In 1937, with the support of government scholarships, the sisters Sherifa and Lulwa al-Zayani, along with their companion Za’faranah Sa'eed, became the first Bahraini female cohort to study abroad in Beirut, Lebanon. Since then, the stories of Sherifa and Lulwa as girl pioneers continue to be summoned as evidence of girl empowerment--a monumental accomplishment of the nation-state. Yet, Za’faranah remains peculiarly absent from this narration of the nation. Subjected to quadruple disciplinary forces of gender, age, class, and race, little is known about who Za’fanarah was, the conditions of her journeys, and what meanings can be deduced from her transgressing color-lines and borderlines. Za’faranah’s story becomes the point of departure for my presentation. Specifically, my presentation emerges from a curiosity about the deafening silence on the histories and lived realities of black girls in existing literature on the politics of schooling and the legacies of the Indian Ocean slave trade in Bahrain and the Arab Gulf states. I ask: How do we explain the perpetual erasure of the black girl from the social imaginary of (post)colonial Bahrain? In what ways does Za’faranah’s story help us pursue “radical hope” and alternative futurities in education? To interrogate and articulate the historical (de)construction of black girlhood as a social category, I employ discourse analysis. I examine ethnographic fieldnotes along with a myriad of primary and secondary archival texts. My analysis traces an ever-emerging discursive tension in Bahrain’s origin myth--i.e., the hypervisibilization of the “Arab” girl citizen-subject and the invisibilization of the black girl citizen-subject. Thus, this presentation aims to: a) disrupt a dominant configuration of ideal girlhood in (post)colonial Bahrain as racially ambiguous; and b) invite a reconceptualization of black girlhood as a plural and fluid category, marked by expansive coordinates of time and place intersecting dynamically with axes of social difference. Recognizing the school as a key institution of nation-building, I argue for a serious engagement with anti-blackness as a disciplinary force operating in and through schools. Also, by centering the stories of school-aged girls racialized as black and learning about the creative ways in which they navigate and negotiate social difference in their everyday lives, critical education scholars can begin to re-imagine education justice in schools from the vantage point of those most marginalized.