Secrets in Plain Sight - McDaniel

SECRETS IN PLAIN SIGHT: INSTITUTIONAL COVERT DISCRIMINATION A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of Social Sciences University of Denver In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy by Jacquelynn Suzette McDaniel June 2010 Advisor: Dr. Kate Willink

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© Copyright by Jacquelynn Suzette McDaniel 2010 All Rights Reserved

Author: Jacquelynn Suzette McDanie!Title: SECRETS IN PLAIN SIGHT: INSTITUTIONAL COVERTDISCRIMINATIONAdvisor: Kate WillinkDegree Date: June 2010 Abstract While dominant national P-20 narratives circulate a discourse of the nearachievement of racial equity post Brown v. Board of Education, there remains alarge gap between the experiences of people of color and the official record oftheir inclusion and access. Organizational self-analysis of racial disparities ineducation often attribute undeniable discrimination to the micro-levelperformances of individuals; claiming micro-aggressions, lack of training,political/personal conflict, or ignorance. When these reasons cannot fully explaingross inequity; organizations turn to society's socio-economic disparities andmirrored racial realities within the country as instructive on the inevitable realitiesof racism within schools. A critically missing piece in the binary of this micro/macro analysis is therole of accountability that the culture of organizations have in reprising andmaintaining structural elements of discrimination that make certain an outcome ofinequality in education. This counter narrative argues that the nature of racebased and other institutional discriminations has changed. Now covert, culturallynormalized and widely sanctioned, these forms of institutionalized oppressionsthrough its invisible form, have gained propulsion. It's largely undisruptedascendancy within institutional life hides in the shadows of culture, actively works ii

to deny marginalized people's ful! expression of their humanity, and work'sagainst their actualization of freedom. Working to make visible the ethereal constitution of institutional covertdiscrimination; the voice of this study through literary device attends to theintimate nature of this closed dialogic space, effectively opening up spaces forsilenced stories that serve to intimately and graphically expose this phenomenon. This research conducts itself as critical indigenous inquiry.Epistemologically working from an Afro-Mexican diasporic position; theauthor/participant asks readers to make metaphorical leaps from the experienceof the individual to a more scopic experience of oppressed people. Piercing theveil of whiteness and more traditional to African relational ways of knowing; storyis used to ground the reader in the everyday experiences of witnesses whotestify to the existence, operation and effect of institutional covert discriminationwhile strategically integrating instructive theories operating sub- textually. This work draws on P-20 education as a historically and contemporarilyimportant location to phenomenologicaily interrogate institutional covertdiscrimination (ICD). Its broader claim is that iCD is not solely germane toeducation; rather it is a disease afflicting large sectors of organizational life. iii

Acknowledgements Thank you Lord for ailowing me to be a part of your pian. Thank you for settingthe path, providing for my every need, protecting me from evil, and sheltering me from harm. Thank you to my loving compafieros in our common struggle toward claiming social justice for the communities we live in, with our bodies and our hearts. To my dear friend, Lily Mendoza, it was in your presence and under your care that I began my awakening, thank you for your courage, your brilliant mind, and your beautiful spirit.Thank you to my loving family who gave so much towards this effort. Dominique, Micah, and Cruz your sacrifices have allowed for this work to become.My awesome friends and family and to Mia, Jory, Alina, Tiffany, Georgette - who sacrificed much in order to support team Jax. You gave up many girls' nights,fed me, encouraged me, listened and talked me down when needed. Thank you! Thank you to my committee for being incredible scholars and people. I am grateful that you believed in my work, trusted me and stretched to consider this vision. iv

Thank you Kate, my advisor and my friend. I am so proud to know you and evenprouder to be your advisee. Your modeling has inspired me to reach for graceand to acknowledge and celebrate all victories in social justice work. I admireyour quiet strength. Those whom you touch, directly and indirectly are blessed toknow your spirit. When I asked you to walk with me on this journey, you did.When I asked you to take seriously this contribution to social justice work, youdid. When I asked you to guide me, you did. And you did all of this with kindness,humiiity, savvy, and courage - thank you. v

Table of ContentsIntroduction ,, 1 1 Chapter One: A Place At The Table • Un Lugar en la Mesa My Prayer , .....2 A Place At The Table 3 The Truth About Stories 8 On Evidence and Transparency 30Section One: Compiex Identities 34 Chapter Two: Blackness: Lessons Learned While Developing aMethod For My Madness , 34 That Nigger Bitch..., , ..45 Narrative: La Madre , 68 Narrative: El Nino Moreno , 71 Chapter Three: Profile of an Institution (Mapping InstitutionalIdentities) ,, 81 Theoretical Framings 82 The Personhood of Institutional Identity... 83 Education As Institution: Ways of Knowing ..87 Wild Wild West: Connecting Land, History, and Education 88 Colorado Sand Creek Massacre 91 The Colorado Klan Era 99 University of Denver 105 Cherry Creek School District .108Section Two: Contestation: The Intersections of Identity 111 Chapter Four: Everyday institutional Violence 111 Institutional Discrimination 113 La M a d r e - 1 s t Year Graduate Student 115 Spring Quarter, 2006 127 El Nino - 6th Grade Year. 142 V!

La Madre - 2m Year Graduate Student .....152 E! Nino - 7th Grade Year 160 La Madre - 3rd Year Graduate Student El Nino - 8th Grade Year .....161 169Section Three: The Emergence of Hope .173 Chapter Five: Community as a Human Condition 173 175 A Sixth Sense: Love 179 .185 Community as a Human Condition 198 199References , 200Appendix A 201Appendix B ................202Appendix CAppendix DNotes..... vii

IntroductionChapter One: A Place At The Table • Un Lugar en la Mesa These writings access a decolonizing space in the production of itscounter narratives. In order to reach deep embodied knowledge withinoppression, I use spiritual language and unconventionally styled writing devicesto open up ways of knowing that live outside of western epistemology. Thiscritical cultural work is careful not impose dominant research ontologies whichthreaten to re-produce existing institutional knowledge. Historically, suchknowledge has often produced master educational narratives of post racialism,which I challenge. The approach of this study pushes to foreground embodiedexperience in order to access new knowledge. In this respect, other researchvoices are threaded as sub-textual to the primary narratives in order to facilitatethe reader's intimate connection with the spirit and experiences of markedbodies. From an African cosmologicaf perspective, which is the ontologicai andepistemologicai basis here, spirituality1 is a part of everyday knowing. I hope to open up space for new forms of knowing oppression to emergethrough a slow and careful unfolding of layered embodied knowledge withinthese critical personal narratives. Because oppression is a condition afflicting thespirit, a full understanding of its nature must also be spiritually grounded.Therefore the writing conventions, language, methodologies, and epistemologies 1

in this study are hinged upon a spiritual way of knowing. Inspired by the traditionsof indigenous people, I begin this research journey with a prayer. My Prayer Today, I inhaled freedom, and it felt good, i took a long drink of its airthrough my nostriis and pushed it down into my lungs. As I watched my bellyatop my diaphragm rise and fall, I could feel its energy circulating throughout mybody. The inside of my lower belly tickles. My thighs, calves, feet, and toes are inon this. My arms tingle and I smile. I fee! as if I am receiving a full-bodied spiritualmassage. The experience of its afterglow is like being washed in the sweetnectar of encouragement, water for life's long journey. I am - finally free. PraiseGod. I have a story to tell. In preparation for this moment, my body has investedapproximately 10,950 days of hard labor. This narrative's composition is graftedfrom the embodied physical and spiritual material of oppressed people. Thesocial of the human experience has contributed to this matter's make-up -producing rich affective nutrients; pain, love, passion, and yearning that fertilizedthe ground that yields the fruits of these writings. As sure as I know dawn rises I know that I live inside this story\", raisingthe stakes for this encounter. I suppose One way or another we are [all] living the stories planted in us early or along the way .... We live stories that either give our lives meaning or negate it with meaninglessness. If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change our lives (Okri as cited in King, 2003, p.153). 2

