connections and healthy interdependence? Her propensity to feel safe and happy within her skin? Her ability to communicate desire, uphold healthy boundaries, and calculate the efficacy of meaningful risks in relationships? Her development and maintenance of healthy relational dynamics with teachers in school? Her power to nurture extensive engagements with texts and literacies that visibilize, enlighten, and empower her sense of validation and choice? When one is perpetually hurting, are these necessary teaching/learning experiences possible? I’ve learned that responding to such a question depends on how we define what hurts.

Through my research, I’ve learned that hurt can be broken down into two strata: pain and suffering (Staples, 2016). Pain is acute. It’s incidental, proverbial (or literal). It’s a stretching or contraction of soulful and somatic muscle such that one’s thoughts and feelings are challenged through social, psychological, physical, or emotional dis-ease, discomfort, or dismemberment. Pain temporarily compromises personal integrity—one’s sense of strength and wholeness. Suffering is different from pain. Suffering is chronic. It’s an extension and exacerbation of hurting. Suffering is the pathology of uninterrupted pain. It forms amalgamations of misery in one’s soul¹ and soma,² inciting interior life disruptions that speed up figurative or literal d/Deaths in personhood (Staples, 2016). Therefore, suffering abolishes personal integrity. Both pain and suffering can come from ideologies that govern teaching/learning contexts, thanks to the well-documented systemic effects of white supremacist patriarchy on the identities and lived experiences of marginalized people, as they take shape in schools and society (Jacoby-Senghor et al., 2016; Staples, 2011, 2012a, 2012b, 2015; Staples-Dixon, 2023).

How we understand this pain and suffering matters, because it influences what we do. Our teaching and activism are only as good as our knowing and being…our epistemological and ontological stances. As I argued in the introduction:

Scholars often measure their impacts and reverberations in broad, quantifiable terms so we can begin to grasp the myriad ways they shape, and limit, exterior life […]There are calls to examine and revise laws, policies, and curricula, in addition to instructional, evaluative, and behavioral practices that govern public spaces within which Black girls and women live and learn (Morris, 2016; Crenshaw et al., 2016). These social justice projects are necessary and laudable. Yet, their emancipatory reach is dangerously unenlightened and woefully limited because they only consider exterior life–when they aren’t informed by deep, sustained emotional justice projects that privilege care for the soul. Soul-centered projects account for the complex, dynamic, interior lives of Black girls and women. (Staples-Dixon, 2023, introduction; Staples-Dixon, in review)

Crenshaw et al. (2016) call for more research in this area, noting that we don’t know enough about what happens when Black girls and women experience uninterrupted, multi-level aggressions across the span of their K-12 and post-secondary education. She laments, “there is very little research highlighting the short and long term effects of overdiscipline and push-out on girls of color” (p. 7). She further states:

Any effort to understand and intervene in the conditions confronting girls of color requires researchers, advocates, and stakeholders to listen to them and to document their stories. Moreover, data must be collected and analyzed to assess the gender disparities that exist within same-race cohorts as well as the racial disparities that exist within same-gender cohorts. If the challenges facing girls of color are to be addressed, then [research, curriculum, teacher preparation, and education research] policy frameworks must move beyond the notion that all youth of color who are in crisis are boys, and that the concerns of white girls are indistinguishable from those of girls of color.

In response to Crenshaw, Ocen, and Nandi’s call, I’m taking the time here to name and categorize some of the t/Terror narratives Black girls and women accumulate in schools and society—capturing clearly how Black girls hurt and what happens when they hurt, over time.

Toward a comprehensive collection of t/terror narratives [or, defining what hurts]

Between 2003 and 2023, I collected the t/Terror narratives of over 4000 girls and women.³ t/Terror narratives are written and verbal articulations of encounters with violence. Specifically, they capture accounts of micro and macroaggressive violences. In addition, they point to systematically aggressive violences—assemblages of institutionalized aggressions that are as heinous, elusive, and duplicitous as micro and macroaggressions, yet taken for granted as sensible, if not proper and fair. There are distinct differences between terror narratives and Terror narratives. A little “t” terror narrative is an account of experience with one or more microaggressions in any relational dynamic (Staples, 2016; Sue, 2010a, 2010b; Sue et al., 2011). These aggressions affect the space of the soul, which can be understood as our conscious, subconscious, and unconscious mind; this is our meaning making center. Little “t” terrors are often accompanied by evidence that is typically considered subjective, incidental, illogical, debatable, or even imperceptible to those outside of the violation’s realm of influence. Proof of their existence is left to the individual affected by their impact and vulnerable to their deleterious effects. For example, a little “t” terror is what happens when a Black girl is emotionally neglected or ghosted by her boyfriend, passive aggressively critiqued by her grandmother, subjected to her STEM teacher’s low expectations, trolled by anonymous white men who fetishsize and follow her on social media, told by her art teacher that she lacks talent, and left out of her counselor’s candidate pools for fellowships and internships because of her “ethnic hairstyles” and bold disposition.

A big “T” Terror narrative is an account of experience with one or more macroaggressions in any relational dynamic. Macroaggressions affect the space of the soma, which can be understood as a physical body or material possessions. The soma is our memory making center. These Terrors are also accompanied by evidence—arguably objective, literal, quantifiable, observable, and evidenced, producing “verifiable truths” that point to their existence. The state accounts for the viability of macroaggressions and can become involved in qualifying and quantifying them. You can file a police report about a Terror. Think: theft, rape, assault, battery, or lynching. Similarly, the police in schools or society can exact a Terror against a girl, as is the case with millions of Black and Brown girls and women in schools and societies all over the world (Slate et al., 2016; Staples, 2016, 2017a). As such, t/Terror narratives are accounts of figurative and literal deaths from the inside out and the outside in. These t/Terrors are perpetuated by systemic aggressions—toxic institutionalized policies and practices sustained and advanced by the ideological customs, norms, and cultures of unconscious educators, disassociated administrators, and other disconnected constituents in power within schools and society.

