| Abstract | This work of narrative-based scholarship aims to explore the experiences of Black and Brown girls who are perceived as “at risk,” and therefore are subject to special educational treatment via mentorship, scholarships, and other support programs. Through a novel-length counterstory focusing on three such fictional girls, I explore how such programs attempt to support girls of color through methods of surveillance, paternalism, and control, and assess the ways in which these practices harm Black and Latinx girls uniquely due to their intersecting oppressions of race, gender, and age. I further contextualize these girls’ experiences as a part of broader educational policies that include school segregation and the persistence of the cultural deficit model in the classroom, arguing that while girls of color continue to be understudied and misunderstood in the academy, narrative-based research developed in and out of the academy can be liberatory in its vivid ability to bring girls of color to the forefront of conversations about race, gender, and education. A framing introduction to the fictional narrative situates the prose fiction in dialogue with scholarship from Critical Race Theory, Girlhood Studies, and Education. |