The effects of this narrative's birth hold the potential to release the energynecessary to actualize unrealized desires. I speak here to and about those whohave the desire to love so deeply that they fight relentlessly through the layers ofoppression that seek to enslave and murder the spirits of marked human bodies.This will to love, fiercely pursues freedom for humanity, believing that to be thespace for the most pure form of being, where joy and beauty abound. Achieving this energy relies on the will and effort of the individual. But thenexus is formed through the solidarity of the collective where critical mass isreached. Strength amasses with each person who places their body on the frontline of battle to stand next to their spiritual kin against the demons of oppression.It is these people who underwrite the costs of social justice. In this story ofcollective spirits, I am weaving together the human experiences of oppressedpeople across time and space. Together, they contribute to the creation of theconditions of possibility that might imprint our storied lives where our deeply helddesires of freedom escape - this, is my prayer. A Place At The Table I remember sitting in that room around the table with my attorney Jim, aself assured, handsome, tall and slender white man. It was all so visibly civil withbusiness professionals exchanging polite conversations, adhering to a controlledconversational norm where tones remained low and speech was slowed so as todemonstrate care, caution and sensitivity. Through the rules of engagement asestablished by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission the dialogue was 3

forced around specific charges with carefully crafted language native to theirculture and foreign to mine. This ensured that affect, emotion, or non-linear, non-logic centered communication did not disrupt the proceedings. As I sat in my chair facing my former employer, their attorney and theFederal investigator assigned to my case, I could feel terror coursing through mybeing. Sweat formed underneath my arms and i moved them closer to my bodyso that no one would notice the moisture on my clothing. I fought back the tearswelled behind my eyes causing my nose sting and my breath to suspend. I wanted to abandon this struggle for justice that required me to constantlybe present with pain and oppression. I wanted so badly to be in a psychologicallyand spiritually safe space, free from the interrogation of whiteness. When I hiredJim I did so not only because of his legal skill but also because he seemed toperfectly embody whiteness and privilege, something ! did not have. I was surethat it would take someone like that to fight this battle. I had faced a regime ofinstitutional violence for some time and desperately needed to mitigate the lossof identity, family, community, self. I was experiencing spiritual and psychologicalwarfare and couldn't name the enemy, their primary strategy, weapon of choiceand my counter strategy. Around that table I had no language, no voice, no narrative, no story; Iwas disembodied and stripped, void of emotion, spirit, and history. I was isolatedand disconnected from community forced to negotiate with these institutionalagents on my own. I was merely a human commodity there employing two 4

attorneys and one government official. They were able to cut out pieces of me inorder to facilitate my industrial use. My body was sitting at the table but I was notthere. 1 felt as though their profession and their civility made it possible tocommodify oppression. Industry has been created to represent the interests andnegotiations of the oppressed with other institutions (law, economy, education).Their proper interests are to protect normative order and does not address thepain of the oppressed nor contribute toward wholeness for thrival. What they doin effect is to aiert beneficiaries of institutions that there is a possible impendingthreat and signal in institutional reinforcements to reorganize and form aprotective line of defense or worse a line of offense. This continues uninterruptedbecause at that table there is no place for me or other marginalized identitiesdespite sustained efforts of activists. We have no place at the table becauseeffective strategies are in place to ensure that it does not happen. I continue tobelieve that the table as a metaphor for community is a place wheretransformation can take place. For me, a place at the table means a seat ofpower with voice assembled among others in dialogue, it is my hope thatwarriors continue their efforts to push for a place at the table in order to addressinequities of power. The table is a familiar symbol in the modem mind representing acommunal space. It functions both as a metaphor and as a material artifact tosignify a convergence point in human communication. My grandmother'soversized wooden table with Spanish carvings was the place where her eight 5

adult children gathered to share memories, make memories and exchangeconversations during holiday dinners. The grandchildren were never allowed tosit at this tabie. They sat for their meals at a smail colored square foldout table.They weren't old enough to be recognized as equals and therefore held no seatat the table. I also remember that it was only those who were present at the tablethat were able to speak when an argument arose. If you weren't at the table youdidn't have a voice, you weren't in it. All tables are not the same but all representa recognized community space of honor. To have a seat at the table means thatin your community you hold a seat of power, respect and authority. When you sitat the table, you can speak, you have a voice and you can be heard but mostsignificantly you have impact and imprint on the narrative. The table metaphor functions outside the family circles also. To negotiatein business only those with the authority to broker a deal and represent aninterested party is invited to sit at the table. In the boardroom, only those with arepresentative interest are invited to sit at the tabie. At the table importantbusiness is taken care of through dialogue. Exactly what qualifies one to speak is certainly specific to the culture oneis operating within. From a dominant social perspective, what we use to qualifyus to speak is often the authority that we have been granted from recognizedinstitutions; a degree, a professional certification, a respected job title, or throughthe extension of another widely accepted voice (e.g. Martin Luther King Jr., John 6

F. Kennedy, Aristotle). And now as a woman of color committed to advancing asocial justice agenda it is imperative that i speak freely and that 1 am heard, I have studied the behavior of others to see how they qualify themselvesto speak. I observe that beyond the institutional authority, the social position oneoccupies through their race, their gender, or their class can also qualify them tospeak. Here, the criterion for success is white, male, and affluent. I am not white,nor male, nor affluent. And I have to be careful to measure the concessions that Iwill be asked to make before I use the authority of any institution. 1 amdetermined to speak and to do so I know now that I must find my way out of thisprescribed way of being in the world. On what authority do I speak? My answer this time is not through theinstitution where I will earn my doctoral degree, not because I am extending atheorists work, not because of the titles i hold. I am qualified to speak because 1)I have staked my body in the battle 2) I have committed myself in the everyday toa social justice struggle and its outcomes mapped onto my spirit and 3) I respectthe voices of the people I stand beside, those who came before me andcommitted themselves in the same way, by honoring their identities, and theirways of knowing and being in this world as influences on my own identity. Iunabashedly express this. Witnessing extends beyond an ocular eye - I witnessed because I wasaltered by oppression. I am a member of community of witnesses wherecollectively there is a power tantamount to movement that can build pressure 7

