ABSTRACT
It is now established that significant numbers of young black women do relatively well at school.2 However, understanding relative black female success is an aspect of social enquiry that has vexed educational researchers and policy-makers for many years. An examination of the contemporary educational discourse over the past three decades reveals an interesting paradox of exclusion and inclusion with regard to young black women in educational research. The former, the exclusion of young black women in race and education studies, appears to be fuelled by political undercurrents which, since the 1960s have sought to maintain the myth of black underachievement (Mirza 1992). On the other hand, when young black women were included in educational research in the 1980s and early 1990s,3 their relative success was explained within the problematic context of ‘the strong black female’ (Mirza 1993). With its reification of motherhood and marginalisation of the black male, this popular theoretical construction appears to be the outcome of an attempt to explain achievement within a discourse whose underlying premise maintains the ‘idea’ of underachievement.
