Perhaps a Black Girl Rolls Her Eyes Because It's One Way She Attempts to Shift Calcified Pain Throughout Her Body

Abstract

My spirit is unsettled each time I read my secondary English education students' reflections about their placement sites. As is typically the case in teacher education programs, in each cohort most of my students are White women, and a few are White men; there are always fewer than five students of color. As they prepare to enter middle and high school classrooms as full-time English teachers, my students participate in required field experiences in schools throughout East Baton Rouge Parish, where they encounter mostly Black and Brown students from low socioeconomic backgrounds. For many, this is their first time being surrounded by students whose bodies and lived experiences differ greatly from their own. I do not join my students in their field sites. I wait for them at the university, in our English methods courses, where they bring many reflective stories. Mostly, their narratives feel like greedy gossip. They relay tales of hostility witnessed as fights break out each day. They report standing on the sidelines, spying young Black bodies clawing at one another. They mumble desires for strategies to "manage" their future students. My Queer-Black-woman self has learned to wander between the spoken and unsaid. Deeper within their reflections lies another narrative-a clear disdain toward Black girls' expression. My students are angered when Black girls roll their eyes, suggest they develop more backbone in their teaching, adamantly refuse another rudimentary reading of The Crucible, or loudly assert their needs and objections in the classroom. Why do my students register Black girls' actions as impolite, rather than seeing them as animated responses? Why must Black girls continue to enter classrooms where teachers aspire to refashion their behavior and to forcibly eradicate loud, wild, and sassy expressions of Black girlhood, rather than "celebrate" (Brown, 2013) their vibrant spirits? Perhaps a Black girl rolls her eyes because it's one way she attempts to shift calcified pain throughout her body? Perhaps she's disinterring historicized pain, meticulously shifting transatlantic memories of an earlier time's forced breeding (De Veaux, 2014; Shange, 2010; Spillers, 2003), of yesterday's slanders against her sexual nature (Morgan, 2000;