against oppressive regimes. Through witnessing, the value of what! am offeringis not empirical evidence as a historical account. I am offering a contextualaccount within a larger history that will serve in community efforts to correctsocial injustices. \"The crucial feature of human life is its fundamentally dialogicalcharacter...We define our identity always in dialogue with, sometimes in struggleagainst, the things our significant others want to see in us\" (Taylor, 1994, pp. 32-33). Because I don't qualify to speak I don't now have my place at the table. Tothis point I have had to rely on the capital of other white, affluent people to speakon my behalf. It has helped me get to where I am today and for that I amthankful. But I have gone as far as I can go using that method and I haveexperienced its limitations. To move forward in the social justice movement I andothers like me must call upon our power and tell our narratives with our voices. Icannot sit at the children's table and ask another to speak for me. I must have myown place at the table. The Truth About Stories I have a history of dismissing the powerful significance of the ways inwhich stones operate in us and through us. When my fourth grade teacher askedme to prepare an oral report for my class on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Iremember expressing my displeasure by dramatically rolling my eyes and loudlysucking my teeth producing a nasty disrespectful sound, i resented him asking 8

me to take on this responsibility to teach the rest of the al! White class about this\"Black American hero\". Given the story I had heard so many times, I knew I wassupposed to hail this misinterpreted icon for his patience and passivity. I simplyhad no interest in researching him further. Other than our commonality of race, Icouldn't identify with him. Though I was annoyed, I took the job seriouslychecking out several topical books at our local library. As expected, every book Iread told the same story: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was an extraordinary person.He led Blacks across the country in a peaceful campaign to unite them withWhites. He fought tirelessly for equal rights. Because of him, civil rights for allhave been won. And that's the story I presented to the class. Unknowingly, I characterized Martin Luther King Jr. as an untouchablehero who carried on his shoulders the civil rights struggle. ! had come tounderstand stones as fantasy constructs. And talking about Dr. King in this wayseemed to fit this romantic paradigm, in moments of public pedagogy (Giroux,2000) in my everyday socialization S learned that American stones weretraditionally never critical or demanding. They followed an Aristotelian andFreudian course of considering stories to be myths, functioning as an escapefrom isolation and solitude (de Certeau, 1984). The formula called for predictableframeworks consistent with European or western values and had a hero, villain,moral, or lesson to learn. Generally people of color or working and middle classpeople like me were thought to be in the most need of learning these lessons.These stories not only gave us the images of what/who we should hope and 9

strive to become but also altered our present life's path through a quietconditioning. As a cultural effect of westernization, it was easy and commonplaceto take such stories for granted. In my early education, riding in the bosom ofromanticism (stories without cultural politics) made it possible for me todisembody from powerful emotions and aggressive demands of politicalaccountability. Schooling reinforced this dynamic of stories. It was a disciplined place fora quiet institutional conditioning of my spirit and behavior. Questioning this\"natural order\" was unheard of to me. For many years I internalized these storiesas I listened, repeated them, and believed them. I found myself subconsciouslyembodying them. The stories became my way of knowing others, the world, andmyself. My mind didn't know what was happening to me, but my spirit did. Thelonger this went on, the more pain I felt throughout my spirit body. In my efforts tomitigate the violence, I began pretending that I was only a listener and never anactor, removing any burden of personal responsibility. This world was totalizingand left me feeling infantile and powerless. It was more than ! could bear. When I think about the Dr. King story now, I wonder how different thingswould have been for others and myself in the room if I had narrated critically.Who am ! outside of dominance? What does my own way of knowing look like inan unadulterated world? What knowledge exists outside of the storiedboundaries I have known? Could these questions have been interrogated andanswered in such a moment remixed? Told as a counter narrative 10

111 lv: Dr. King was an everyday citizen who was an activist with goals forinstitutional transformation. Through sustained everyday activism [as Collinssuggests] he successfully challenged injustice, poverty and inequality (Collins,2000). This is an account that would have allowed my 4th grade self to locatewithin a long civil rights movement. This identification could have awakened thesocial justice calling from within that I have felt from a very young age. But, Ididn't tell this story and I never heard it either. As a result the path to myawakening as an activist was prolonged. The Road to Activism Nearly all of my K-12 school years I was the Brown girl in a sea of Whiteprivileged peers. The rules of intercultural engagement left me no choice but tolearn in whitenessv the language, cultural norms, and rules of privilege, in thisgame White people are rarely called to examine their own culture from necessityor compellation. I learned early that they couldn't or wouldn't share their wayswith me. But they insisted that outsiders nevertheless learn them well enough tomake themselves invisible, so as not to be disruptive. I don't remember the first time I was punished for not respecting theboundaries of whiteness. By the end of my third grade year I knew fromcountless painful encounters with teachers, school aids, and administrators thatthere was a racial hierarchy with different rules for different groups. It seemed Iwas always in violation of the rules. Except I had no idea what they were. Tired of 11

being a regular offender, one day 1 just stopped trying to become (which seemedto be a constant disruption) and started capitulating to this mysterious power. 1 did everything I could not to disrupt the powerful sphere of whiteness.Not having anyone to talk to about my painful experiences and lacking languagefor what was happening, I began to feei the weight of isolation. In a move ofdesperation i developed an iteration of dual consciousnessvl. While fixing mygaze™ on my oppressor I managed a subjugated identity. With the gaze, I hopedto iearn intelligence that might free me from spiritual captivity. I wanted thefreedom I knew before I started school, before the stories. I wanted to respond tothe urge within me to grow, to become. Down but not out, at a very young age I became a serious student of theintricacies of culture. I saw that politically, socially, and economically Whitepeople appeared to have more power than I did. They decided how one was tobehave, what was appropriate and what was not. They determined where peoplewould live and how much money one could have. They seemed to hold the keysto a secret society that I secretly wanted to be a part of. It was like they were thecenter of the universe. Even when they were not present, all of our ways of beingwere still commanded by White people. Though 1 couldn't inteilectuaiize it,without my will or desire, my body knew that! lived on the margins. Like a video game designer, I wrote a program that would decode anddemystify this secret society. I developed a counter weapon to fight the violenceof whiteness. Developing and using an intelligence tool like surveillance allowed 12

me to do this. I have been developing this art and skill since kindergarten. As asixth sense, I allow my spirit to temporally absorb the energy of another. Thispermits me as an outsider to know them intimately, sharply understand themfrom their world-view, and extract information. Even if I don't agree with theirpolitics or choices, i sit with them in the spirit. As a child I obsessed with mastering this act of spiritual communication inthe same way I imagine Michael Jordan in his childhood obsessed withmastering basketball. Silence and covertness are norms of Whiteness. Acquiringspiritual capital such as this kind of intelligence allows me to leverage mypositions in the everyday negotiations of power. I took everything I had learned from my culture of being a Black Mexicanand out of desire and necessity I crafted a too! that would give me the power Ineeded to protect myself from harm and also gain the power necessary to get outof the margins, where I could be free. Thirty years later, this mastery has pushedthe restrictive boundaries of whiteness so that I could buy myself some freedomto become. With this tool, sometimes I gain power to leverage so that I canexplore and access new spaces. As ! move farther on my path in life, I amincreasingly aware of the limitations of this intercuitural communication strategy.That is, the range of the benefit of this tool is limited to the self. In my spiritualevolution I have matured to a point where I want to reach beyond the self. Idesire to come fully into freedom of being by knowing others and myself withincommunity, where the highest order of knowing is love. 13

