I am a young black woman. My experiences are shaped by multiple factors such as sex, gender, race, class, geography, culture, income, education, dis-ability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and religion, to name a few. My social location and subject positioning are the lenses in which I understand the world around me. My intersections combine in the creation of experiences that are personal to me, but I am more than the sum of all my parts. However, systems and processes of oppression dictate when and where my many identities will intersect. I do not chose how my race enters, I cannot move in and out of being black. I hold Eli Claire (2003) with me dearly as a reminder that my layers are tangled and I hold stories of both oppression and privilege.
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I am living out the layers of anti-Black racism as the tensions and stories of black youth also reverberate in my life. Henceforth, the multilayered discourse of anti-Black racism is an effective theoretical framework to analyze the diverse lived experiences of Black individuals. It is an intersectional tool because it not only examines the types of racism Black people experience, but the types of racism Black people perpetuate as well as both the struggles against anti-Black racism and the struggles against the racism perpetuated by Blacks. In this essay I am going to explore the contours of anti-Black racism, with a focus on how it can be used theoretically to examine how social workers can engage with it in anti-oppressive practices. An analysis on the policing of Black bodies, the ideologies around anti-Black sanism in the school system, and internalized racism among Blacks will be evaluated as to how they pertain to institutional, symbolic and individual impacts of anti-Black …show more content…
Kumsa, Mfoafo-M’carthy, Oba and Gaasim were in shock of how much they were found in the same tensions. In fact, through self-reflection and reflexivity, the researchers realized that they struggled in their everyday lives to break free and separate themselves from these interwoven webs of anti-Black racism, thus situating themselves in their research (p.21). They use “we” to describe the commonalities of the themes behind their experiences and “I” to reflect their personal connections to the issues relating to anti-Black racism (p.22). The four authors used anti-Black racism to discern the following three understandings of their own anti-oppressive practices: the type of racism directed against Black peoples (A-BR), the type of racism that Black peoples perpetuate (AB-R), and lastly, both the struggle against anti-Black racism and the struggle against the racism perpetuated by Blacks (Kumsa et al., 2014,
I am living out the layers of anti-Black racism as the tensions and stories of black youth also reverberate in my life. Henceforth, the multilayered discourse of anti-Black racism is an effective theoretical framework to analyze the diverse lived experiences of Black individuals. It is an intersectional tool because it not only examines the types of racism Black people experience, but the types of racism Black people perpetuate as well as both the struggles against anti-Black racism and the struggles against the racism perpetuated by Blacks. In this essay I am going to explore the contours of anti-Black racism, with a focus on how it can be used theoretically to examine how social workers can engage with it in anti-oppressive practices. An analysis on the policing of Black bodies, the ideologies around anti-Black sanism in the school system, and internalized racism among Blacks will be evaluated as to how they pertain to institutional, symbolic and individual impacts of anti-Black …show more content…
Kumsa, Mfoafo-M’carthy, Oba and Gaasim were in shock of how much they were found in the same tensions. In fact, through self-reflection and reflexivity, the researchers realized that they struggled in their everyday lives to break free and separate themselves from these interwoven webs of anti-Black racism, thus situating themselves in their research (p.21). They use “we” to describe the commonalities of the themes behind their experiences and “I” to reflect their personal connections to the issues relating to anti-Black racism (p.22). The four authors used anti-Black racism to discern the following three understandings of their own anti-oppressive practices: the type of racism directed against Black peoples (A-BR), the type of racism that Black peoples perpetuate (AB-R), and lastly, both the struggle against anti-Black racism and the struggle against the racism perpetuated by Blacks (Kumsa et al., 2014,