Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invisibilized Challenges of Black Girlhood in Elite Independent Schools

Harm Within

While many of the most prestigious independent schools were founded more than a century ago, the foundation on which they stand is characterized by a legacy of wealth and opportunity hoarding that is reproduced even today. In more recent history, schools have made attempts to diversify their student bodies, and contemporary studies (Gaztambide-Fernández, 2009; Khan & Jerolmack, 2013) showcase a continued use of a white-masculinist framework that, at its core, seeks to consolidate an upper class, elite ruling party that predominantly benefits the white, wealthy, and male constituencies. The most “fundamental characteristic” of elite boarding schools is exclusion (Gaztambide-Fernández, 2009). When Black girls step into these spaces, they exist as the antithesis of what these schools have historically stood for, and this affects how they are perceived and treated, and how they see themselves. Studying elite independent schools and Black girls within them creates a more detailed picture of the scope of schooling experiences and the extent to which students can end up spending formative years in learning environments that are harmful to their development.

For many Black children and families in the United States, schooling is a site of suffering (Dumas, 2014). Drawing on Bourdieu’s concept of la petite misère, Dumas made the claim that working-class students suffer a malaise that stems from their growing consciousness of how their experiences often misalign with promises of educational opportunity and improved life chances, and run into clear conflict with hegemonic structures within school communities. Adhering to their long-standing history of catering to their economically advantaged and white clientele, independent schools have recently emphasized diversifying student populations, which has had a significant impact on both the schooling experiences of Black youth and their personal development. It is the confluence of Eng and Han’s (2000) racial melancholia—that is, the deeply felt heavy awareness of the history and persistence of anti-Blackness in their localized and greater contexts—and this malaise that contributes to much of the suffering Black students face in schools. Such suffering has real-world implications and effects on life outcomes for the students. There is evidence of linkages between interpersonal racism and social exclusion, and health outcomes for Black people (Goosby, Cheadle, & Mitchell, 2018; Goosby, Cheadle, Strong-Bak, et al., 2018). As early as childhood, exposure to discrimination is linked to negative mental and physical health outcomes, including sleep disruption and high blood pressure (Goosby & Walsemann, 2012).

Black Feminism In Education

In centering the racialized, gendered, and classed challenges Black girls face in educational settings in this research, I incorporate Evans-Winters and Esposito’s (2010) critical race feminism (CRF) framework into this analysis. CRF, a branch of critical race theory (CRT), takes on the central components of CRT in education—(1) the centrality of race and racism in society, (2) whiteness as property that can be used to one’s advantage, (3) a need for a challenge to dominant ideology, and (4) a commitment to uplifting structurally marginalized voices and communities (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002)—and adds to it by incorporating intersections of race, class, and gender. In the development of CRF, Evans-Winters and Esposito (2010) argued in favor of the need for intersectional considerations when looking at the educational landscape; because “feminist epistemologies tend to be concerned with the education of white girls and women, and race-based epistemologies tend to be consumed with the educational barriers affecting Black boys, the educational needs of Black girls fall through the cracks” (p. 12). Drawing on Kimberlé Crenshaw’s (1991) concept of intersectionality, CRF provides a framework to examine Black girls’ misogynoiristic (Bailey, 2021) experiences within schools and encourages researchers and educators to consider incorporating discourse that seeks to liberate and uplift Black girls in these spaces.

The central tenets of CRF that are most relevant to the current study are: (1) Black girls’ experiences and perspectives are inherently different from those of boys of color and white girls, (2) Black girls face multiple forms of discrimination because of the intersections of race, class, and gender within a system of white male patriarchy and racist oppression, (3) within the Black girl construct, there are multiple identities and consciousnesses (i.e. anti-essentialism), (4) there must be multidisciplinary writing about Black girls, and (5) this work calls for theories and practices that simultaneously work to combat gender and racial oppression (Evans-Winters & Esposito, 2010). This framework allows me to consider how the current study can contribute to discourse on lived experiences of Black girls in school communities—an area of the literature that remains relevant to researchers and scholars, as well as educators interested in improving their praxis.