i have seen others reach this point as well and turn back, choosing to livein isolation, connecting only to their needs, interests and well-being. This affordsthem a false freedom, a comfortable illusion. That's the poetics of their story. Theconvenience of forgetting the politics, particularly the oppression of the raced,gendered, and classed kind leaves us blind and numb to the nuancedunderstandings of human complexities involving criticai sacrifices and suffering. In the United States, storytelling is a part of our everyday life. The way wetell stones, live them, embody or objectify them is culturally specific. We rarelythink about the responsibilities that come along with being a teller, an actor or alistener. The frequency and ease in which we engage stories is akin to breathingair. Not until the body is sick or the air we need becomes polluted, do wecontemplate the complexities involved in breathing; its power, the labor of humanlungs, or the importance of a clean environment. Storytelling is like that. It's themoments when you experience forcefully being silenced or forced isolation as aresult of living your story or from its telling that you come to terms with thedemands of respect for story; its power and its politics. Choosing not to comply with the demands of this respect most alwaysbears dark consequences for some human spirit. I've faced some of theseconsequences... I know what it feels like to have stories kept from you, hiddenaway, access denied. I also know what it feels like to have the stories I live inaltered through calculated manipulation by those in power. Its effects changeyour life in ways that should not be. I know what its like to have your story 14

violently choked out of you leaving you mute. But I imagine something differentfor this story, something much closer to the sacredness of pre-modern stories,which faced extinction when stories became commodified, co-opted by thosewho stood to gain. I will tell this story with naked vulnerability, unabashedpassion, and demanding integrity. Of you, I ask for your grace, openness,solidarity and embrace of the poetics and politics. The Truth About Love This story is about love. Ultimately that's what all my work as a researcheris about.vl\" And in perfect and strange parallel, that's what all of my living isabout. These are the stories I am called and prepared to tell. 1 see injustice andoppression as socially constructed barriers to knowing and loving. My laborseeks to dismantle those structures. The origin of knowledge is lovelx. It comes from a place of passion withinthe soul (Palmer, 1983). I recognize that I live amongst many who believe in thenecessity and inevitability of determined individualism and isolation. This is theway of knowing that is dominant in this society. However, I strongly maintain anallegiance to loving through community and relationship. I see the world asecology of already connected humans, nature, and animals. For me, therealready exists a relationship to one another. Choosing to isolate and focus on theindividual is in direct conflict with who I am. Operating this way is a space ofdouble consciousness within me. It is the equivalent of asking a Brown person tosee the world as a White person, an African to see the world as an American, a 15

woman to see the world as a man, or a lesbian woman to see the world as aheterosexual woman. Each demand asks for one to replace who they are, theiridentity with the identity and epistemology of another. In order to be free, to fullyknow and express who I am in my relationships to others in my communal work, Imust rebuke this kind of violence. My daily work is not to choose to be or not bein relationship. I already am, we all are. The choices in the everyday, center onattending to them with mutuality, reciprocity, grace, caring, and accountability. On my journey I've come across a breeding ground for the kind of violenceI speak of. It's a training site for oppression where people's identities are undoneand redone in the image of an oppressor, bearing dark consequences. 1 havesuffered from its grip and have witnessed many others die a spiritual deathbecause of this. Yet this violence continues to operate freely, largelyunchallenged because of its disguise as a wolf in sheep's clothing. It travels andoperates covertly. Often talked about in neutral terms and normalized as natural,this darkness has become sanctioned in our everyday ways of knowing andbeing. It is the relationship between love, epistemology (the way one sees andframes the world), and education that helped me see my way out of this violence.In K-12 schooling I resisted the imprisonment of teachers, many timesunsuccessfully, who sought to moid me into their prefabricated definitions of theworld, trying to create me in their image (Palmer, 1983). They worshipped a 16

closed logic in an endless quest for power where choices of being were fixed in abinary between dominate or being dominated (Palmer, 1983). Different from school, \"education, in the broadest sense, is a principalfeature of politics because it provides the capacities, knowledge, skills, and socialrelations through which individuals recognize themselves as social and politicalagents\" (Giroux, 2004, p.115). Blacks in the diaspora have used education asintellectual and spiritual tools to counter the violence they experienced and toreturn to their epistemologicai center. With an understanding that spirituality andepistemology \"have tangible effects on our souls, on the material and spiritualwell-being of our people and humanity\" (Baba Ishangi, as cited in Diliard, 2008,p.278) such epistemic moves were strategies to connect themselves as theimages of the knower to the known and their relationships, forming the way theyas educated people not only thought but also acted (Palmer, 1983). CarterWoodson's collection of speeches by Black Americans in the late 19th and early20th century, provide an early American historical frame reflecting such thoughts,and point to evidence of the constant presence of spirituality throughout Africandiaspora. The orators here regularly referenced the spirit of the \"Negro\" in largerdiscourses of economic, social and corporeal liberation. Connecting educationand spirit to a material manifestation of freedom, one oratorx spoke: ... The entire Negro people experienced a profound sense of spiritual release, ... In the heat of the struggle they found themselves bound with other Americans in the spiritual fellowship of a common cause. When they stood on the height of this exalted experience and looked down on their pre-war poverty (civil war), impotence, and spiritual isolation, they realized as never before the depth of harm they had suffered, and there in them 17

arose a mighty hope ... (Woodson, 1925, p.659). [Some of us believe] that the Negro may never expect to acquire economic, political, and spiritual liberty in America. [However, this accomplished] would place these United States in the spiritual leadership of all humanity. When the Negro cries with pain from his deep hurt [he] lays his petition for elemental justice ... (663). I am connected through genetic lineage to the community of Mexican andAfrican diasporic people searching for justice and freedom. But I am alsoconnected to a broader spiritual lineage of oppressed people across this earth.We share in common the pain and brokenness of forced disembodiment betweenour spirits and our bodies, which has in effect isolated us from each other.! seekan end to violence against humanity and a return to ourselves before theviolence began (because ! believe there was a before). The anatomy of stories is so peculiar. Even to define what it is becomes aconundrum; I like to say it's a living tale of simple complexity. I think that'sbecause they involve people, either as the narrator, inventor, actor, or listener.And people are funny, at the dawn of everyday, you never know how and in whatways they are going to shape the world. The power of story is undeniable. Acrosscultures, stories are embedded in communication. It's as if in storytelling or storyacting we are meta-communicating about our embodiment. But what happenswhen only certain people are allowed to reflect back, or are given the authority tokeep our memory or our knowledge of what is, who is, and how it is? Whathappens when we have no agency as actors in our own story? That is thedilemma of storytelling irreverent of culture. 18

