After transitioning from teaching adolescents to educating adults, I’m challenged to understand people in the context of their identities and workplaces, especially when that context is unclear to me and those I educate. I do this while combating a flattening double consciousness, wrestling with who I am and others’ racialized and gendered perceptions of me. I do this as a Black non-binary person with multiple chronic illnesses, who is read as an able-bodied Black woman.

W.E.B. Du Bois originally named the experience of double consciousness in his first book, “Souls of Black Folk.” Double-consciousness is the simultaneous experience of being Black as one sees oneself while inescapably seeing oneself through the white gaze. It gives language for the dissonance of the repeated realization of a fractured personhood and how we persistently reassemble ourselves.

Understanding double consciousness helps me reconcile what pushed me out of a mainstream education. It helps me, as a consultant, build organizations’ capacity for equity-centered change. Each of our unique combinations of identities may occupy varying perspectives and positionalities; even when we do share identities, we may not identically experience or understand them. It can feel lonely and isolating balancing this fractured personhood. However, building community with Black women educators as a participant in the EdSurge Research and Abolitionist Teaching Network healing circle, showed me how the intersections also collide for other Black women educators.

This article examines several themes that surfaced during the group sessions that are connected to my reflections on intersectional identity negotiations. We examine the influence of the intersections of race, gender, sexual orientation, disability and migration on these Black women educators’ experiences based on the seen and unseen elements of the participants in this study. We relate my experiences and other participants’ perspectives to the endurance of double consciousness and intersectionality, and we end with questions for future inquiry and suggestions for supporting Black women’s wholeness in the education ecosystem.

Read the full article about intersectional identities of Black educators by Seph Young and Mi Aniefuna   at EdSurge.