Research questions

Given these definitions of what hurts, I ask: (1) How do Black girls hurt? Specifically, I wonder about the mechanics of pain and suffering. What specific stories do Black girls and women tell about the pain and suffering they’ve endured in various teaching/learning contexts? What are the mechanics of their hurt, the institutionalized logistics at work in cultivating and sustaining their pain and suffering in schools and society? I also wonder, (2) What happens as a result of uninterrupted hurt? In what ways are Black girls and women uniquely expressive and advantaged in their literate lives, as a result of their hurt? In what ways are they seriously hindered, as academic and social citizens, in relation to the hurt they endure in schools and society? Finally, to move us toward solution centered responsiveness to t/Terror narratives, and the race and gender injuries they produce as a result of these multi-level t/Terrors, I ask, (3) How can teachers help⁴? In what ways can literacy educators inform their curricular choices, instructional practices, and relational capacity through deep engagements with the t/Terror narratives of Black girls and women and their resulting complex literate lives? How can literacy educators help Black girls to heal and, in so doing, heal themselves? In what ways do pedagogies need to evolve to grasp the literate lives of Black girls and women in schools and society? Why do they need to evolve? In what ways is 21st-century education for all people advanced in relation to this work?

Data collection methods and analysis

These three overarching research questions informed my approach to, and involvement in, data collection. In the early years (2003–2015), I solicited t/Terror narratives casually through word-of-mouth and by sharing calls through personal and professional networks. Some questions/statements used to prompt school and society related narratives were: What is the one event from your schooling experience that’s holding you back in your adult life? What is life like for you in school right now? Describe a pattern of stress or struggle you experience(d) in school. How does that pattern affect your sense of confidence and resourcefulness in adulthood? What type of embarrassing event happened in school this year? How did your teacher help you to deal with it? In what ways do you feel stuck in life, unable to achieve your academic or social goals? How did that “stuck feeling” happen? What academic or social experience is at the root of it? In some instances, no questions or prompts were used. Rather, girls and women contributed their narratives in response to t/Terror narratives I shared. In either case, their narratives detail encounters with various violences and abuses meted out within contexts endemic to schools and society. Some sites include public spaces such as classrooms, lunchrooms, libraries, play grounds, cafeterias, administrative offices, and school buses. Other sites include private/intimate spaces such as bedrooms, kitchens, and living rooms. Other spaces could be qualified as virtual or mediated such as phone conversations, email correspondences, text or direct messages, snail mailed documents, and social media posts. Accounts of t/Terrors detailing injurious events within various types of relationships were comprised of different academic and social constituent groups, such as teacher:student; teacher:teacher; parent:offspring; teacher:administrator; student:administrator; student:student; employee:supervisor; platonic friends; and romantic partners.

Solicitations of these narratives evolved over many years and they were shared through various means, such as: one-on-one interviews, small focus groups, mass contributions from attendees at large conference meetings, and open-ended responses to surveys or other shared spaces for writing. Although during some phases of my research, contributors to the collection could choose not to disclose their identity through some electronic submissions like surveymonkey.com, most contributions were typically not anonymous. A majority of the collection includes women of color with Black girls and women [who self identify as African American, Caribbean American, bi- or multi-racial], Latinas, Southeast Asian women, and Asian American women comprising more than two-thirds of the sets. Unfortunately, self-identifying Native American women have yet to contribute. A little less than a third of the narratives come from white girls and women. Overall, contributors self-identified as girls or women aged 18–81, with the majority of contributors ranging in age from 18 to 55. Contributors typically referred to their socioeconomic status as working or middle class. However, some women self identified as lower working class, while others self identified as upper class.

Most respondents/contributors self identified as straight, cis, able-bodied, and employed a femme gender expression, although a small percentage of members self identified as queer, describing themselves as trans, lesbian, or bi-sexual. The vast majority⁵ of contributors self-identified as Christian or “spiritual and not religious.” A small body of contributors described themselves as atheists or agnostic. Over time, girls and women were invited to share social and relational experiences in schools or society that sparked either a visceral immediate reaction in their somatic space—such as shock, rage, or shame—or a recollection of events or encounters that eventually revealed latent soulful reactions that were more gradual, yet longer lasting, such as sadness, loneliness, detachment, dissociation, anxiety, or depression. As a result, t/Terror narratives captured both immediate, current experiences in schools and society or memories of profound experiences from years past. I share this broad, descriptive picture of the inventory of narratives collected to clarify the spectrum collected. For the purposes of this paper, I will focus on a small subset of excerpts from three Black women included in the collection.

Confidence, intimacy, and trustworthiness

I gained contributors’ trust in sharing their t/Terror narratives by sharing mine. I learned to connect my formal, professional, public articulations with t/Terrors (Staples, 2011, 2015, 2016) to my informal, personal, private articulations. Doing so meant digging deeply into my own meaning and memory making practices. I worked to find ways to share the hurt I accumulated over my lifetime as a Black girl and woman while I crafted my academic and social identities and experiences in schools and society. I needed a way to draw hurting girls and women to me as both audience members and partners in these excavations. I hoped to increase my collection and knowledge base and also establish widely recognized leadership in ways of sharing. So, in 2015, I began to talk publicly about my professional and personal experiences via my online platform for emotional justice work: The Supreme Love Project⁶ (SLP). SLP empowers me to connect with girls and women in the U.S. and abroad, both casually through local connections, formally through social media campaigns, and systematically through email calls-to-action. At this time, SLP has a subscriber list⁷ of approximately 14,000 members and a follower list⁸ of approximately 30,000. The online outreach videos I produce and distribute on platforms like Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Instagram, in addition to SLP online summits and interview series, reach approximately 1.2 million people each year in 40 different countries.

Within the SLP community, through live videos, blog posts, podcasts, and other outreach and connection tools, I have shared what it felt like to often be, "the only one" in my elementary, middle, and high school classrooms. For instance, I was the only Black girl in gifted education and I described the ways my teachers made me their pet. I recounted how I was a Black girl who treasured books and in fourth grade wrote her own by hand, completely filling multiple three-subject notebooks with fantastical characters and imaginative plots. I also conveyed that I did not share my writings with any teacher because I didn’t trust that they would respect my work. I revealed that I was a little Black girl who was sexually molested during her kindergarten year by her babysitter’s son. I was the Black girl who never told. I was the Black girl who was called a nigger by a white boy in her third-grade gym class because she beat him in every race. I was the Black girl who was called a bitch by her tenth-grade science teacher, a white man, because she pointed out an error he made in the wording of a significant question on a physics test. I was the Black girl who was told she was, "not really Black" because she was tall, skinny, and quiet, not stereotypically short, fat, and loud. I was the Black girl who was told by an elementary school librarian that she "talked white" and was, therefore, "an acceptable Black." I was the Black adolescent girl who wanted a romantic partner and felt surprisingly beholden to broken boys who needed saving. I was the Black girl who would eventually subject herself to wounded men, narcissists, avoidants, liars, and cheaters throughout early adulthood. I was the Black girl who was warned by her 11th grade AP English teacher that, though I was “reasonably talented” I should “definitely not” apply to Ivy League universities. Instead, I was encouraged to attend an HBCU⁹ and "stay with [my] own people." I was the Black girl who had to fight, throughout middle and high school, for inclusion in her guidance counselor’s applicant pools for elite scholarships and coveted fellowships.