When stories are alive, a part of us, there is no beginning or end or pointin time. Living narratives have no fixed commitment to person or geography. Infact this story I'm about to tell you preceded me, but I have a part in it. This storyis not placed in the everyday but made up through everyday moments. And eventhough everyday moments tell this story, it could never be understood from aneveryday perspective, which assumes normalcy and status quo. Critical personalnarratives require a sustained and aggressive critical examination of ourselveswithin feminist & indigenous epistemologies. This kind of intense activeengagement runs oppositional to the system of our dominant culture. \"Story helps you touch whatever lives inside them that knows Truth whenthey see it, wants to see the bigger picture, and wants to do the right thing\"(Simmons, 2001, p.34). My narrative competes with other narratives that areconsidered official records. There is an existing dominant and popular story thathas circulated in news stories that get picked up and in legal communities,influencing how business in organizations is done and how policy is made. Thisstory's premise is that discrimination (race, sexuality, gendered, age) largelyoccurs at the level of the individual and has become the barometer against whichpeople measure its existence, effect and problematic. My counter-narrative usesrace as a category of discrimination and interrogates the claim that the structureof discrimination is limited to the individual domain. The implications here extendmore broadly to the heart of the issue of discrimination, a particular logic in theproject of oppression. 19

At present, the evidence for determining the occurrence of race-baseddiscrimination lies primariiy within institutional authority. The narratives ofinstitutions are priviieged over the narratives of the subjugated. With little regardfor supported discrimination claims or contradictions of racial and inclusivepolicies; the standard in organizations, personal and public communicativespaces, and in legal and political institutions is to defer to institutions to confirm adiscrimination narrative. The prevailing notion that undergirds all claims is that weas a nation - but for a few extremists - have moved beyond the shameful historyof racism in this country. Those who teii counter-narratives to this story areconsidered to be victimizing themselves and creating an aggressor where therereally are none. Their claims of discrimination are considered acts of aggression. I can't think of a moment when I have been \"out ioud\" about living in oramongst stories. But this day is different because I recognize that my silencemeans that a different record is recorded than what i know and therefore I live adifferent truth and am compiicit in its denial and reign of oppression -which haskept those on margins in captivity, if the origin of knowledge is love, then in thismoment, like others before me, in community with epistemofogical force I will usemy education, spirit and body in order to claim freedom.Honoring the Voices In this study design I, the researcher, am also the sole participant. Theprimary data for this dissertation uses my experiences as a mestizaxl graduatestudent and the mother of a secondary school age African American son who 20

concurrently for the past four years have pursued their education in economicand raced privileged institutions. This narrative gives testimony as an embodiedwitness to institutional oppression and serves as a counter narrative,\"perspectives that run opposite or counter to the presumed order and control\"(Stanley, 2007, p.14), to a larger discourse of equity in education. \"Counternarratives act to deconstruct the master narratives, and they offer alternatives tothe dominant discourse in educational research\" (p.14). Providing \"multiple andconflicting models of understanding social and cultural identities\" (p. 14). I have faith in the power of critical research to labor for the human spirit asa sophisticated means by which to work out the social dilemmas we becomefaced with. It has the capacity to facilitate new ways of knowing and in theprocess it can undo unwanted ways of knowing. Where some researchmethodologies reach limitations for liberation, decolonizing research, such asAnzaldua (2007), and Calafell & Moreman (2009), can uncover the colonizingtendencies of the English language and traditions of epistemological domination.It concerns itself with the \"process in both research and performance of valuing,reclaiming, and foregrounding indigenous voices and epistemologies\" (Swadener&Matua, 2008, p. 31). Research can draw attention to and access the deepest parts ofourselves. We can use it to teach and to inspire action. As researcher-participantI witness, providing testimony of institutional covert discrimination based on first 21

hand knowledge and bearing witness to something beyond recognition that can'tbe seen (Oliver, 2001). When I arrived as a graduate student at the University of Denver I aimedto make sense of a pattern of racialized encounters I had witnessed. Each ofthese encounters were enactments of some form or combination of violence;spiritual, physicai, intellectual, or psychological. Through sustained rigoroustheoretical engagement and in the relentiessness of further witnessing of thesame nature, I began to observe that the common denominator in these patternsof violence was institutions. This understanding marked the beginning of myinvestment into tracking a phenomenon I am calling institutional covertdiscrimination (ICD), a phenomenon of sanctioned discrimination at theinstitutional level against identities of difference within the institutional structure. ICD, both culturally insidious and pervasive, is a hegemonic powermaintenance strategy that targets cultural identities, which threaten itsnormativity. Using the social and political capital inherent in its social position,institutions here call its own resources (human and material), institutionallynetworked authority, and political will to exercise acts of violence against itstarget for the purpose of erasing their identities through a psychological andspiritual undoing - For as long as the institution perceives a threat to itsnormativity, The end goal in institutional covert discrimination is to systematicallydismantle subjectivities, its occurrence is in the everyday, embedded withinculture, language, behavior, institutional practice, policies, laws, ideologies, and

lived organizational values making it extremely difficult to locate and makevisible. It is the institutional identity that reproduces agents who will labor onbehalf of the institution; as ideology, language, social practice or organizations asthe chief enforcers of this strategy, making !CD sustainable through time andspace. In other words, it is seen across generations where time and people havechanged because it is a phenomenon that is invisibly staked within the everydayand draws strength through its unchallenged presence and diversions which pinaccountability on individuals and elude institutions. Institutional identity is theembodiment that transgresses threatening subjectivities. Its presence is culturallyinsidious and pervasive. Making ICD visible through the identification of its nature and naming itsacts of violence as it has occurred in this story is the primary project. Additionally,labor here aims to produce an affective calling to its readers that situate theirspirit selves in relationship with the actors of this story and the actors inconnected stories of institutional oppression. This research deviates from apractice of seeking the authority of an institution in order to establish or verify anact of discrimination either as an evidenced accounting of what is said to havehappened or in standardizing a binary where the institutions hold a standard ofviolation that the discriminated must be held to in order for the occurrence ofviolence to be affirmed or acknowledged. I view both of these positions asdominant strategies of denial; undoubtedly institutions will never acknowledge

structural discrimination. But through a voice of the oppressed it becomespossible to see a truth not properly recognized through other ways of knowing. In order to make it possible to sustain the pain of the oppression in writingthis narrative and also to connect this knowledge with others who also know withtheir bodies in this way, I am approaching this study communally. Telling in thisway can be a critical part of making contributions to oppressed communitieswhere this research can be used for libratory purposes. It breaks norms of asocially nasty dependency with discursive accounts of violators. Witnessing fromthe spirit counters institutional strategies of denial of discrimination. This methodology foregrounds indigenous voices (epistemologies andontologies) that have experienced institutional oppression. A community ofindigenous people who have lived oppression in this particular way offers apowerful tool to dismantle structural oppression. This knowledge can act inservice of liberation for oppressed people as they are able to name what it is thatis happening to them (and by whom), strategically mitigate their losses, combatviolence, birth hope, and build on news ways of knowing that offer emancipatoryspaces to allow suppressed non colonized identities to emerge or give rise toother identities not formed out of the day of their colonizer. Community of the Oppressed as Method The selected method for this study, Community of the Oppressed, hasbeen inspired from endarkened feminist epistemology (Diliard, 2008), Africancosmology, and spirituality research. In endarkened feminist epistemology: 24

