1. “I Carry the Eyes of
Ida B. Wells”:
Understanding Memory, Race, and
Writing with Black Female College
Students' Texts
Carmen Kynard, Ph.D.

2. Overview
Using Patricia Hill Collins’ notion of critical
Methods: This presentation draws praxis, I will present this study as a series of oral
from a current manuscript-in- narratives to alternatively politicize issues of
progress that looks at how female methodology and textual arrangement in
college students of African research about black women (Couter and
descent construct themselves as Smith, Barone). This textual process is, thus, a
social activists and literate beings conscious attempt to portray experience and
in the struggle for their own right to
flow “past the barriers” (Royster) emotion, question normative positions, and
and reconstitute themselves. The offer a critical space for the interpretation of
study challenges still dominant black women’s literate lives in the academy
understandings of writing, rhetoric, (Denzin). I call this subject-driven
and knowledge as deracialized narrative analysis.
and degendered
phenomena. Using a critical In a Geertzian sense then, narrative as the form
discursive analysis of black
women’s multiple articulations of my telling means that I am conscious of the
(Chouliaraki and Fairclough, ways that I use stories to understand and
Fairclough, Gee), I make the present the lives and literacies of black women
assumption that language plays a where the cultural roles of black female
crucial role in maintaining and storytellers enact critical inquiry (Richardson,
creating social inequalities (Luke) Gonick and Hladki).
and that black women continually
negotiate and reconfigure this
social world.

3. Narrative I: Set It Off…
Black female college students write and carve out
their literate beings in a context that often looks no
different from what Phyllis Wheatley faced when
white colonists found it difficult to believe that she
had written her own poetry. She had to defend her
authorship in a Boston court in 1772 to a group that
included the then governor of Massachusetts. It
was only when she provided “proof” that they
signed an attestation to her authorship, which was
included in her Poems on Various Subjects,
Religious and Moral published in 1773. While the
adage that history repeats itself is much too simple
to capture social complexities under race and
gender in the United States, a historically situated
understanding traced back to the first book of
poetry published by a black woman, Phillis
Wheatley, does offer critical understanding of the
continuum of barriers imposed on black women’s
literate possibilities.

4. Narrative II: “Reminisce on the
Love We Had” (Methods)
What started as a way to digitize overflowing file cabinets turned into
this study. I checked the themes that I thought I was seeing
against 14 years of gradebooks where I make notes on every
topic that a student chooses (a strategy that I use to remember
what texts to suggest for student research projects). I checked all
of that against discussion forums in my online course systems.
Four, dominant themes emerged in black female college students’
writing. I settled on 20 students’ essays for each theme that met
the following criteria: 1) each essay was shared in a public forum;
2) each essay went through multiple revisions; and 3) each essay
was at least 500 words long. I then interviewed the authors of
each of these essays, black women who now work in all sectors,
and asked them to (re)situate the politics of the essay that I still
had as well as ask their permission to use the essay in this study.

5. Narrative III: Mothers and
Othermothers/Daughters and Otherdaughters
This theme about mothers, othermothers, daughters, and
otherdaughters is the second, most saturated theme. These
are writings about black motherhood where young black
women either chronicle the lives and experiences of their
own mothers and othermothers or are mothers themselves
chronicling their own stories.
I am particularly inspired by Susan Willis’s argument that
interest in mothers’ and grandmothers’ generations has
given black female novelists access to the past denied
them. For my political purposes, I am most interested in the
ways that Black motherhood, child-bearing, and child-
raising have represented racialized, cultural meanings in the
United States that black female college writers often take on
as central to the intellectual work of understanding America
and themselves in it during their college years.

6. Mamie Till as Embodied Metaphor
For this group of women, the ancestral
legacy is Mamie Till, mother of Emmit
Till who was murdered in 1955. Mamie
Till left Till’s casket open for everyone to
see, for America to see what it had
done; it was not her terror to witness
alone, it was a pain that belonged to
Black communities and it was the
design of white America. When I think
of the pain and ripping-apart-of-her-
soul that Mamie Till went through, I
must question: how could we, as Black
women in the academy, ever dare to
bow down, get scared, backtrack,
cower, second-guess, or back away
from naming, showing, and screaming
out loud when white racism comes for
us? It is this rhetorical awareness, as
embodied by Mamie Till, that I connect
to the women writers in this theme.

7. Narrative IV: “I Carry the Eyes…”
The third theme is Street Consciousness
for/in the Academy where black
female writers in college writing
classrooms use language as a way
to deliberately align themselves with
the struggles of working-
class/working poor black
communities. These are women of
African descent who explicitly write
about and problematize, based on
their own lived and personal
experiences, what they see as the
most pressing social issues facing
their fictive kin in places that they
outrightly name “the hood,” “the
ghetto,” “slum(s),” “the block,” “the
streets,” “the co’ner,” or “the
projects.”

8. Harriet Tubman as Embodied Metaphor
I situate Harriet Tubman as the gravitational, ancestral force for
these women. Tubman was said to always carry a pistol with
her on her trips to the south where she led other slaves North to
the Promised Land. That pistol was a warning for any slave who
got scared and wanted to leave the “freedom train” and go
back to the plantation. A return to the plantation was a danger
to the rest of the group and the very functioning of the
Underground Railroad and so it was safer to shoot the
naysayer/deserter because as Tubman was said to exclaim:
“Dead men tell no tales.” These women writers claim full,
romantic responsibility for promoting black unity and also
always embrace the reality and possibility that some will forego
the well-being of the black masses--- and be let go.

9. Narrative V: Transmigratory Identities
For Carole Boyce-Davies, unique black female identities are formed
in movement for the creation of transnational subjectivities. Here
the fight against colonization has distinct discursive functions for
Black female students with Pan-African visions.
Davies asks that we use and understand migratory subjectivity to fully
situate the work of someone like Claudia Jones: the only Black
female communist tried in the United States, sentenced for crimes
against the U.S., incarcerated, and deported in 1955; she then
became founder of London carnival and one of the first black
newspapers in London.
I see migratory subjectivity and the work of someone like Claudia
Jones as a trajectory in which to locate students’ writing in this final
theme. Here the fight against and critique of colonization--- both
internally and externally--- have distinct discursive functions for
black women with a Pan-African vision. Many of these women do
not intend to stay here in the U.S. but the fight against oppression
here is linked to oppression in their home countries and the rest of
the African Diaspora.

10. Narrative VI: Colorism& Caste Systems
The theme examined most frequently by
my black female college students is
Color/Hair/Body as Racial Caste System:
a racialized hierarchy that maps out good
hair, bad hair, light skin, dark skin--- an
arsenal of body politics that function as
societal discourses that divide,
differentiate, and lead to unjust social
practices felt most strongly by black
women.
I link these women’s writings to bell hooks
in the ways that hooks continually shows
that racial, gendered issues related to
colorism are cultural politics, not
individual experiences.