Black Girls Are Their Own Makers

In the emerging field of Black girlhood studies, scholars are drawing attention to the importance of centering Black girls and their assets. Within the academy as well as individual institutions, narratives of deficiency are cooked up and projected onto Black women and girls (Evans-Winters & Esposito, 2010), despite their highly developed critical consciousness surrounding how they are perceived. The “oppositional gaze” that Black girls develop in response to negative stereotypes of emotional instability, hypersexuality, and lack of intelligence (Walton, 2013) forms a counternarrative that affirms their self-worth (hooks, 1992; Jacobs, 2016). Black girls’ oppositional gaze empowers them to recognize the gendered-racialized projections and expectations thrust upon them and provides tools for them to construct internal self-confidence that opposes such external attempts at devaluation (Jacobs, 2016). It is also through these acts of resistance against deficit-based narratives that Black girls develop resilience (Evans-Winters, 2005, 2014). While much of this existing research is focused on Black girls within urban, low-income contexts, this study argues that race-, gender, and class-based oppression within independent school contexts and the strategies that Black girls must employ to combat this oppression mirror those of the world outside the elite bubble.

Site

This study relied exclusively on virtual communication because of the COVID-19 pandemic; email communication and Zoom interviews made up the virtual “site” in which this study took place. While I remained in California for the duration of data collection and writing, participants called in from a variety of cities and states along the Eastern seaboard.

Participants

The sample consisted of 13 Black women 20–28 years old who were graduates of five independent boarding and eight day schools in the Mid-Atlantic and New England regions. While all participants identified racially as Black, nine of the 13 women referenced either their own or at least one parent’s immigration story (from regions of Ghana, Nigeria, Liberia, Haiti, Guyana, Trinidad, Jamaica, and Antigua). Seven of the women were the first in their family to enroll in independent schooling, while five had one or two parents or elder siblings who had attended prior; only one participant had three or more family members who had attended an independent school before they had. In terms of first year of entry, four participants began independent schooling in kindergarten or earlier, one in second grade, and eight in ninth grade. Participants self-reported how their families financed their studies; three reported zero financial assistance, nine reported some or all financial assistance, and one was unsure of whether their family received financial assistance to attend their independent school. At the time of data collection, three participants were working toward completing their undergraduate studies, and 10 had received bachelor’s degrees; 11 women attended/were attending private colleges and two attended public colleges. All participants were provided pseudonyms for the purposes of anonymity. Table 1 provides a visual breakdown of participants’ entry into and participation in independent schools, including time of entry, funding, first-generation status, school type, and graduation year.

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Table 1.

Participant Demographic Characteristics.

Pseudonym	Grade of Entry	Received Financial Aid	First in Family	School Type	Graduation Year
Adrienne	2nd	Yes	Yes	Day	2019
Nia	9th	No	Yes	Day	2013
Aliyah	Kindergarten	Unsure	No	Day	2013
Tamara	9th	Yes	Yes	Boarding	2012
Mae	9th	Yes	No	Day	2011
Elizabeth	Kindergarten	Yes	Yes	Day	2013
Athena	9th	Yes	Yes	Boarding	2011
Zuri	9th	No	Yes	Boarding	2017
Calla	Pre-K	No	No	Day	2016
Devin	9th	Yes	Yes	Day	2015
Raven	Kindergarten	Yes	No	Day	2015
Halima	9th	Yes	Yes	Boarding	2011
Selah	9th	Yes	No	Boarding	2017

Data Collection Procedure

I used an introductory questionnaire as my initial invitation to participants. Utilizing my network of fellow independent school alumni, former and current teachers, and former students, I was able to garner potential participants through initial posts on Facebook and Twitter. After receiving a handful of participants, I relied on snowball methods to identify more in order to round out the sample. The introductory questionnaire provided an overview of the study and asked demographic questions that allowed me to both identify their eligibility (e.g., school name, location, and class year) and craft a set of questions relevant to their schooling/individual experience. I then reached out via email to those who had completed the questionnaire and were eligible to participate, inviting them to a virtual interview with me. All interviews were conducted over the Zoom video communication platform during March 2021. Interested parties self-scheduled utilizing Calendly, appointment scheduling software. Interviews lasted between 55 and 90 minutes. I used Zoom’s transcription feature during the interviews, then reviewed and compared all transcripts with their audio files to ensure accuracy.