I was the Black girl who developed maladaptive coping strategies to deal with white privilege, white fragility, and white bias in relation to the traditional, linear instructional practices I endured, along with conservative, trite, formative assessments of my intelligence. I was the Black girl forced to figure out how to contend with obtuse, arrogant, and obstinate middle aged white male administrators who thought they could do no wrong and dismissed my petitions for equity in school policies as, "cute." I was the Black girl who was told she would "never make it" in graduate school. I was the Black girl who had an abortion, alone, in graduate school. I was the Black girl who lost friends and family to death and disease, and still completed her masters and doctoral work on time and with distinction. Although I loved school, I was the Black girl who never felt like she was good enough, fit in, or could stabilize a sense of belonging in academic and social spaces. I was the Black girl who staved off emotional exhaustion and breakdown, for years, as a result of these identity compromises and negating lived experiences in schools and society. I was that girl. I am one of millions. I shouted my narratives from every rooftop and podcast, in my hunger to build community, grasp the bedrocks of my academic and social identities, name my own experiences, of my own volition, and develop inroads to joy, peace, and power from the terrible strongholds of my pain and suffering.

It worked. While I slowly, gradually, collected approximately 500 t/Terror narratives from girls and women between 2003 and 2015, mainly through word-of-mouth, in-person meet ups, and casual invitations to share at small conference gatherings, I collected nearly seven times that number from 2015 to date, through Supreme Love Project initiatives. Through these varied processes of collection, I learned to lay bare my interior life and give other Black girls and women space to do the same discreetly and honestly as well. My transparency and vulnerability built confidence that they were sharing their hurt, and what happens when they hurt, with a like-minded, soul-centered sister, daughter, auntie, mentor, scholar, teacher, coach, or friend who practices understanding, confidentiality, and non-judgment as a matter of principle. Through critical, interpretive analysis and exhaustive, extensive experience, I developed a keen eye and ear for patterns that illuminate trajectories of pain and suffering. I began to recognize how these patterns were sparked within various teaching/learning contexts and across multiple time/space continua. I began to see, for example, how t/Terror narratives featuring similar stories of isolation or loneliness in a school context presented very similar language about meaning and memory making, regardless of whether the contributor was 21 or 65. I learned that when I heard absolute language littering a narrative, such as, "always, never, all, and everyone," I would also soon hear or see tightly wound fatalistic finalities in the conclusion of the narratives, ones that severely limited, or flat out ended, perceptions of possibilities for one’s academic or social trajectories.

Critical spiritual intersectional discourse analysis [or, what dynamic data analysis can determine]

To develop a deep understanding of the written and verbal articulations of Black girls’ and women’s experiences with multi-level violence in schools and society, I employed a critical, spiritual, intersectional discourse analysis. My intention was to grasp revelations about girls’ and women’s meaning and memory making, i.e. iterations of their soulful thoughts and somatic feelings about personal identity and experience after being t/Terrorized within spaces described as “developmentally nurturing” (Wun, 2016; Zion & Blanchett, 2011). I intended to discover nuanced understandings of how Black girls hurt and what happens when they hurt, over time. To find this out, I melded Critical Race (and gender) Theories (Blake et al., 2011; Haddix et al., 2018; Staples, 2011, 2016, 2017b), Critical Discourse Analysis and New Literacies Theory (NLS) of talk and writing (Fishman & McCarthy, 2005; Morris, 2007; Srivastava & Francis, 2006; Staples & Jayakumar, 2017), and analytic frameworks for uncovering roots of spiritual sensibilities evident in verbal and written texts (James & Friedman, 2009; Jakubowski, 2001; Staples, 2011, 2016, 2017b). These frames created intersectional lenses through which I could determine:

• How race and gender injuries manifested in soul and soma [helping me to grasp how Black girls hurt, my first overarching research question]

• What happened when these race and gender injuries “took root,” i.e. suggesting meanings and memories to which Black girls and women began to self-identify and name as “truth” [helping me to grasp what happens when Black girls hurt over time, my second overarching research question]

• What bigger, unseen forces were at play in noticing the aggressions, naming them in narratives, and negotiating the subsequent deleterious interior life effects they set in motion [I recognized this determination as significant in 2005, shortly after initial engagements with the t/Terror narratives of Black girls and women in schools and society because their abilities to form t/Triumph narratives crafted by extraordinary literacies¹⁰ and empyreal logics¹¹, after subsuming innumerable amounts of violence through multi-level aggressions, seemed otherworldly]

Questions for data analysis

Determining the “how of hurting,” the “what happens when of hurting,” and the “types of extraterrestrial forces that assist in interrupting the hurting and its effects,” prompted me to inquire strategically. Inspired by these ways of organizing my interests, I formed the following analytic questions to grapple with data sets. Of the spoken and written narratives, I asked: (1) What is the range and variation of beliefs about social and academic identity and lived experiences expressed by Black girls and women who have been t/Terrorized in schools and society? (2) In what ways do Black girls and women defend against multi-level aggressions in schools and society, and the various injuries they produce in relation to interior and exterior life? (3) How do Black girls and women sustain personhood within these violent contexts? (4) What language is used to present interior thoughts and feelings related to the injuries resulting from multi-level aggressions taking place in schools and society? (5) How do the cumulative effects of interior deconstruction [of the soul] affect exterior reconstruction [of the soma]?

To theme several sets of narratives, I captured a few more than eight hundred [800] of the approximately three thousand [3000] written and verbal accounts of violence shared by girls and women who self-identify as Black. I used the analytic questions, above, to code for beliefs, defense tactics, sustenance strategies, language variations, and somatic signifers [i.e. noted physical or material changes resulting from psychological and emotional stress]. I used Critical Race [and gender] Theories to identify the respective injuries girls and women shared. For example, if a girl—storying the times in middle school when she was made fun of for her developing body [particularly her posterior, for instance] and/or the blackness of her skin—shared how that incessant teasing stunted her ability to believe she was worthy of admiration or respect, I highlighted that belief. I then attempted to locate that belief in a system, or, a collection of beliefs functioning within interior life that formed a constellation of convictions from which behaviors stemmed, as evidence in her exterior life. I used theoretical frameworks from New Literacies Studies (NLS) to discover how girls and women defended themselves against multi-level aggressions. I did so by combining their narratives for written and verbal descriptions of impulsive, calculated, or persistent strategies of resistance. NLS was also helpful in guiding my lenses to pick up references to sustenance, or, survival within the contexts of schools and society. For instance, when a Black woman, glancing twenty years backward to her high school experience, shared one or several accounts of her constructed propensity to yell, curse, feign sarcasm, and display fits of bravado within the context of her schooling (especially naming it, in hindsight, as a behavior meant to protect or buoy her), I coded that as a social practice prompting various literacy events to construct a safe and strong personhood within a threatening context.

