Running head: POSITIONALITY NARRATIVE 1

Positionality Narrative: Intersecting Identities

Jessica Miller

University of California Los Angeles

POSITIONALITY NARRATIVE 2

Positionality Narrative: Intersecting Identities

The greatest gift I believe I have received in my education is understanding that identities are

intersecting. There is not one factor that completely defines anybody, we are composed of multiple ideas,

ideals, and interests. This paper however focuses on three identities that are most prominent in my life

currently. The first being my racial identity, followed by my realization of identifying as a member of the

Black community, and ending with my familial identity. None of these are completely realized or fully

solidified, I truly believe they will forever be in process. However, all of my identities play a central role

in how I have viewed my student teaching and how I want to educate my future students. These identities

have led me to agency, individualism, collectivism, and representation as meaningful aspects to be

implemented inside my classroom. These ideas spring from manners of constructing critical hope, which I

believe to be an essential part of social justice work that will be done inside my classroom. My

positionality has manifested in assisting students to create critical hope inside the classroom so they can

also implement it in their lives outside of the classroom.

My racial identity has always been in flux, a continuous struggle to place and explain myself. The

question “What are you?” (in reference to my ethnicity) has been asked more times then I care to

remember, and my awkward answer: “Well my mom is white and my dad is Black and white so I guess

that means I’m…” and the confused face of the questioner at my long winded explanation. Yet, truly, I

identify as a Black woman because no matter what room I enter into it will be clearly apparent I am

brown. It took me a long time to state that and believe it, and I’m still working on it. Growing up I did not

see any other biracial families, and for a while I was convinced I was adopted because my skin color did

not match my mothers like everyone else I knew. When I told my mother my theory she showed me

pictures of us together in the hospital when I was an infant to dissuade my point of view, and even that

did not erase all skepticism from my brain. Growing up as a Black girl there was little representation in

my public schooling experience, growing up as biracial, there was none. No characters in books or movies
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ever looked like me or shared a similar experience, and zero of my teachers looked like me, which I guess

isn’t as surprising now considering, “teachers of color only compose 17.1% of the workforce”

(Cabrera-Duran, 2016, p. 41). It took me until college to find more representation, or to even consider that

I had not been represented. I did not realize how terrible this was until I went to college and studied Black

Studies and all these amazing people and theorists came out of the woodwork to justify my childhood

experience as being unfair and unjust. I instantly felt terrible for myself, who experienced this in a rather

diverse city, and every other student of color who does not see themselves, or people like them,

represented in their own education. College forced me to begin confronting my own internalized racism, it

gave me all these reasons and explanations for why I had this negative and deficit view of myself, why I

tried to reject my Blackness. I was, as many teachers of color are, “educated by an oppressive schooling

system that promot[ed] white cultural values” (Kohli, 2013, p. 6). My childhood was filled with internal

wishes for straighter hair, lighter skin, and blue eyes. So many messages from peers and the media in my

life have nurtured my own internalized racism, “it manifested in the way they saw themselves, their

intelligence, their beauty, and for others it affected the way they saw their family and community” (Kohli,

2013, p. 12). I am elated that I now have this knowledge and can continue addressing and battling my

own internalized racism, as well as educate students in these ideas earlier in their life so they don’t feel

the same underrepresentation I did. In my student teaching placement I did a lesson on Fannie Lou

Hamer, a Black woman who was also a civil rights activist. I wanted to bring diverse stories and cultures

into my classroom, including my own, I want each student to see a piece of themselves in my classroom. I

was able to do this academically but also on a more personal level when I shared my pictures of my

family through the bio bag on the first day of placement. Upon seeing my biracial family a student asked

me, “What’s your culture?” I thought that was such a beautiful way to try and understand something you

have never seen before. To me that experience underlined the importance of being a teacher of color and
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getting to expose students to new narratives earlier in their lives so they are more understanding of the

variations of people they will meet later in their lives.

I remember taking my first Black Studies course in college, it was my second year in and I had

recently changed my major to English. I sat in lecture that first day, simply with the idea that I was going

to complete my university mandated ethnicity requirement, but I was surprisingly completely enthralled

in the history of the other half of my people. I was given vocabulary and terms to directly identify the

stereotypes I had experienced in my own life and schooling. I felt like a veil had been lifted from over my

eyes, what was once fuzzy and confusing became very clear. I then felt infuriated. Why was all of this

new information to me? Why didn’t I learn about this growing up? I added a Black Studies minor to my

degree after that class, and I got to do so much investigation into a history I felt had been silenced. It also

led me to understand that Black people’s history is not the only history that this has happened to. It

brought me to this magical word, intersectionality. The idea that people are not simply made up of one

identity but a series of different identities that influence and impact them or oppress them in different

ways. I feel like we often get stuck in conversation over whose oppression is primary when in reality we

can have multiple forms of oppression at work and intersecting. Martin and Van Gunten talk about the

O.J. Simpson case as a classic way in which “students became polarized on the basis of their perceived

positionalities, believing those positionalities to be singular, primary, and fixed” (2002, p. 47).

