Last semester I was in a feminist autoethnography class. So, ethnography is the study of a group of people through stories, whether that is the gathering of other's stories, or the researcher's response to the stories they have heard. Therefore, autoethnography is the study of one's own group through their personal stories and experiences.
The ultimate goal in this class was to develop our own autoethnography at the end of the semester, and I would like to share mine with you all. Because this paper was not short by any means, I welcome everyone to my autoethnographic series where I will be posting sections of my autoethnography weekly.
My autoethnography is the development of my black consciousness. I will not go too much in to detail, but it took me a long time to realize that being a black woman in America meant that I was inherently different. Through the places I lived, kids would show me I was not like them, but the way I was internalizing it was damaging both internally and externally. Therefore I chose to show this through the development of my natural hair journey. I welcome you, and hope you all enjoy.
My black aesthetic has been overshadowed by many of the places I have lived. For instance, for a long period of time I did not even acknowledge my blackness. Living in Michigan had a lot do with this. All of my friends were white at school. Being a military child who has lived in five states total, two of those have a significant impact on my upbringing. Michigan is where I completed first through eighth grade. Though I stayed in the same state for that long period of time there were a lot of changes I was forced to undergo within that time. My elementary school was composed of predominantly white students. This is the kind of school who would claim diversity because of the children of Italian, Polish, or Irish descent, but they were all white. Myself and five other black kids were amongst the rest. At the time this did not make me uncomfortable because it was all I knew. Many questioned my hair and I did not have answers. In a sixth grade class of mine we had to make a portfolio about our family. We were asked to make a cover to our portfolio with decorations of different aspects of our family. My teacher gave us ideas such as finding our family crest. This intrigued me because the example he showed us looked so decorated. I asked if every family had a crest and he cheerfully answered yes. I always had so much trust in my teachers so when I got home I asked my mom. She got so mad at me, saying of course we did not have a family crest. Why was this such a simple answer to her when my teacher told me EVERY family has one? Confused so I went to ask my dad. He shook his head and said his knowledge of our family history did not go far past my great grandparents. They were so content with their answers, I was dissatisfied. Sent back with a half filled out family tree, a Haitian flag, and an Army star; the embarrassment to present filled me as I watched everyone else show such cool aspects of their crests from England, Italy and Germany. Not to mention I was very confused as to why my mom handed me a Haitian flag because I barely considered myself Haitian at that time.
The Eurocentric ways in which lower education is taught to children at the biggest institution of socialization provides for a damaging platform for learning specifically for African American children. The very act of being taught through the lenses of one’s colonizer must be decolonized. Critical Race theory best explains a reason as to why racism exists can be attributed to the institutions and policies built on notions of colorblindness that perpetuate white dominance (Bergerson 2003). My feeling of being different is the foundation of what education was built upon; “most students learn history as a set narrative, a process that reinforces the mistaken idea that the past can be synthesized” (Wong 2015). The one sided history I was being taught left no room for me. Not being able to trace my history is a result of the slave trade. Because that school system is rarely challenged with racial minorities they did not know how to handle my black mind. As a result, my embarrassment was not only met with an incomplete crest, but also an incomplete grade for not filling out the family tree.
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