I used Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to capture how Black girls and women used language to frame their identities and structure understandings of their experiences within toxic environments. CDA helped me to see, for instance, how girls’ and women’s talk and writing were informed by negating sociocultural influences steeped in racialized and gendered norms about their roles and rights in schools and society. For example, when a Black girl recalled multiple accounts of rejection during reading and play time with her mostly white elementary school peers and used restrictive language to subsequently frame her academic and social identities, going so far as to state that her limitations were a foregone conclusion to which she must resign herself, I coded that as evidence of affected narrative structure [i.e. a language issue, in addition to a sociocultural one]. Finally, in my efforts to understand what bigger, unseen forces were at play in noticing the aggressions, naming them in narratives, and negotiating the subsequent deleterious interior life effects they set in motion, I wove together various Judeo-Christian, Buddhist, and spiritualist¹² principles to support my analysis. When applied to the narratives, this network of lenses enabled me to hone in on the ways invocations of support from a Higher Power were used to re-assert academic identity or re-frame social experience after enduring multi-level aggressions in schools and society. Such written and verbal articulations highlight a reassertion of power and reclamation of authority over one’s own capacity to intentionally and rightfully be and do humanity, as a Black girl or woman, within the many contexts of schools and society. For example, when an elderly Black woman shared with me a collection of accounts detailing the physical assaults and verbal insults she endured from her high school boyfriend, being accosted in and outside-of-school—along with the patriarchal admonitions dictated by some of her teachers, mother, and aunties to excuse the behavior and stay in the relationship in order to marry a boy from a well-to-do family and dutifully secure her parents’ financial future—she referenced continually her faith as a mainstay in establishing not only her voice in defiance, but also healing in her abused body.

Some topics of t/terror narratives

Within my collection of narratives, I look for accounts of race and gender injuries, in particular: mentions of pain or suffering related to one’s perception of oneself as a result of encounters with white Supremacist Patriarchal Ideology (Staples-Dixon, 2023; Staples-Dixon, in review). I also watch how those perceptions affect a sense of self and possibility in teaching/learning contexts and as an academic and social citizen. Here are some topics featured within the collection:

• A 19-year-old Black girl describing the verbal harassments she endured from school security officers throughout high school

• A 26-year-old Black woman describing winning numerous spelling bees throughout elementary school, yet not being featured in any publications or public announcements typically used to feature winners

• A 54-year-old Black woman describing how she was told that her braided or cornrowed hair was unacceptable by middle school administrators; including details of how she was repeatedly touched in classrooms and school hallways, without permission, by white girls interested in/or mocking her hair

• A 47-year-old Black woman describing dating her alcoholic boyfriend throughout high school and lamentations of that relationship as a precedent for other romantic relationships with addicts throughout her early adulthood

• A 39-year-old Black woman describing regrets that she acquiesced to her English/Humanities teacher’s instance that she wasn’t “college material” and should instead enroll in a cosmetology program, even though she was an accomplished rapper, freestyle artist, and poet in middle and high school

• An 18-year-old Back girl who details her experience with gaslighting¹³ in relation to a predatory, male, high school teacher and the resulting PTSD she’s experienced in reclaiming her sanity and self confidence

My critical and creative analyses of sociocultural and socioemotional discourses used to capture the effects multi-level aggressions have on conceptions of identities and experiences in teaching/learning contexts like schools and society show myriad long term effects. For instance, I learned that as an older adolescent or young adult woman, Black girls who endured micro and macroaggressions were likely to experience involuntary dissociations when engaged in conversations with people they imagined might judge, reject, or abandon them. The terrors in their souls might prompt them to question their sense of worth, adequacy, and agency in romantic, sexual, political, social, and academic contexts. The Terrors in their somas could result in social shrinking, and emotional suppression, or, risky sexual or social behaviors, outbursts, defiance practices, cutting, drug abuse, attrition, or eating disorders. They might begin to question their body autonomy—debating their own visibility and also fearing the deleterious fantasies ascribed to the self by racist and sexist ideologies harbored by teachers, principals, or other authority figures in schools and society. Such fantasies of ugliness, insignificance, weirdness, worthlessness, or threat were often silently, sometimes unknowingly, yet persistently, ascribed to them. Meaning, they may not be overtly ascribed, yet they were intimated through actions.

To share the epistemological and ontological power of these narratives, and the insights they can provide teachers, curriculum developers, administrators, and policy makers, I present two samples here. The first is a composite terror narrative. It is an account of one type of microaggressive violence experienced in school, as shared within the terror narratives produced by three different women. I’ve chosen to share a unified account of this aggression, built from an intentionally etched-together-collection, because of the nature of terrors. I’ve learned that one can more adequately relay the cumulative effects of microaggressions when they are presented as a multi-member unit (Staples, 2011, 2015, 2016, 2017a). Such representations are crucial because without a method for illuminating the race and gender injuries that come from small terrors, their illusive, slippery style makes them too often subject to debate and dismissal, rendering accounts of them useless in the quest to affect change in the practices and policies governing schools and society. Later, I present a Terror narrative. It is an account from one life altering experience with catastrophic race and gender injuries exacted by the state and taking place within society. The Terror narrative presented has been widely shared with the public and represents a type of macroaggression too often experienced in the exterior lives of Black girls and women. Yet this type of aggression is not deeply understood in relation to the effects it has on a girl or woman’s interior life and any meaningful pedagogical stances that could be produced in response to such effects.

