| Summary: | Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) === The systemic racism imposed on the lives and education aspiration of six of my
elders who stayed in the racist South during the ferociously deleterious era of Jim Crow
is the focus of this phenomenological critical race study. These stories centered the voices
of my elders as powerful weapons to expose white supremacy and the
psychophysiological trauma imposed upon my elders. These stories were about the lives,
lived experiences, and educational trials and triumphs of six of my Brown and Black hue
American elders whose ancestry was born out of slavery and delivered into the vicious
Jim Crow era.
My work was grounded in Phenomenological Critical Race Theory. Critical Race
Theory validates my elders’ narratives and their narratives fortify the tenets of CRT. For
you see, racism was an everyday phenomenon my elders experienced as residents of rural
Southern America. My elders came to understand “what” they were, Black, by
understanding “who” they were not, White. Furthermore, this qualitative
phenomenological critical race study was guided by three inquiries, what experiences
have you had with Jim Crow; how or in what ways did your experiences with Jim Crow
affect your education; and how or in what ways did your experience with Jim Crow affect
your life? These inquiries produced four intersecting themes, 1) the survival of racism as
part of everyday life, 2) economic exploitation of Black labor, 3) denial of equitable education, and 4) the sociopolitical construction of racial identity, and three significant
findings, racist place, sociopolitical oppression, and inequitable education.
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