How to Build a Black Girl Traphouse: A Meditation and Manual for Black Feminist Survival in and Beyond the Academy

Abstract

By design, the university is a colonizing, racializing, and classed space, built through unequal structures that perpetuate systemic violence (Peña, 2022). When many marginalized folks enter any university setting, they are marred by projections, judgments, assumptions, and assaults by those who question their worth, ability, and competence (y Muhs, Niemann, González, & Harris, 2012). Discriminatory actions and attitudes endured by Black women in academia often make us severely angry as well as mentally and physically ill. Many of us are so traumatized that we choose to leave and/or are pushed out of our jobs. Those of us who choose to stay are then saddled with the disproportionate labor of navigating varying levels of madness often magnified by the harms inflicted on our persons and ways of knowing while also creating alternative ways to be, create, live, and succeed through our work. In this article, we draw on the wisdom of Black feminist writers and activists to break out of the dehumanizing boxes within which academic institutions try to confine us. We explore how, in constructing a sanctuary for ourselves–the Black Girl Traphouse–we challenge conventional understandings of respectability and embrace a praxis of ratchetness that leads us towards care and community. This piece is intentionally crafted as a multivocal meditation on the ways academia has tried us and our responses to cling to one another in acts of radical resistance. Through our collective voices, we memorialize the critical components we have used in our care work for ourselves and one another. By centering our journey as Black women in higher education and the social work profession, our analysis offers a new vision for maddening the academy. It is our sincere hope that other Black women and femmes reading this work will have a blueprint to begin building their own ‘trap houses’ as well.