Regarding contempt: a brief on a terror that happens in school

• 40-something¹⁴ year old Black women’s retrospectives describing the looks of contempt they routinely saw on their elementary and middle school teachers’ faces in relation to their sociocultural dispositions, Black bodies, and textured hair

I have authored one critical and creative mashup of excerpts from several terror narratives contributed, over two years, by three women—Erma, Jennifer, and Angela¹⁵. To distinguish between their written and verbal accounts of experiences with contempt exhibited by the white women teachers who taught them during their elementary and middle school years, I have selected fonts with which to feature each woman’s voice. The reflections shared are excerpts from transcripts of one-on-one interviews completed by phone and in person, in addition to journal entries emailed to me. These terror narratives were collected between 2016 and 2018. Words shared in the context of any one terror narrative represent a melding of words spoken during several interviews and/or written within emails. This melding is guided by the intention to critically notice signifiers of beliefs, defense tactics, sustenance strategies, language variations, and somatic signifers [i.e. physical or material changes resulting from psychological and emotional stress]. This representation is also meant to creatively show these phenomena as they build and form infrastructures within interior life. When asked, “What is the one event from your schooling experience that’s holding you back in your adult life?” I discovered one facet of what hurt these women during girlhood in school and what happened when that hurt went unnoticed, unnamed, and unmediated, over time:

Daddy told us how important it was to look good for two occasions: church and school. And on the weekends that’s what we did. When I got ready for school, I was happy. I was eight at the end of third grade. We lived in the city and my school was just a few blocks from our house. Every other Saturday my mother would wash our hair. We could play outside all morning, after my sisters and I did our chores. We had to clean the house top to bottom every Saturday. After we did that, we could play outside, then we got our hair washed. Me and my three sisters. I was in the middle and we got washed in order. Ellen first. Then Esther. Then me, then Elisha. She’s the baby. We took turns laying on the kitchen counter, with our heads dipped in the sink and mama would scrub us with Dark n’ Lovely¹⁶. It smelled sooooo good. I’d close my eyes and smile so big. She’d be hummin’ to the hits on the radio. I heard Luther, Teddy, Aretha, Michael, Whitney, Pebo… the greatest. After a while, we were all scrubbed and oiled. I loved the way I looked. Neat and simple. Straight lines and perfect plaits. Not a hair out of place. I was grateful that my mom knew how to do hair. So, I didn’t understand the looks I got. I didn’t understand the looks until I got older. But, looking back, I can see they were always there. It was kinda weird…you know? I don’t know how to explain it. When I saw my teacher, sometimes my principal, it was like…I could see…their eyes rolling at me. I didn’t know the words for it back then. I could feel it though.

It’s the scent and the sound. That’s what gets the looks… so heavy you could feel them. My mom used all the beads, barretts, and ribbons we had every weekend to get us ready for the week. Hair plaited and braided. Bows and ribbons. Our heads looked like technicolor rainbows and we made noise too. I mean our hair sometimes made noise. But we was so fresh and clean! Just shinin’. I was so happy come Monday morning. I just wanted to show off, you know? But my teacher, she would frown and say things like, “eww, what’s that smell?” I didn’t know she was talking about the grease in my hair and the cocoa butter on my face. She hated it but I loved it so I didn’t realize what was going on. It clicked later when I was grown and raising my daughter; her teacher told me in a conference that the smell of her products…her hair and skin products…was offensive. Can you believe that!? I went off. Then, after awhile…I remembered. That’s what Mrs. Benson was thinking every time she gave me a dirty look in fourth grade. All those times she hugged the other girls, the white girls, but not me. She frowned at me a lot. I get it now. I got it later, when I saw it again in Mahogany’s¹⁷ teacher’s face. It’s disgust.

They don’t even notice. I’m talking about some of the white women [teachers]. They don’t know they hate us. They try really hard to be good and fair and liberal [laughing]. They don’t know where their hate is…that it bubbles up to the surface from some place they ignore. Nobody teaches them how to notice it, so they don’t notice it. They can tell you alllll about how they “love all children” [laughter]…how education is a right and will save the world…how children are the future and deserve the best [teaching] and how they give it their all. I’ve heard it a million times and I’ve raised five daughters in the city, so, I can also tell you a lot of it is garbage. The divide is too big for all that talk to be true. Plus, I’ve collected the looks over so many years. I know the looks they have and don’t notice. I’m clear on it now. I’m Black, you’ve seen me, Jeanine. You know what I look like. Well, my skin is dark and my hair is silky curly, so, I’m specifically different among us…the exotics, the freaks they get to save. So, I remember how my social studies teacher in seventh grade, Mrs. Kennett, said, “Oh, Angela, you can go swimming because you have that ‘good hair’!” She was laughing when she said that! So, I shot back, “everybody has good hair!” She shrunk back when I snapped at her because she thought she was doing me a favor. She was separating me from the girls with kinky hair and dry, ashy skin because she hated them and she thought I’d be flattered that she thought I was special because my hair was like hers. I was so pissed. She hated them and she thought I was dumb enough to hate myself by separating myself from them to go be with her. I was so pissed.

This mashup is progressive. It presents a gradual increase in intensity. The set features a layered awareness of race and gender injuries microaggressively projected upon students’ somas as they constructed an exterior life within elementary and middle school. In Erma’s terror narrative, we see a familial context that couches the significance and ritual of hair and skin care in her family and community, vis-a-vie her confusion about why her affection and respect for these rituals and their outcomes were not reflected back to her in school. We see her awareness of contempt from her teacher, the insecurity it seeds, in addition to the confusion about where it stems from and why it’s happening. There is a silence and contemplation intimated in Erma’s terror narrative. Jennifer’s contribution to the mashup picks up this thread of contemplation and moves it forward. Her terror narrative features recollections from a slightly older child entwined with an adult woman raising a similarly aged child. In the narrative, she’s connecting to her ability to notice and name the microaggression of contempt through her daughter’s experience and defend against its repercussions. Finally, Angela’s terror narrative is more sophisticated, mature, and vocal in resistance. She offers her subjective, arial stance on white women teachers immediately and reflects on herself as a Black girl in middle school, defying them. She features herself with a distinct sense of agency and criticality, along with a commitment to maintain consciousness around the terror of contempt and the multi-level injuries it causes, both within the space of the individual and in relation to valued membership within her race and gender group.

