# Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood: Psychological Safety, Black Girls' Speech, and Black Feminist Perspectives on Directness

*Woodson · Power & Equity, Voice & Silence, Critique & Boundary · Journal of Educational Psychology · 2020 · Paywalled*

Woodson turns a Black feminist lens on the concept of psychological safety itself, and finds it wanting. The dominant rubric in organisational and educational psychology treats directness, saying what you think plainly, as a marker of a psychologically safe context: if people speak directly, the environment must be safe. Woodson centres Black feminist theories of speech to show why that inference is unreliable when applied to Black girls, whose traditions of direct, assertive speech are shaped by their own cultural and rhetorical communities and by the racism and sexism of the settings they move through, not simply by how comfortable a room feels. A Black girl may be direct in a context she experiences as anything but safe, and may be read as disruptive or aggressive precisely for speech that a white, middle-class norm would count as healthy candour. The paper's theoretical move is to read the popular psychological-safety rubric both with and against sociolinguistic, literary and sociological accounts of Black girls' direct speech, exposing what the construct takes for granted; its political move is to call for critical, transdisciplinary work that attends to the cultural realities and structural conditions shaping who speaks how, and how it is received. For a corpus alert to the WEIRD and leader-centric biases of the psychological-safety literature, this is an important corrective from inside the field: it shows that reading voice as a clean signal of safety can misfire badly across lines of race, gender and culture, and that the same directness can be safety in one body and jeopardy in another. Its limits are those of a theoretical intervention: it reframes and critiques rather than supplying a measurement or a method, which is partly the point, since its argument is that the tidy measures are exactly what miss the reality. (Text drawn from the 2020 Journal of Educational Psychology paper, 112(3), pp. 567-578.)

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