Social “pecking order”

All participants spoke either directly or euphemistically to a social hierarchy within independent schools that plays a significant role in how all students participate in the sociocultural practices of the institution. Determined by a set of core identifiers, students are sorted into various rungs of the social “pecking order.” The more identifiers one holds, the likelier their chances of a higher status. This status mostly determines how students are sorted among their peers, but it also has implications for how adults choose to engage with them. Athena, a boarding school student, suggested that the hierarchical structure of the student population was largely driven by access to the following identifiers: (1) economic capital, (2) social capital, (3) whiteness, (4) masculinity, and (5) athletics, and that there is a clear, almost algorithmic, categorization of one’s role in the social order based on such:

To be successful at [school name], you have to . . . have a lot of money, have social capital, know everybody. There are a lot of kids from Greenwich, Connecticut, which is one of the wealthiest towns in America. A lot of the kids that went to my school were from Greenwich or if they weren't . . ., they vacationed in Cape Cod; . . . aesthetically, that's what it looked like to be successful . . . to be popular, you have to be an athlete, specifically. . . . A Black male athlete. . . . You just had to be the quintessential white kid, honestly. You couldn't be emo; you couldn't be goth . . . there was just [a], preppy, white, “I vacation in Cape Cod and my mom has millions of dollars” aesthetic. . . . Think of everything outside of that, then don’t be that. And even if you're a person of color, like you kind of have to—I don't want to see subject—but mold yourself to fit in . . . some of the kids in my class did that. The experience is very jarring for Black people, unless you are a Black athlete. . . . it was easier for Black guys to integrate than the Black girls. (Interview, March 19, 2021)

Athena’s detailing of the levels of fixed social stratification among the student body reveals a strong understanding of the of ways in which people organized and are organized into social categories; they also reflect a high-level analysis of the hidden order, usually reserved for those who sit on the outskirts (hooks, 1992). Her assertion is affirmed by the accounts of Halima, who attended boarding school more than three states away. Halima identified a similar structure present in her own school community and went further to explain the differences between those controlling versus those controlled within the social sphere:

As far as social capital . . . of course, were the rich wealthy white boys. Sometimes a [Black] basketball star felt like he was at the top because he still could date the white women, and that was seen as like an indicator status . . . . So sometimes “big man” on campus felt like whoever the Black basketball star was that year. [At the top] was white rich boys and those particular Black stars. Underneath, nonathlete Black boys probably and white girls. And then underneath that, probably somewhere is, well, probably Latina girls, then, and any kind of mixed girl who's working class, [they] had some kind of social capital. Then at the bottom, Black girls, by skin color. Sometimes there were middle- and upper-class Black girls who could also navigate . . . alongside white girls from time to time. Depending on their class background or if they made an effort to attach themselves a white girl who was more popular. (Interview, March 15, 2021)

Halima identified several significant components to this social structuring—the first being the ways that a certain combination of identities (such as Black, male, and athlete) had the power to circumnavigate other traditional gatekeeping identities (white, wealth, economic capital) (Ford, 2008). Additionally, she highlighted that among the Black girls who mostly reside at the bottom of the hierarchy, the rankings go as far as to distinguish by skin color/tone. While issues of colorism came up in a many of the interviews, especially in conversation about certain Black peers with privilege to align themselves with whiteness for social gain, Aliyah spoke to some of the social challenges that can come from a racially polarized social environment. Aliyah, a self-identified mixed person with a Black mother and white father, struggled to find community within her school because of her own discomfort in homogenous spaces and other people not knowing how to categorize her:

I look weird for sitting at the [Black] table because I'm super pale . . . by the same token, I'm not going to sit with all the super-rich white kids or even just the super not rich middle-class white kids whatever because that is a different aspect of who I am. Just because I'm white passing doesn't mean it turns a switch off. It's not like, from nine to nine, I'm Black, from nine to nine I'm white . . . having to shape shift and not necessarily remove but . . . modulate up and down levels of what part of myself I'm allowed to be right now. . . . But [mixed] being an identity in and of itself was not an option, because then I was alone. (Interview, March 10, 2021)