To consider what happens in relation to this hurt, over time, Erma, Jennifer, and Angela provided insights into the cumulative effects of this microaggression. Gauging the reverberations and effects of contempt—and the multiple single instances through which they experienced it in school along other microaggressions like social erasure, emotional neglect, and verbal microinsults—meant tracing its threading across the development of identities formation and experiences in school and society spanning from childhood, to adolescence, and into adulthood. When asked how encounters with contempt “held them back” or “affected their sense of confidence and resourcefulness in adulthood” each woman developed their terror narratives, or added new ones to the collection. Notably, all three women developed bouts with anxiety and depression in young adulthood¹⁸ and adulthood.¹⁹ All three women struggled with codependency in their most significant romantic and familial relationships—characterized by an incessant need for external affirmation and validation from others. All three women chose partners that exhibited narcissistic tendencies including grandiosity, histrionics, infidelity, neglect, and gross fabrications resulting in the cultivation of hypervigilance and stress. Angela shared, “My husband left after 25 years of marriage. He was my first everything. We share five beautiful children and I loved him with everything I had in me. He lied, cheated, and took almost everything. And, you know what? He looked at me with hate in his eyes too. Do you know what happened when I realized that? When it clicked that I married myself to the hate that was following me my whole life? It almost killed me.” Erma and Jennifer made similar choices in relationship and noticed how the root of contempt, compounding over time with other microaggressive violences they experienced in school, shaped their understanding of possibility in life and love. This tracing reveals a few significant features of terrors. Since they are microaggressive, it is important to note that they are slick. The subtleties of a terror are precisely why only one is presented here, via excerpts from three narratives. The intention is to show the terror more ostensibly so that it doesn’t slip away, unnoticed and unnamed.

Regarding catastrophe: a brief on a terror that happens in society

Although investigations into microaggressive terror narratives (such as contempt) are arguably more important than investigations into macroaggresive Terrors because they are more elusive and have such far-reaching cumulative effects, I urge scholars to start their inquiries with the latter. To be clear: when beginning explorations of the dynamic, enviable literate lives of Black girls and women in schools and society, we are most empowered by accessing their pioneering paths to new epistemologies and ontologies for interior life by first examining some of the ways they hurt in exterior life, where big “T” Terrors happen. It’s often easier to first look outside/in because root cause analysis (i.e. looking inside/out) is more conceptually difficult to do. I’ve discovered this as an educational anthropologist and sociocultural literacist through my granular, even cellular regard of macroaggressive, systemically aggressive, and microaggressive episodes (ranging from those that are acute to chronic, respectively) in teaching/learning contexts. When I do deep analysis with data, I can grasp more quickly the ways white supremacist patriarchal ideologies assert themselves by watching the ways centralized members (i.e. white men and women) explicitly perform harm and overtly claim knowledge, innocence, dominance, credibility, and authority in schools and society through big Terrors. I then reverse engineer the injurious effects of those Terrors as directed by the literate lives of Black girls and women.

To further spotlight how Black girls hurt and what happens when they hurt, I focus now on one adolescent Black girls’ widely publicized suffering with a macroaggressive Terror exacted upon her as she participated in a common social activity. I begin by tracing one of her Terrors backward…from its public illumination…then downward, to its core. I then trace the Terror upward…forward to its materializations as a root cause of pain and suffering…to name subsequent effects of that suffering. In doing so, I will share with you how figurative deaths happen in interior life when various violences and abuses happen in exterior life. This tracing will then create an entree to serious discussions about the significance and necessity of emotional justice work in tandem with social justice work through new literacies education for the liberation of all people.

Regarding the figurative deaths of black girls and women in school and society through the terror narrative of one girl

In 2015, a Black adolescent girl named Dajerria Becton attended a pool party with her peers in the small town of McKinney, TX. Some neighbors called local police to complain about the noise from the party and officers were dispatched to the location. After being told to vacate the premises, Dajerria, who was wearing a bikini, began to walk away. Within seconds of her attempt to depart the scene, Dajerria was accosted by Corporal Eric Casebolt when he believed she said something rude about him under her breath. Officer Casebolt yelled and cursed at her, forcibly dragged her to the ground by her hair, and placed his knee in her back. While Dajerria screamed and cried for her mother, officer Casebolt drew his gun and pointed it at other teens attempting to help her, threatening their lives. When several teens began to run away, some officers restrained officer Casebolt while other officers ran after the children.

Interestingly, the teen who shot the video capturing this assault against Dajerria Becton was a white boy named Brandon Brooks. He stated, “everyone who was getting put on the ground was Black, Mexican, Arabic. [The cop] didn’t even look at me. It was kind of like I was invisible.” It was reported that, four days after the pool party, McKinney Police Chief Greg Conley called Casebolt’s behavior, “indefensible” and issued a public apology. The chief further stated that the “policies…trainings and practices of the department do not support [Casebolt’s] actions.” Mayor Brian Loughmiller pledged to work with community members to help reconcile parties involved. There were many organized protests and many well written critiques of this incident²⁰. As a result, policies were reviewed and revised. Police department curriculum was altered to train officers differently. McKinney mandated body cameras and proposed an integration of its ranks with more people of color and women. These are typical “social justice” initiatives and subsequent outcomes. Some years later, Dajerria won a six-figure settlement after a civil suit. The incident was eventually diffused and many social justice advocates professed relief that there were no deaths that day.

However, I disagree. there was, in fact, a death in McKinney, TX

Dajerria Becton, the child who was assaulted and debased by Mr. Casebolt, did experience a demise on June 5, 2015. She was fifteen years old and she was Terrorized. Her death was figurative²¹ and we all saw it. It is a death she will likely revisit and unpack for many, many years to come. Figurative deaths are a relinquishing of aspects of identity, experience, and power as a result of various traumas, abuses, violences, dissonances, humiliations, and actual or perceived separations from a whole. These phenomena are now lodged and operating in Dajerria’s soul and soma, i.e. her brain and body (like those of many other Black girls and women in schools and society). They are creating figurative deaths of herself, from the inside/out. The diminishing and deconstructing effects of these deaths may not even be fully registering in her active conscience yet. But, just wait. They will. The effects of figurative deaths sprint and also creep; they take root in flashes and in slow motion as they travel through a person’s subjective time/space continua. Because figurative deaths are so relentless and so reverberating, we must get a handle on their forms and functions to better understand their effects on the identity formations and lived experiences of the most vulnerable among us. I argue that in order to fully understand how #BlackLivesMatter, we must understand deeply how Black deaths happen. When we remember earnestly to #SayHerName, we must remember to actually say she died (Staples, 2011, 2016). When we do this understanding and remembering, we must know fully what it is we mean (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Dajerria Becton being assaulted by Eric Casebolt. https://www.blacknews.com/news/dajerria-becton-black-teen-girl-assaulted-white-cop-Texas-pool-party-wins-settlement/.