reality is known when based in the historical roots of Black feminist thought*\", embodying a distinguishable difference in cultural standpoint, located in the intersection/overlap of the culturally constructed socializations of race, gender, and other identities and the historical and contemporary contexts of oppressions and resistance for African ascendant*\" women (Dillard, 2008, p.280). There are six assumptions inherent in endarkened feminist epistemologywhich all relate closely to a method of the oppressed: 1) Self-definition formsone's participation and responsibility to one's community\" 2) Research is both anintellectual and a spiritual pursuit, a pursuit of purpose: 3) Only within the contextof community does the individual appear (Parker Palmer, as cited in Dillard,2008, p.280) and, through dialogue, continue to become: 4) Concreteexperiences within everyday life form the criterion of meaning, the \"matrix ofmeaning making\" {Anthony Ephirim-Donkor, as cited in Dillard, 2008, p.280): 5)Knowing and research are both historical (extending backwards in time) andpresent, reaching outward into the world: To approach them otherwise is todiminish their cultural and empirical meaningfulness: 6) Power relations, manifestas racism, sexism, homophobia, and so on, structure gender, race, and otheridentity relations within research (Diilard, 2008, p.280). African cosmology is an African understanding of the woridxlv. Dillard usesthree concepts within African cosmology in shaping Endarkened FeministEpistemology spirituality, community, and praxis, which are each central to thisstudy. Spirituality, in African-centered thought is the very essence of African people, regardless of where [they] are in the world. It is a kind of cosmoiogical spirituality that holds central the notion that all life is sacred 25

and the moral virtue of individuais and that of the community is the same (Peter J. Paris, as cited in Diiiard, 2008, p.279). Spirituality across disciplines is a burgeoning methodology. For theseresearchers, methodology is spirituality (Gutierrez, 2003): \"it is a dynamicspirituality that does not allow for fixed or definitive theory that can be applied atail times and in all places (Gutierrez, 2003, p.xiii) but is a form of struggle againstdomination ...\" (Diiiard, 2008, p.286). Spirituality is an intangible energy sourcingfrom a higher authority and power that connects one to all other people, animals,and nature through which life flows. \"As researchers, whether conscious or not,we are always one with spiritual reality, not removed from it, as has been theethos of Western traditions\" (Diiiard, 2008, p.289). But \"it is important to 'drink from our own wells,' from our own experiencenot only as individuals but also as members of a people\" (Gutierrez, 2003, p.xix).Community of the Oppressed as method is a collection of carefully selectedcounter narratives of persons who have negotiated their identities with institutionsof privilege, experiencing embodied oppression. Within these narratives and myown I look for connections between our stories that could demonstrate evidenceof a pattern. Part of the labor of my project is to give people tools in their fightagainst oppression and to recover from some of its devastating effects. Beingable to estabiish a pattern demonstrating institutional covert discrimination andmake it visible is one such tool. Narratives like these require the reader to suspend the logic center of theirmind & accompany the author on a journey with their free mind, body, and spirit. I

practiced a deep listening to each community member's stories and trackedpatterns within each that influenced the development of my own story. Therewere five outside narratives in all; Bobby Sands (1998), Rigoberta Menchu(1984), Maria Teresa Tula (1994), James Yee (2005), and selections from theNew Orleans Hurricane Katrina Survivors. These narrative voices are from allaround the world, Menchu-Guatameia, Tula-Ei Salvador, Katrina-Louisiana/United States, Sands-Northern Ireland, and Yee-Guantanamo Bay(United States). The specific narratives themselves are varied in theirgeographic location or the specific accounts or things that happened within theinstitutions. What is similar is my affective response to all these stories. My bodyno longer felt separated from my mind. I could listen to these stories with all ofmy presence. Listening to these narratives requires you to be fully present in away that I have not experienced before. My emotional reactions ranged fromviolence, to sadness, to anger to pain. Though none of the texts were presentedas research, they were all attempts to bear witness. I attribute their success ofconnecting with the reader by mapping their oppression onto the reader's body toan inherent honoring of indigenous epistemologies, which were different for eachnarrator. Together, these people form a spiritual community of leaders and activistswho through counter narratives map onto bodies a fully recognizable system ofoppression where there are connections to draw from. This method functionsmost meaningfully because of its connection to community, a spiritual space of 27

communion (more fuliy discussed in chapter 5) and oppression (unjustsubjugated groups of people). There are three direct advantages to taking thisapproach (1) it enveiops me as a researcher/participant into a safe space amongothers who with their bodies have engaged and actively resisted oppression,constituting a community of allies. This takes me out of a David and Goliathduaiistic pairing and into the collective where together we confront our oppressor(2) it functions as act of resistance by rejecting the isolation that oppression andmost western research paradigms impose by acting from a communal space and(3) it draws me to a spiritual space where from many indigenous vantage points(including Mexican, African, and Native American) the spiritual realm is central toways of knowing. It is an intimate community who assists this project with theirknowledge, minds, bodies, spirits, and prayers. I am giving birth to this part of myspirit that feeis compelled to bear witness and want to do so with those who walkbeside me and in front of me. This method recalls the knowledge of the body, mind and spirit, honors mymultiple identities, and calls on those who have walked before me. My bodyexperienced first hand the trauma and the violence of institutional discriminationand that in and of itself is the impetus to bear witness. Building a 'community ofoppressed' is a method complex enough to address diasporic intersectionalidentities present and situated across varying power structures.

The development of the researcher/participant narrative as a critical personalnarrative, a centra! genre of contemporary decolonizing writing, functioning as acounternarrative wiii: disrupt and disturb discourse by exposing the complexities and contradictions that exist under official history... As a creative analytic practice, it is used, to criticize prevailing structures and relationships of power and inequity in a relational context... [Counter narratives explore the] intersections of gender and voice, border crossing, dual consciousness, multiple identities, and selfhood in a ...post-colonial and postmodern world (Mutua & Swadener, 2004, p.16). In the space between critical and indigenous methodologies are avenuesthat can open up pathways that can attend to the demands of witnessing. In thismethod, I nod to indigenous methodologies because within them areepistemological and ontological foundations that allow me with grace to marry theidentities that are core to my being; research, multi-racial, gendered, multi-diasporic, and spiritual without abandon of the research goals. It is how f bearwitness as an oppressed person to the oppression I and others in my communityhave experienced using decolonized language, organization of thought, ways ofknowing, and research tools. \"The spirit of the fire spurs her to fight for her own skin and a piece ofground to stand on, a ground from which to view the world-a perspective, ahomeground where she can plumb the rich ancestral roots into her own amplemestiza heart\" (Anzaldua, 2007, p.45). With Anzaldua's words emblazoned onmy heart, this project is both my honor to labor for and my fight for my own skinand a piece of ground to stand on. 29