With the dominant culture in independent schools controlled and enforced by white students, families, and school adults, all students whose culture does not align are subject to hegemonic control. In Aliyah’s narrative, she revealed difficulty finding community among peers of various racial and class backgrounds because of the segregated nature of her school’s social sphere. Quite often, when Black students gather at a “Black table,” it is usually in opposition to white hegemony and as a means for socioemotional protection (Tatum, 2017). Because of the assault on Black students with less ambiguous racial identity, Aliyah expressed challenges with gatekeeping and exclusion from such spaces for fear of her perceived ability to weaponize whiteness within. As a result of whiteness and eliteness mainly controlling the social arena, she was largely left to her own devices to decide which part of her identity she wanted to align with and which she would need to cast aside. The essentialism within school communities largely introduced by admissions practices and perpetuated by social dynamics contributed greatly to the predicament Aliyah expressed.

Navigating Relationships With White Peers

Initiating, developing, and sustaining meaningful relationships with white peers was increasingly challenging for all participants with each passing year of independent schooling, despite participants’ accounts of significant amounts of time spent with white “friends” and peers. Those relationships struggled to endure, and almost all the Black women found themselves in enclaves with other Black girls by their junior and senior years. Adrienne, an independent school student since elementary school, shared how her relationships with white peers began and then shifted over time:

[At first, friendships] formed over shared interests. I liked certain kinds of music . . . in middle school, and so I would gain friends from there and also theater . . . . But they were into weird microaggressive things like trying to touch my hair and I don't like their politics, they were just very strange to me. In sophomore year. I think I had my moment where I was like “I can't do this,” and so I kind of just mostly cut ties with my white friends . . . really the last two years of high school I didn't really talk to them that much.

Then I would mostly hang out with my Black best friend. (Interview, March 12, 2021)

Adrienne felt forced to make a choice between continuing her long-standing friendship with white peers with whom she shared interests, and protecting her emotional well-being from their constant microaggressions; as she got older, it became more difficult to spend time with those whose acts and beliefs felt disrespectful to her Black identity. On the other hand, several women chose to make a distinction between friends and acquaintances and the extent of the superficiality within the school community. Mae, who entered her school in ninth grade, expressed confusion around the social norms of forming relationships:

I was definitely friendly with everyone, but not necessarily friends with everyone. . . . This is my first time, en masse, with white people, and there were a lot of lessons I learned about “friendly” versus “friend.” I'd always been in school environments where somebody was your friend, or they weren't. But this was the first school environment, and it also coincided with being my first majority-white learning environment where I learned that some people are friendly but they're not your friends . . . I really had to sit down with all of this—the students kept saying, “Oh my gosh I love you so much!,” and then they would talk about each other behind their backs, and the schools where I'm from and the neighborhood where I'm from, nobody would [do that]. You just say, “This my girl,” and you meant it. You wouldn't talk about that person behind their back. I had a lot of cordial relationships with a lot of students at [school name], and only a couple of friends. (Interview, March 12, 2021)

In Mae’s depiction of the culture clash between her home community’s practices and those present at her independent school, she highlighted her own need for an assessment of her new context and the choices one must make in creating and sustaining relationships with peers at school, even when they don’t quite make sense.

Rootlessness

Another common theme emerging from these data involved feelings of rootlessness and lack of control over one’s identity for Black girls in independent schools. All participants spoke to moments in which they struggled to be themselves because they had few models of how a Black girl or woman like them could find space within their school or exist beyond it. Nia, who grew up in an all-white town and public school before attending her independent school, revealed difficulties in figuring out who she was and wanted to be:

I didn't have an authentic self until I got to college . . . I didn't have an authentic self when I was growing up . . . I never felt like I could be that because I didn't know what that was. I'd been around white kids my whole life. So, I had no problem making whatever changes . . . I had no idea what [being yourself] was. I think I was still trying to figure that shit out all the way up until I got to college, and I was really around Black people to really determine who I am. But the 10 [Black students] that were in my grade, I mean, they had also been corrupted by the system, so I don't really know if anybody, really, any of us knew who we were, or really felt any sense of loss. (Interview, February 23, 2021)

