Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

The physical, emotional, and psychological violence to which Black girls are subjected on a daily basis is both tremendous and ubiquitous. Our society, dominated by twenty-first century tools, including smartphones and laptops, has encouraged the exponential circulation of racist and sexist media, especially directed at Black girls (Tanksley, 2016). Fortunately, research suggests that empowering spaces of literacy learning have the potential to support Black girls in enacting their literacies for the purposes of self love (Muhammad & Haddix, 2016; Sealey-Ruiz et al., 2016; Winn, 2011), which I define here as the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing, celebrating, preserving, or protecting one’s own or another’s physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual growth. Thus, inquiries of literacy education are ripe for opportunities to explore the ways Black girls’ digital literacies assist in the development and enactment of self love. Grounded in this understanding, this study employs collective case study methodologies (Barone, 2011) to answer the following question: How do Black girls use their digital and critical media literacies to develop and enact self love?

Study participants include a total of nine girls in the ninth through eleventh grades at an urban public charter high school in a large mid-Atlantic city. The girls range in age from 14-17 years old. Participants were arranged into three groups of 2-4 girls each and groups met on a rotating basis following a loose meeting structure. Each participant completed an initial survey that documented demographic information as well internet use habits. Students also participated in four semi-structured focus group interviews, through which I explored the various ways Black girls develop and enact self love through the use of their digital literacies.

Initial analysis of the data suggests that the girls in the study (1) use digital tools to find multimodal messages that resist deficit framings of Black girls and (2) critically consider and respond to both asset- and deficit-based messages regarding depictions of Black girls. These findings, consistent with research that shows Black adolescents engage digital texts and tools to critique and create more frequently than their white counterparts (Lenhart, et al., 2015), have important implications for both digital and critical media literacy education. As citizens of the twenty-first century, students consistently interact with and are asked to make meaning of the digital images they consume both in and out of school (Kellner & Share, 2005). When considered in tandem with existing research, the practices of the participants in the study suggest that we perhaps have the most to learn from students from some of the most marginalized communities amongst us. Thus, I argue that the digital and critical media literacy practices of Black girls can serve as a model for all students. Specifically, as we come to know more about the varied ways Black girls engage with digital texts and tools, we can begin to reconsider what it means to critically assess sources, develop arguments, and respond to false information.