As part of our theory of change, the PGP believes that we cannot discount anyone, and that everyone deserves access to education. But as we began discussing last spring, women and girls are left out of conversations about educational justice for currently and formerly incarcerated people, even though incarceration rates for women have increased sevenfold since the early 1980s. Black women and girls are especially treated as what education justice advocate Kimberly Haven calls correctional afterthoughts. This is the case, despite their disproportionate criminalization and incarceration in the United States.
In this webinar, we explored this exclusion by learning about how Black women and girls became societal afterthoughts and victims of domestic, carceral, and anti-Black violence. In conversation with Black feminist historian Dr. Treva B. Lindsey, author of America, Goddam: Violence, Black Women, And The Struggle For Justice (2022), we grappled with the history of violence and criminalization of Black women and girls while also learning of their strivings for justice. PGP volunteer tutors, Virginia Union University, and the broader concerned community, ended this webinar with an expanded vision of educational justice by looking at the roots of injustice towards Black women and girls.