Nia’s discussion of herself and others as “corrupted by the system” speaks to the ways in which Black students struggle to remain in control of themselves—mentally and emotionally—in predominantly white contexts and the extent to which they are denied access to role models who can support their development as Black thinkers. Tamara, a Black woman who gained access to her boarding school through a local sending program in her home city, made a similar statement about the lack of support that Black students are afforded in understanding how their school context can be drastically different from home. She asserted that as a result, Black students often feel detached from their school and home lives because of their shifted social location:

I think some people go there and get lost, especially Black students. And there's no perfect way to prepare for that. Even [sending program name], and I offer this critique with grace to them often now, as an alum. I said, “You know, the main preparation y'all got us or tried to instill for us, for the schools, was academic. You guys did no real preparation for us in terms of what it would actually be like to be a 13-year-old kid in these spaces and figuring out who you are, and this type of environment.” There’s a social cost. There's a cultural cost. I remember some points in high school feeling hella lonely when I came home, because a lot of my friends went to school together here in [home city] and I wasn't with them. And so, there are some things that you lose . . . it's so intangible right? . . . . you are in the middle of your adolescent development, right? And so, when you layer that, with being Black, at a PWI, that's just a lot. (Interview, February 27, 2021)

Tamara’s narrative highlighted how being academically prepared for the rigor of her school’s curriculum could not mitigate the extreme social and cultural cost she felt at her boarding school. When the dominant culture, as well as the student and adult populations of one’s school, is overwhelmingly white, Black students are openly deprived of opportunities to engage with alike peers.

(Lack Of) Desirability

Issues of desirability and self-confidence begin to set in from quite a young age for Black girls in independent schools. Within this current study, a significant number of participants recalled moments in which they felt undesirable and undesired, both outwardly and internally. Elizabeth enrolled at her independent school in kindergarten and spent the duration of her formative years there. By second grade, she showed signs of frustration with her appearance and recounted the moment of drawing self-portraits as a defining one in her understanding of herself:

I drew myself with white skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes, and nobody said anything to me about it. They just let it rock. They didn't even address it. So, my classmates were like “That doesn't look like you,” and I was like, “Well, but they said it doesn't have to be perfect.” But they were like, “No, but it doesn't look like you at all,” and I was like, “Well, this is the way I want to look, so I'm going to draw it this way,” and no [adults] did anything. It wasn't until my parents came home from Parents’ Night and my mother pulled out the picture and she said, “Explain this to me. What's going on here?” and I explained that I just picked those colors because I thought they were prettier . . . and she said, “But why do you think they're prettier?” and I told her because they just are. (Interview, March 17, 2021)

Elizabeth’s explanation of attempts at intervention from her peers, but not adults, affirms other participants’ narratives of lack of support and need for self-defense. Elizabeth’s narrative depicts how she was left to her own devices to feel comfortable drawing herself, despite knowing that her portrait would look different from others, then defend her actions without any mediation from the teachers. Seemingly benign moments like Elizabeth’s memory from second grade plant seeds and serve as the root for continued trauma for Black girls as they move into adolescence. Not only do those memories remain in the minds of these girls into adulthood, but they also reinforce the lack of address to those who cause the harm. Selah, a boarding student who arrived at her school in ninth grade from an inner city, also became the subject of such trauma, even without the historicized experiences of being a Black girl in the earliest grades of independent schooling. When asked to explore whether she would send a hypothetical future daughter to her alma mater, she gave the following response:

I would not send my girl child to [school name]. I wouldn’t want to subject her to this kind of mental abuse, abuse on your self-esteem, all of that. Maybe a boy child, he might have a good time, but we'd also have conversations about how to be and not to be in regard to being respectful, especially to other Black girls and girls of color . . . I don't know if I’d do that to a daughter . . . I had parents [and a home community] who would reinforce that I am beautiful, smart, all of that . . . and that was still really hard for me to deal with going there and feeling like I was at the bottom of the barrel, especially as a teen when you're starting to develop feelings and all of that. That was really terrible. Just feeling like you're not the beauty standard. So . . . beyond trying to get her to have self-esteem and reinforce that internally, I don't know what else there would be to do. Because I feel it's kind of unfair to impose that on Black girls and other minority girls. That they have to find their self-worth from within, when everyone else's beauty and et cetera is validated and reinforced by society and other people around them. (Interview, March 15, 2021)

Selah’s accounts amplify the developmental battle and cost to a Black girl’s sense of self often faced within these institutions. She also drew a gendered distinction between experiences, drawing attention to the suffering that Black boys can inflict on their counterparts within the school. This feeling of being undesirable permeates various areas of campus life, especially in the boarding school context. With the significance of attraction and desirability within the process of establishing a social order at the adolescent level, Black girls like Elizabeth and Selah are relegated to lower rungs of the social order because of the societal and institutional perceptions of Black women and girls.