On Evidence and Transparency The process of constructing these counter-narratives is one of carefulconsiderations, thoughtful choices, and spiritual meditations. Over the four yearsof negotiating educational terrain in my raced body, I collected quite a bit ofrelated written material such as emails, meeting minutes, marketing andmiscellaneous institutional materials, other inter/tra-personal transcripts, andjournal entries I have written along the way. These were the primary materialsthat I used as evidence to write these narratives. Deciding what stories to tell was one of the more difficult decisions I had tomake. There were many stories to tell. I had to be careful that each story I chosemade a major contribution to the argument of institutional covert discriminationand the macro-ieve! conversations of negotiating difference in communicationand in addressing the problematics of dismantling oppression, such as namingdiscrimination logics and its effects. There was also the choice of selecting \"what\" stories were least likely toreproduce the kinds of violence I have known, epistemic or otherwise to myselfas the researcher and participant and also to the readers. While ali of the effectsof these narratives on the reader cannot be known in advance, carefulconsideration was given in these predictions or anticipations. There were manyvoices or stories that I had data with which to use as evidence for writing storiesthat would meet the criterion of usefulness for this study. But in the consideration 30

of caring for individuals and communities, I have chosen not to use much of thedata, respecting the unjust costs of such knowledge becoming public. Another choice to be made was in deciding the \"how\" of writing thesenarratives. My positionality within these narratives cannot be changed, howeverthe lens with which I write these narratives, the epistemological framework iimpose, and the political choices I make through language use, analysis, and inforegrounding some aspects of story and back-grounding others are all decisionsthat had to be negotiated. My writing strategies carefully weighed and consideredways to avoid playing into colonizing logics, or traps, which reproduceinstitutional logics of denial, individualism (which evades institutionalresponsibility and instead reaches to map responsibility onto the individual), orretelling master narratives. And finally, a researcher note about the importance of prayer andcommunity in this research process; working with oppression theoretically and inpraxis is a painful undertaking. Throughout this research study I have had toinclude a considerable amount of time for spiritual meditation on this workthroughout its development. Prayer helped me in my decision making, in healing,and in staying connected and grounded in embodied experience. I used thenarratives, experiences, pain, and persistence of the others within the communityof the oppressed in order to call forth language and insights for this telling.Without prayer, mediation, and community, these writings would not have beenpossible. 31

This dissertation will be divided into three different sections, which serveas meta-markers that chronicie a journey of a mother and her son in theirnegotiations with education institutions. Each chapter weaves in and unpackstheory specific to its focused analysis and makes contributions to the larger goalof making visible institutional covert discrimination. This collective study is anargument for its existence and makes familiar its nature. Section I contains two chapters, which detail cultural identities, a Blackidentity and an institutional identity. Using interdisciplinary veins of culturalstudies Black identity is constructed through the eyes of the mother and includesAfrican Diaspora and spiritual communication theory. Chapter three oninstitutional identity builds its argument around theories of whiteness andmodernity formations. Combining critical personal narrative and historicalliterature, a composite of educational institutional identity will be written. Section ll's chapter gets at everyday violence within institutionaldiscrimination. Under the theoretical framework of the everyday, micro-aggression, black subjectivity, and whiteness, violence in the everydayexperiences of this mother and her son is fore grounded. In the contestation ofblack identities in institutions, what is commonly experienced as everydaynormalcy should be understood as strange and horrific (Alcoff, 2008, foreword)acts of aggression and violence. The last section has a single chapter, Community as a human condition,which turns toward theorizing community as space of possibility for successful 32

intercultural negotiations between institutions and marginalized identities. Usingfeminist and indigenous paradigms, this chapter investigates the notion ofcommunity as a foundation for serious work to take place in the creation ofsuccessfui interculturai spaces. Insisting on being fully human as a Black personwhile accessing public institutions demands the construction of new libratoryspaces. 33

Section One: Complex IdentitiesWhen a man is hanging on a tree and he cries out, should he cry outunemotionally? When a man is sitting on a hot stove and he tells you how it feelsto be there, is he supposed to speak without emotions? This is what you begin totell black people in this country when they're beginning to cry out against theinjustices that they are suffering. Malcolm XChapter Two: Blackness:Lessons Learned While Developing a Method For My Madness Exactly how to begin to talk about one's Blackness is a very difficult thingto do. On one hand you are holding an identity rooted in a racialized ideology(created by White people) that by its own eugenic design positions Slack peopleas the lowest biological classification of the human species and in someiterations sub-human. Some branches of the American science community havesince corrected their previous findings, even attempting arguments that call forthe elimination of the use of race as a social category. But the embeddedness ofrace in the consciousness of the social, social scientific, legal, political and thecultural, effortlessly maintain the classification's mechanisms. The effect is aconstant reinforcement and powering of racist ideology. To keep secure themaintenance of this racial classification there are in place instructive socialdiscourses, legal and political infrastructure, educational institutions, media, andeveryday public and private forums that educate the masses to this end, 34

incentivizing and punishing them into complicity. Cradled in the other hand, is thecollective spirit of people who have inherited a wealth of spiritual capital andknowledge. These people, of African indigeneity and its diaspora possess suchwealth because of their embodied earnings from their historically livedexperience. They have used such knowledge and capital to advance humanity inconcrete ways and contribute intellectually, spiritually, and materially to thecommunal well-being. Their way of knowing and being in the world centers hope,community, and love. And they have and continue to earn new ways of knowingand becoming that bear the fruits from their sustained faith in humanity and Godin the midst of continued racial, spiritual and economic oppression. This isBlackness as a legacy of spirituality and hope. Each hand influences Blackidentity in ways particular to the lived experience of the individual but that arecollectively familiar. These are the two hands that compete for space on my bodyand within my spirit. The signification of Blackness has historically and intellectually been tiedto phenotypic and cultural markers. But my own racialized body knows that thesemarkers are too simple to accurately type who holds a Black identity and whodoes not. My mocha skin; my thick, full, and course mane; and the curves of mybody physically mark my Blackness. The rhythm of my voice is reflective of myrearing and schooling in mostly White affluent neighborhoods. My ethics andpolitics have been shaped by my own battles against racial discrimination and inmy pursuit to occupy and live in just spaces. My spirituality is ancestrally tied to 35

both an African and Mexican way of knowing. And the stories I am connected toare texturally Latino and African both global and domestic. But I also see myreflection in the narratives of other oppressed people; Jewish, Japanese, andNative Americans. These reflections also shape my Blackness. I think of mypeople as reaching from al! corners of the earth, some are known to me andothers I still wait to meet. The identities of my cultural, ancestral, and spiritualfamily cannot be limited to what you see or where and when they were born.Their cultural identities are most clearly, material to their spirit. Difficult perhapsfor outsiders to marker, but we are known to each other. Blackness requires that you negotiate both Black bodies and Whitebodies. The same is not true in reverse. Though some may, it is not necessaryfor White identities to negotiate Black bodies. In order to negotiate andunderstand how a racialized world affects a raced body one must have a senseof how they each operate. This is one reason why I continue to be amazed at theoutrageousness of non-marked bodies acting as official and unofficialadjudicators of race- based discrimination, trauma, and oppression through theirofferings of \"objectivity\". These voices or accounts are most often institutionallyvalued over the embodied (with emotion and spirit) testimony of a raced body.For example, as it stands n o w - evidence for race based discrimination infederal, state, and legal municipalities as well as law and public policy concernsitself with the documentation of overt acts of discrimination. Such acts must beobviously differentiated from other acts of normalcy such as personality conflicts, 36

