Testifyin' and Signifyin'

This essay is an ode to the African American women who thoughtfully and generously shared their personal stories of the triumphs and challenges of navigating their raced and gendered identities in educational, professional, domestic, and civic spaces. I contextualize the individual and collective value of these narratives by drawing on the intellectual lineage of Black ² women academics, artists, and writers who shaped the work I do as a Black woman scholar. As a Black woman, it is impossible to disassociate my personal experiences that intersect so frequently with the stories shared by our interlocuters. After listening to the stories, I was in awe of these women’s courage, and I was ready to write an essay that honored their experiences. And then I was stuck. When it came time to write, I suddenly did not know where to begin, how to begin creating a compilation of such complex narratives—both their own and where and how my own intersected with theirs. I concluded that one way was to demonstrate how their experiences are like silk threads in a grand web of Black women’s lived experiences—some that have been told, but many that dwell in spaces of silence and forgottenness. Coupling these narratives—the personal with the larger historical and social—reveals a narrative grounded in Black vernacular traditions of testifying and signifying. It is through these traditions that I analyze how our interlocuters share their personally selected snapshots of navigating systemic racism in Central Indiana.