“It is just a different school if you are black”

Part of the challenge for Black women in independent school is the intangible nature of many of the racialized, gendered, and classed interactions they have with adults and peers alike. Often schools will boast goals of meritocracy and equity, despite their actions showing highly unjust practices (Khan, 2011). More than half of participants spoke about moments in which they felt they had received the short end of the stick. Devin arrived at her all-girls independent school in ninth grade because of her mother’s impressions of the doors that such an education could open for her. Despite her family’s goal of using her elite high school education as a ticket to an elite college, she faced challenges with receiving equitable access to resources within the school and often felt that she was treated differently from the white girls in her school. In the example of college counseling, she detailed the palpability of her feelings of mistreatment:

My senior year, during the whole college process . . . all the Black girls in my class were kind of advised in a different way, told that schools that were very much so target schools were reach schools . . . . The Black girls in our grade, . . . we all thought she was incompetent, the one person who was our college advisor. We were like, “What did she say to you?” [and] “What did she say to you?” and I remember she was saying to me that Howard was a reach school for me . . . not that there's anything wrong with Howard, but also no, absolutely not, that is a safety school and a half for me . . . it was a “What are you talking about and are we looking at the same transcript?” kind of thing . . . she was also recommending, almost exclusively, HBCUs to all of the Black girls. . . . So we all kind of navigated that process ourselves, and I was lucky enough that one of my mom's . . . friends was a college admissions person, so she guided me through the process . . . we were just like, “Okay, you know what she's doing, too? Okay, like this is some bullshit.” (Interview, March 11, 2021)

Devin’s telling of the disparity between Black and white students faced within her school outlines the extent to which she felt she had to support herself to achieve her goals. Despite being at a well-resourced independent school, she, along with other Black girls in her class, were tasked with guiding themselves when school adults failed to uphold the institutional mission. Such happenings can also occur in other areas of an independent school, beyond cocurricular venues. In her interview, Adrienne highlighted how disciplinary processes are a visible area in which race, class, and gender can determine enforcement:

It’s mostly administrators or [certain athletics coaches] who [perpetuate unfair treatment]. . . . Also if it was a student whose family is a legacy or they're donating a lot then there's also that aspect. . . . There was one time where [description of an incident involving two students breaking school rules] . . . one was our class president and [he] made a speech about how he was sorry, kind of, but it was vague . . . but he still stayed as our class president. There are no real consequences when white boys—they also played sports, which was thing—when they do things, nothing really happens . . . there are no consequences or there are shady consequences for when white people, particularly white boys, either overtly or covertly, break rules . . . [sometimes] it is like they . . . wanted to push how far they could go without getting caught. (Interview, March 12, 2021)

Adrienne’s explanation of the multiplicity of levels of the inequitable disciplinary practices at her school mirrors Devin’s retelling and contributes to the pattern of Black girls having to develop heightened levels of sociocultural competency to equitably participate in school offerings. Knowing that the best college counseling advice must come outside the counselor’s office or that breaking school rules yields differed consequences signifies an alternate knowledge base of the navigational capital it takes to move through independent schools.

