Chapter 3: Autoethnography as Counternarrative: Confronting Myths in the Academy—An African American Female Perspective

African American women have for centuries been raped, mutilated, ignored, ridiculed, demeaned, exploited, and consigned to the status of inferior. Stereotypes abound and have captured popular imagination through media and the promulgation of historical half-truths and contemporary misrepresentations. Historical archetypes equating Black and female as lazy, loud, rude, hypersexual, uneducated, and irresponsible have been operationalized by majoritarian narratives of Black female identity. These common narratives have framed public opinion resulting in the othering of African American female academics, an othering that isolates and demeans. Symbolically, we are lions striving not to starve from our isolated existence, and we are gazelles running from our predators whose goal is to seek and destroy us. We are survivors who actively resist starvation and being killed.