How we d/die each day

Our social justice movements for visibility, acknowledgment, “equity, and inclusion” must acknowledge connections between violent deconstructions of the body (such as assaults, harassments, and deaths) and passive insults, threats, and discriminatory innuendo. When we link our social justice work to emotional justice work, we can avoid missing these connections. We’ll instead create multiple opportunities to deeply grasp whole landscapes of trauma and trajectories of pain and suffering imposed by racist, sexist, ableist ideologies and systems and lived out by wounded, dying, minoritized people everywhere (Staples-Dixon, 2023; Staples-Dixon, in review). For instance, we know from research that the socioemotional terrors seeded within Dajerria’s consciousness will probably have several outcomes that span interpersonal, social, and ultimately, academic and professional spheres. These are spheres she will occupy on her own (as an individual, living in her own skin, daily encountering her own thoughts, and engaging with her own emotions). They are spheres she will occupy with multiple others (as a future partner, parent, employee, colleague, sister, auntie, grandmother, and citizen). When social and emotional justice work are linked, research might then tell us how the effects of socioemotional and physical t/Terrors will manifest in Dajerria’s life and in the lives of those she loves both immediately and eventually (Castro-Atwater, 2021; Moon & Holling, 2020; Staples-Dixon, 2023; Staples-Dixon, in review; Trainor, 2002; Varga et al., 2021).

For example, Dajeria could attempt to defend herself from the power of her own voice by either silencing it or springing to the opposite effect: yelling, screaming, cursing, literally and proverbially, in effort to gain control in multiple relationships and personal situations. She may experience memory loss that interferes with her ability to learn in school, or perform at work (DiAngelo, 2018; Matias, 2016). She may develop difficulty identifying and naming her emotions, causing her interactions to become confused, inconsistent, or unspoken altogether. She could also develop agoraphobia, anxiety, or depression, crippling her ability to relate and be related to (DeCuir & Dixson, 2004; Delagado & Stefancic, 2018; Dixson & Rousseau, 2006; Lynn & Dixson, 2013). She might also stiffen herself to become a perfectionist and overachiever in her life as a student or a careerist, still fueled by ideas that she is “never good enough” and intensely focused on success, perhaps to her emotional, physical, or social detriment. These are other types of dying and they are very real. They signify multiple losses of identity that can not easily be retrieved. From those voids and inflammations, one is likely to reactively produce many impoverished, defensive, and despairing sensibilities that make an inevitable and irrefutable bind with perpetual suffering. So, although we can be deeply thankful that the violence at the pool party in McKinney, TX did not result in any dead bodies and we did not have to bury another member of our youth as a result of that incident, we were not then, and are not now, off the hook. Celebrations are not in order. A part of Dajerria did die that day. We need intensive, compassionate attention and resources to support her healing and resurrection, from the inside out. Our community depends on this emotional justice (r)evolution.

Yet, we do not thoroughly understand the complexities of the effects of Black girls’ experiences with multi-level violences in schools and society. How do the aforementioned hurts affect a Black girl’s development of identity and healthy self esteem? Her confidence in crafting social experiences? Her sense of academic possibilities? Her capacity to form deep connections and healthy interdependence? Her propensity to feel safe and happy within her skin? Her ability to communicate desire, uphold healthy boundaries, and calculate the efficacy of meaningful risks in relationships? Her development and maintenance of productive dynamics with teachers in school? Her power to nurture extensive engagements with texts and literacies that visibilize, enlighten, and empower her sense of validation and choice? When one is hurting, are these necessary teaching/learning attributes possible? My work mediates this knowledge breach.

Findings: how black girls and women hurt

My work with narratives like those contributed by Erma, Jennifer, Angela, and Dajerria²² repeatedly points to a five fold internalized matrix of oppressions. This matrix takes root in a t/Terrorized person’s interior life, as a result of her pain and suffering. I have found that the toxic soulful and somatic amalgamation consists of:

• Limiting belief systems

  • A stunted ability to consistently think expansively, in tandem with adventure, liberties, and journey

  • Results in stunted ability to vision, dream, plan, self-affirm

• Hypervigilant defense mechanisms

  • An exaggerated, reactionary tendency to guard, defend, resist, hide, or engage with intimacy, closeness, or proximal appreciations of self and others

  • Results in socioemotional isolation, distance, avoidance, self-imposed perceptions of singularity, sociocultural disconnects and aversions

• Persistent survival programs

  • An excessive preoccupation with pending doom along with a corresponding, insistent, unilateral, obsessive energy in relation to one’s safety, security, and continuity

  • Results in rash, unplanned actions with short term attentive immediacy to basic needs and long term detachment from appreciable gains

• Toxic narrative structures

  • A tendency to use absolute, accusatory, abstracting, and acidic language to describe personal identities and experiences and those of others

  • Results in fear-based profanity, resistances, antagonism, pessimism, awfulizing, a fractured sense of possibilities, victimhood, and rage

• Exaggerated somatic pain and tolerance

  • A tendency to absorb an exorbitant amount of negating energetic motion [emotions] stemming from unmediated encounters with microaggressions, macroaggressions, and systemic aggressions

  • Result in compromised physical strength, health, perseverance, and/or an unhealthy self-identification with superhuman strength

Through twenty years of pouring over thousands of t/Terror narratives, I’ve gained clarity about how articulations of hurt, and what happens when one hurts, reveal the form and function of a fragmented interior life. Consequently, I’ve begun to predict behavioral patterns likely to be evidenced in the exterior life of a pained or suffering person. Such predictions empower me to advocate for Black girls and women in ways that affirm our identity formation and lived experiences and re-imagine schools and society in relation to our instructional, curricular, practical, and even policy needs. I’m also now able to inform my sensibilities as a teacher educator, specifically focused on preservice teacher preparation for urban contexts (Staples-Dixon, 2023; Staples-Dixon, in review). I’ve been intent on using revelations I’ve gathered about the powerful and dynamic interior lives of Black girls and women in my work with mainly white preservice teachers, in order to advance their pedagogical frames. My goal is that new teacher pedagogies become extraordinary, embodying the capacity, stamina, agility, and sensitivity to hold respectfully and regard lovingly the literate lives of minoritized and marginalized students.

This includes witnessing and honoring students’ interiorities with belief, so that their praxes of engagement become even more dynamically compassionate, imaginative, critical, creative, responsive, intuitive, spiritual, and (r)evolutionary, over time. This is emotional justice for social justice. The realization of equity goals within social justice work depends on deep connection with intersections of such work. That is, our success in creating exterior lives that feature respect, honor, deference, and privilege for all depends on our success in excavating interior lives that facilitate that work. Social justice work is moved by heartbreak. Shock. Shame. It is a public response to t/Terrors. It must be fueled by a deep, complex understanding of pain and suffering. Disappointment. Confusion. Fear. To be meaningful and affecting, social justice needs sophisticated and persistent connection to the Big Strong Deep (Staples-Dixon, 2023; Staples-Dixon, in review) of interior life. This is the bedrock of emotional justice. It meets social justice by revealing from the inside/out.