Tempering Oneself For Fear Of Implications

Eight participants also expressed internal challenges related to arbitrating their socioemotional selves while in school, many of which had lingering effects long after their graduation. While much of adolescence can be characterized by learning to temper oneself in relation to the various spaces they inhabit, for Black girls in the independent school context, there are heightened pressures resulting from isolation, projections of ignorance from other community members, and the college preparatory nature of these institutions. Raven spent 13 years at her independent school and revealed the lasting trauma to her psyche that resulted from challenges of being at her school for so long:

I think a lot of the things I struggle with now as a young adult probably can find their roots during my time at [school name]. I’m really sensitive about . . . how people perceive me. . . . I'm really [pause], I'm really [pause], I think I developed [pause], I think I need to overachieve in order to demonstrate that I'm impressive, you know? I think I need people to see me as being intelligent or as being really competent and really smart and highly accomplished. . . . I felt really deficient, you know? I was lacking. I think I compartmentalize pretty well. . . . Sometimes I feel like maybe I'm over-exaggerating my experiences there, maybe they weren't as bad as I'm remembering them as being, because I feel the way I'm describing it now, it seemed like it was completely hopeless, and I was unhappy all the time. And that's true to an extent . . . I have really bad anxiety. I think it is a product of having gone to [school name] . . . I struggle with . . . low self-confidence and low self-worth and anxiety and all that, I think that's a consequence probably of having gone there. (Interview, March 19, 2021)

In her interview, Raven talked about the challenges of being a dark-skinned, low-income Black girl at her all-girls independent school and the ways in which she struggled to find space in her school despite being well-liked by many peers. Identity-related challenges affected her schoolwork, and she spoke at length about how she is still working through these traumas with mental health professionals today. Raven’s feelings of deficiency in her academic work are notable, given that school leaders will often blame Black students’ academic troubles on lack of training prior to enrolling at their institution. Raven is considered a “lifer” at her school, having begun her studies there in kindergarten. Her story parallels Calla’s, despite their vastly different personal histories. Calla was a legacy student who enrolled prekindergarten at her school. She is also the daughter and niece of three independent school alumni, two from the same institution. In her narrative, she described anxieties related to how her actions could negatively represent herself and Black women in greater society:

I felt like I had to be on my “A Game” all the time. . . . not using AAVE, not using that vernacular, making sure that I was speaking very clearly, coherently. . . . There was no room in my mind for looking like I didn't know what I was talking about. . . . If I were the only Black person in that class, I wanted to make sure that I was putting the best representation of myself forward, because there were so little Black people . . . I don't think anyone would have thought this but, in my mind, I didn't want people to think that somehow, I was lesser, whatever that means. And so, I felt my own internal pressure to make sure that I was always doing what I needed to do . . . when I was touring parents around campus and this one white woman told me that I was “very articulate” . . . I had to save face because I couldn't “black” on this woman in the middle of an admissions tour for [school name]. I'm representing the school. So, I just gave off some remark about how I've been going to the school since I was four, so I'm glad that they were able to give me such a “comprehensive vocabulary.” But moments like that were . . . I wouldn't say often, but it was often enough where I was like okay like I'm a Black woman in a predominantly white space, excelling, and sometimes that makes people a little bit [pause] threatened, in some respect. (Interview, March 12, 2021)

Calla’s recollection of the internal pressures of avoiding perceptions of Black women as angry is connected to the oppositional gaze Black women develop as a result of misrepresentations of Black womanhood in the media (Walton, 2013). As adolescents, Black girls become acutely aware of the disproportionate negative stereotyping of Black femininity and feel immense pressure to avoid contributing to it—for both themselves and other Black girls and women whom they will never meet. Performing well in academics and school leadership roles is not only a matter of learning, growing, and preparing for future academic and professional endeavors; it is also one of controlling localized and widespread perceptions of Black womanhood in society. For Calla or Raven to allow for anyone to walk away from an interaction with a negative feeling would have grave implications for the treatment that another Black woman or girl could face in any setting—a tremendous burden on both personal well-being and mental capacity, as well as an explanation for the heightened levels of anxiety with which these girls are graduating.

While the themes outlined in this section do not represent the totality of challenges these Black women faced during their time as independent school students, they represent significant overlap of experience related to Black girlhood. Considering the diversity of participants (school type, class background, skin tone, legacy status, etc.), their realities within this elite schooling context remain largely the same. School communities are microcosms of society, and the plight against Black women more broadly is inextricably linked to what participants faced within their independent schools. Both external and internal forces related to their marginalized status within privileged spaces amplified socioemotional challenges for these Black women. As a result of having to navigate such barriers and sustain quality academic performance concurrently, participants were required to do more and be better than their peers, despite these efforts going unrecognized.