ABSTRACT
This chapter will share two stories. The stories both focus on a Black 1 woman who has been bullied 2 and, in the process, confronted abuses that were driven by racialized animosity. Although scholarly analyses of student mistreatment are extensively available (e.g., Ahn, Rodkin, & Gest, 2013; Espelage, Hong, Rao, & Low, 2013; Orpinas, Horne, & Staniszewski, 2003), the significance of colorism-discrimination spurred by skin complexion and related traits (Russell, Wilson, & Hall, 1992)—in racially influenced aggressions is often under-recognized or muted. Likewise, researchers who highlight the salience of intra-racial physicality in Black education do not commonly engage the topic of bullying; rather, works tend to encompass calls to account for color bias as a general backdrop to Black life and schooling (Hunter, 2016; Keith & Monroe, 2016; Monroe, 2016), a component of Black racial identity (DeCuir-Gunby, 2009), an element of teacher education (McGee, Alvarez, & Milner, 2016), a factor in within-group differences such as educational attainment (Allen, Telles, and Hunter, 2000) and suspension (Hannon, DeFina, & Bruch, 2013), and an influence on traits such as self-esteem (Robinson & Ward, 1995) and self-efficacy (Thompson & Keith, 2001). As a consequence, the ways that colorist antagonisms frame and inform bullying remain poorly understood despite the prevalence of skin-tone discrimination involving people of color and the presence of interpersonal aggression in educational spaces.