Personal liberation projects: regarding the significance of emotional justice work for social justice progress

The extent to which a girl or woman is able to self-generate affirming, appreciable meanings within her interior life, ones that bolster an inherent, intrapersonal fidelity, is the extent to which she is able to shorten and authenticate her recovery arc as it pertains to academic and social t/Terrors. This is a crucial practice. When intentional, constructive meaning making happens within interior life, as a response to the racial and gender injuries resulting from t/Terrors, Black girls and women are empowered with epistemological and ontological responses that evolve beyond defense and reaction. They are empowered to take interior life revelations and generate exterior life revolutions. Such revolutions include emotional justice projects that portraiture and express the litscapes of their interior life with sophistication, rigor, and guile. My call is for English teachers, literacy coaches, and school administrators to assist girls and women in this work, in addition to orchestrating it in themselves. Instead of demanding explanations for pain and suffering, proof that it’s necessary to extend care through pedagogical (r)evolutions, curricular revisions, and revised policies, I implore members of the power structure to grapple with pain and suffering. My request is that we hurt, and heal, along with Black girls and women. We can do this by working to understand how, why, when, and where the strategic, mindful empowerment of conscientious meaning and memory making from the inside/out and outside/in improves the lives of Black girls and women in schools and society. It is through their emotional justice work that they craft extraordinary literacies—dynamic, intersected social and spiritual practices that relieve the soulful and somatic injuries compounded in relation to the micro, macro, and systemic aggressions experienced in academic and social life. It is through emotional justice work and extraordinary literacies that they reassert, again and again, the sensitivity, strength, and stamina, endemic in the identities and experiences of the oppressed. Let us learn from them, stop the hurt they endure, and support their spectacular evolution. Their literate lives are salvation for all humankind.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jeanine M. Staples-Dixon

Dr. Jeanine M. Staples-Dixon is a Professor of Literacy and Language, African American Studies, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Department of Curriculum and Instruction, College of Education, Pennsylvania State University.

Notes

1 I define “soul” as one’s mind or cognition; the soul is one’s meaning making center, in the space of personhood.

2 I define “soma” as one’s matter or body; the soma is one’s memory making center, in the space of personhood.

3 At the time of this publication, the exact number of narratives in the collection is 4998.

4 While I do not directly critique teachers in this article, I have placed this question to show that the continuum of knowledge building around Black girls’ hurt must clearly include teacher education. Their inclusion is crucial in efforts to interrupt pain and suffering that inhibits the evolutions of dynamic academic and social identities and experiences among these youth. As such, teachers are an audience of this piece in addition to new literacies scholars and sociocultural literacists.

5 More than two-thirds of contributors.

6 www.thesupremeloveproject.com

7 An email subscriber list is built through various social media campaigns. Each campaign might bear, for example, an invitation to obtain a complimentary educational resource or access to an informational or inspirational webinar. Another might offer an opportunity to schedule a coaching call, participate in a survey, a roundtable series, or join a virtual conference or interview series that provides immediate value by addressing a pertinent relational problem occurring in an academic or social context. Recipients of such campaigns are given the right to, "opt-in" to the correspondences with their name, email address, and telephone number (to receive calls or text messages). By opting-in, subscribers agree to terms and conditions that make their contributions subject to interpretive analysis, and confidential, descriptive sharing for marketing, research, and educational purposes.

8 A follower list is built through the same campaigns as those described in generating an email subscriber list, however, the social media platforms they’re distributed on prioritize, follows, likes, shares, and views as opposed to opt-ins.

9 Historically Black College or University.

10 These literacies are defined in the implications section of this article.

11 These logics are defined in the implications section of this article.

12 When I use this term I am specifically referring to A Course In Miracles. A Course in Miracles—often abbreviated as ACIM or simply called The Course—is a complete, self-study, spiritual thought system. As a three-volume curriculum consisting of a Text, Workbook for Students, and Manual for Teachers, it teaches that the way to universal love and peace—or remembering God—is by undoing guilt through forgiving others. The Course thus focuses on healing of relationships and making them holy. A Course in Miracles also emphasizes that it is “but one version of the universal curriculum, of which there are many thousands.” Consequently, even though the language of The Course is grounded in biblical principles, it expresses a non-sectarian, non-denominational spirituality. A Course in Miracles, therefore, is a universal spiritual teaching, not a religion.

13 Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation in which a person or a group covertly sows seeds of doubt in a targeted individual, making them question their own memory, perception, or judgment, often evoking in them cognitive dissonance and other changes such as low self-esteem. Using denial, misdirection, contradiction, and misinformation, gaslighting involves attempts to destabilize the victim and delegitimize the victim’s beliefs. Instances may range from the denial by an abuser that previous abusive incidents ever occurred to the staging of bizarre events by the abuser with the intention of disorienting the victim. See Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting

14 The participant’s exact age was unknown because she chose not to reveal it.

15 These are actual names and are used with permission. Today, Erma is a single mother of one Black girl and a middle school teacher in an urban neighborhood school. Jennifer is a single mother of five children [one Black girl and four Black boys]; she is a customer service representative for a cable company and also a beautician. Angela is a divorced mother of five Black girls and an electrical engineer. All three women live in a major metropolitan city in the U.S.

16 A popular shampoo in the African American community; specifically formulated for kinky, coily, textured hair.

17 A pseudonym; reference to Jennifer’s daughter.

18 Young adulthood is defined as ages 21–26.

19 Adulthood is defined as ages 27–44.

20 Andrea Ritchie, Teen Vogue, https://www.teenvogue.com/story/dajerria-becton-arrest-pool-party-viral

Kelly Macias, Daily Cos, https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/4/27/1760308/-Waffle-House-arrest-reinforces-the-pattern-of-police-violence-and-sexual-abuse-toward-black-women

David Moye, HuffPost, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/dajerria-becton-pool-party-viral-video_n_5b2a751be4b0a4dc99233e9d

21 See, How To Die Peacefully (TEDx) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WonC2e5aOGE), by Jeanine Staples

22 Note that the depiction shared in this article is a t/Terror narrative to the extent that it is a description of a macroaggression that took place in society. It does not reflect Dajerria’s direct reflection on the experience. To conduct analysis on Dajerria’s articulation, several videos were reviewed including this one, wherein she says, of the physical, emotional, and psychological assault, “I was terrified of what he was going to do to me. I was shocked. I was confused.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gc0tIgKgDM&t=1s