Understanding the fluidity of identity and that it has multiple facets can do so much work in uniting

people who have turned against each other for fear there is not enough room for everyone “at the top.”

There is this battle over who is being oppressed “the most” but that is just another way to pit people

(especially people of color) against each other. Black Studies showed me that just because society has

manipulated us into believing certain things and maintaining certain norms, does not mean we are unable

to enlighten ourselves or challenge the standards in place. This enlightenment is an essential first step in

dismantling these structures. I plan to deconstruct oppression in the public school system through
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engaging in conversations surrounding identity and stereotypes with my students. I was able to start this

in my student teaching placement by reading a poem a day about Fannie Lou Hamer’s life in which we

got to cover topics such as racism and connect experiences from the past to things in the present. I do not

want my students to feel the shock and betrayal as harshly as I came to understand it in college, because I

know those feelings of shock and betrayal can be all consuming. I would like to further support students

by implementing an action project that is student driven, so my they can feel empowered in a world where

you are often made to feel powerless.

What was my family's journey as black in America? I fear I will never know. This has been a

great struggle in terms of my own familial identity as a Black woman. As my white grandmother began to

develop dementia on my father’s side of the family it became extremely important to me to contribute to

what her and my aunt had begun many years ago before my aunt passed away. They had started

compiling a narrative of our family history, this included stories from my grandmother, that she thought

worth noting about her parents and their parents before them, as well stories my aunt had recorded from

oral tellings my black grandfather had shared with her in the past. On the paternal side of my family there

is little to no information past my great grandfather who was a swamper in Lake Charles, Louisiana. The

past two summers I have been obsessively researching on Ancestry.com, as well as other sites, to try and

drudge up the past and uncover family mysteries. This has been an extensively disappointing journey,

especially when comparing the white side of my family (who has been able to easily trace back history all

the way to us being related to President William Harrison) to the Black side of my family. It angers me

that my families Black history must simply blend into slavery with a giant question mark at the end. I

don’t know enough of the narrative to think my ancestors were anything but enslaved at some point in our

history, and a DNA test only gave a vague answer of being connected to West Africa. But I will never

truly know their stories, their hardships, their strengths because they weren’t seen as important enough to

document as anything more than a number. Let me tell you, census reports are impossible to trace when
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you don’t know where your last name came from, was it a choice? Was it forced upon my family? All

answers are unknown and a million questions are created. This has forced me to look deep into my

identity as a Black woman, how do I want others stories to be remembered, how can I support

documentation of those stories in my own life and teaching?

I view this ongoing struggle with my families history as connected to multicultural social

reconstructionist education. Truthfully, “Whose knowledge has been seen as worth teaching and who has

benefited? Whose knowledge should be taught and why?” (Martin and Van Gunten, 2002, p. 46). My

whole life I have felt like a big piece of my story is missing and it angers me endlessly that that

information may never be known, that amazing and enlightening stories have been lost. Then I think, how

can I change this narrative. The most prominent way I can influence the future is inside my own

classroom through the production of knowledge which is “inclusive of the voices and histories of

historically marginalized groups in American society” (Martin and Van Gunten, 2002, p. 45).

Documenting our own personal histories is a way to create change and hope against the silencing of the

stories of our ancestors “it extends the boundaries of reform to empower students and teachers to become

agents of change” (Martin and Van Gunten, 2002, p. 46). I want to make space for students to record

things about their lives that they think are important and have choice in learning about topics they believe

are relevant. Providing this agency in education to my students is a way to be inclusive of knowledge and

history that they deem culturally relevant is a way of bringing what has been cast out and marginalized

into the light.

My personal positionality is composed of many things, but it truly centers on social justice. My

grandfather wrote in the last paragraph of an article: “For me the world is hardly more than a dream. All

that prevents it from being a dream purely and simply is hope – hope that the snail pace advancement

toward total equality of opportunity for all will be accelerated. For I do not believe that my grandchildren

will be either willing or able to endure that sense of inner panic and awful abandonment that gnaws at my
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soul. They will not merely want to holler, they will! Loudly!” Most recently I have felt this inner panic

and soul gnawing and I am continually thinking about how I can challenge the structures in place, I am

searching for hope, and I am going to find ways to bring it to my students. They are truly my source of

hope and as long as I can make an impact inside my classroom I can continue to grow and nourish that

hope.
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References

Cabrera-Duran, E. (2016). More than Numbers: Recruitment and Retention of Teachers of Color

in U.S. Public Schools. ​#CritEdPol: Journal of Critical Education Policy Studies at

Swarthmore College,1(​ 1), 39-52. doi:10.24968/2473-912x.1.1.6

Kohli, R. (2013). Unpacking internalized racism: Teachers of color striving for racially just

classrooms. ​Race Ethnicity and Education,17(​ 3), 367-387.

doi:10.1080/13613324.2013.832935

Martin, R. J., & Van Gunten, D. M. (2002). Reflected Identities. ​Journal of Teacher

Education,53​(1), 44-54. doi:10.1177/0022487102053001005