Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood: Psychological Safety, Black Girls' Speech, and Black Feminist Perspectives on Directness

• Published in: Journal of educational psychology 2020-04, Vol.112 (3), p.567-578
• Main Author: Woodson, Ashley N.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Adolescents; African Americans; Behavior; Black People; Black students; Communities; Cultural Influences; Educational Psychology; Female; Females; Feminism; Human; Leadership; Marginalization; Mental Health; Oral Communication; Power Structure; Psychological aspects; Psychological safety; Qualitative Research; Racial Bias; Racial Differences; Resistance (Psychology); Risk; Safety; Security (Psychology); Speech; Speech Communication; Womens studies; Youth Programs
• ISSN: 0022-0663; 1939-2176
• DOI: 10.1037/edu0000458

Black feminist scholars have produced compelling frameworks for assessing direct speech behavior, both within and external to Black female speech communities. These frameworks are marginalized in mainstream organizational psychology and educational psychology research on psychological safety. Psychological safety is a concept that positions directness as a marker of contextual comfort. In this article, I center Black feminist theories to analyze how Black girls make sense of their own direct speech behaviors, particularly when they do not perceive the context as psychologically safe. My theoretical objective is to read a rubric of psychological safety popular in educational psychology with and against sociolinguistic, literary, and sociological findings on Black girls' direct speech performances. My political objective is to call for more critical collaborations and transdisciplinary approaches that consider the cultural realities and societal conditions that might motivate Black girls' participatory risk and reasons not wholly accounted for in conversations about psychological safety that might move Black girls and women from silence into action. This qualitative inquiry has provided important points of departure for conceptualizing psychological safety in conditions of intersecting oppression. Educational Impact and Implications Statement In research on psychological safety, directness is used to describe straightforward, constructive approaches to conflict that are often employed in psychologically safe contexts. Research on Black girls suggests that directness in sometimes looks like psychological safety but is actually a resistance performance to identity-linked threats. This paper uses tools from critical race ethnography to bring these thought traditions together, centering Black girls' experiences and asking questions about how to assess and interpret directness.