mis-communication, and cuituralfy benign differences such as opinions or neutralperspectives etc. The expected criterion for this kind of evidence is that it beempirically witnessed or affirmed by ontologically and epistemoiogicaliyrecognized bodies or medias of Whiteness. Additionally, this standard ofevidence seeks repetition of verified discriminatory acts in order to establish adocumented pattern before accountability could ever be offered. To be clear,though I magnify race and in particular Blackness here in order to provide a pointof reference for maximized understanding, I am speaking about how thenarratives, claims, and testimonies of bodies of difference, those that occupyspace outside of dominance (race, gender, class, sexual orientation, disability,and gendered identity to name a few), are forcibly positioned, dismantled anddenied by institutions. The effect of this strategy has been successful forinstitutions in that they have structured the intercultural negotiating space wherethey occupy total power using tactics of language, story telling, denial, andspiritual and psychological violence. Restructuring this space were power can bereclaimed by marginalized people can establish rich new terrain for injuredpeople, allies and social justice activists to more effectively maneuver, reclaim,and live decolonized identities. In the next section i offer vignettes - - personal stories that have shapedmy politicked Black body. These stories highlight the socially constructiveelements of racial identity. Like all social constructions they can never be fixedand are always changing: \"...liberation takes place only in a context where we 37

are able to imagine subjectivities that are diverse, constantly changing, andalways operating in states of cultural contingency\" (Hooks 1995, p,248). Withinthe interstices of these selected moments are trackable threads that show suchmovement. What then are the effects of the fluidity of identity on racializedbodies, the site where such constructions are materialized through thecorporeal? All of this becomes complicated by the spiritual nature of a racedidentity such as the ways that ancestry, earth, and higher power are manifestedthrough the body. I am offering a glimpse of Black identity that is intersectional(raced, classed, gendered) (Collins, 2000) out of culturally and spirituallyconstructed experiences that are communal, negotiated on multiple social levels,and experienced at the level of the self. A composite of hope, desire andyearning within me most fully expresses my humanity and my experiences in theworld that have shaped what I know about myself. While I am spirituallyconnected to people indigenous to Africa and throughout its global diaspora, Iacknowledge that each one of them is individuals with their own uniqueexpressions that converge upon and dialogue with a nationally contextual Blackidentity. Blackness for me is a commitment to living whole - - alongside othersand fully connected in my mind, body, and spirit to God. There are many theoretical considerations that pull together an embodiedunderstanding of Black identity. I have selected one key theoretical element thatwill not only help to understand the everyday experiences I offer but will alsoposition Whiteness (which I more fully discuss in chapter three) and its influence 38

on the Biack body and identity. George Yancy brilliantly theorizes the \"subjectivityof Black bodies under a White racist hegemonic gaze\" {Linda Alcoff, as cited inforeword, Yancy, 2008), which is an everyday struggle in the way that Biackpeople know themselves. Yancy points out that \"the body's meaning...is in constant contestation.The hermeneutics of the body, how it is understood, how it is \"seen,\" its \"truth,\" ispartly the result of a profound historical, ideological construction\" (Yancy, 2005,p.2). Black bodies are scripted, written on, interpreted and assigned withmeaning by devices of Whiteness. A White gaze upon a black body, interpolatedas deviant and problematic and deposited within a Black identity is a course ofepistemic violence. \"The burden of the white gaze disrupts first-personknowledge, causing 'difficulties in the development of bodily schema'\" (Yancy,2005, p.7). It is an invisible form of ontologica! and epistemic violence thatviolates the integrity of the Black body (Yancy, 2005). Linda Alcoff stresses the importance of understanding racial embodimentas a lived experience and says that \"...only when we come to be clear about howrace is lived, in its multiple manifestations; ... when we come to appreciate itsoften hidden epistemic effects and power over collective imaginations of publicspace, can we entertain even the remote possibility of its eventualtransformation\" (Alcoff, 1999, p.15). A contribution of this study is the recognitionthat our \"secular, commodity-driven society is dominated by the realm of thevisible\" and labors to provide many moments of the invisible visibie through story: 39

\"In such a context, visible differences operate as powerful determinants oversocial interaction\" (Alcoff, 1999, p. 15). We don't want your kind here One of my earlier lessons about Blackness came in the summer prior tomy high school senior year. ! was recruited to attend a college preparatoryprogram at Colorado State University aiong with others from across the countrythat had the interest and potential for a career in agriculture and science. I wasso excited to get my first taste of college life; attend classes, work in a laboratoryand experience a little independence. But my college experience wouid beovershadowed by a cruel introduction to the spirit-psyche penetrating violence ofinstitutional racism. Though I had encountered racism many times before, theseengagements were amplified encounters that forever changed me. About halfway through my summer stay, the other students and I spent aquiet evening attending a movie downtown. Waiting for our chaperones to comepick us up, after the show we walked 5-6 blocks on the main strip laughing andtalking. I felt safe in the city of Fort Collins, a small rural college town in NorthernColorado. The place had a smattering of family owned businesses like theseveral locally owned coffee shops with outdoor seating that felt like an extensionof home. Its' downtown character could be sensed from the quaint bistros,boutiques, and one movie theatre with limited show times that occupied primereal estate. 40

in a group of about 20 students, i was at the rear. Directly in front of mewere two kids holding hands; Kris, a tali White guy with freckles had just starteddating Ahn, a Korean-American from the East coast with straight dark hair and anenchanting smile. As we were walking, with sudden impact, Kris fell forward andscreamed. I turned my head and saw him struck over the head with the back ofan axe handle, again, and again, and again. While I was looking helplessly athim, I was struck from behind. As I felt cold metal scratch my skin, an electriccurrent shocked my body causing my arms to convulse and writhe with pain, iwas paralyzed by fear. The rest of the group ran away, leaving Kris, Ahn and Ialone. The attacks continued with Kris relentlessly being kicked and beaten. Ailthe while, vile speech like traitor, nigger, mook and other denigrating languageaccosted us. With tears streaming down my face and blood running down my arm, I ranto a parked police car. I looked at the officer through my sixteen year old browneyes waiting for their acknowledgement. 1 needed them to know that I had beenbrutally attacked by skinheads, a white supremacist gang. I needed them toprotect me. I stood to the side of the car tilting my head to speak through ahalfway rolled up window. The officer sat in the driver seat and faced forward. Henever looked at me, he never acknowledged me, he just sat there. When Irealized i wasn't going to get any protection from him, I ran away for safety. The following day the local media broke the story and reported that localgang members, skinheads, attacked visiting high school students from across the 41