Ain’t Nobody Got Time for That: Anti-Black Girl Violence in the Era of #SayHerName

2018 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 162-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
Treva B. Lindsey
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Black Girls ◽  
State Violence ◽  
Police Brutality ◽  
Water Crisis ◽  
Black Girl ◽  
Racial Injustice ◽  
Primary Focus ◽  
The Many ◽  
A Site

In the era of #BlackLivesMatter, anti-Black state violence is a primary focus. From police brutality to the Flint Water Crisis, organizers within the Movement for Black Lives draw important connections between various sites of racial injustice as experienced by people of African descent in the United States. One of the many sites where anti-Black violence and victimization occurs is in our classrooms. This article explores the classroom as a site of racial–gender terror for Black girls. The classroom is far too often an anti-Black girl space.

Global Application of Intersectionality Theory

2021 ◽  
pp. 27-53
Author(s):  
Johanna Bond
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Partner Violence ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black Girls ◽  
Human Rights Violations ◽  
Gender Based Violence ◽  
Gender Based ◽  
The Many ◽  
Inadequate Prenatal Care ◽  
The Right

This chapter delves into examples of global intersectionality to illustrate the need for a thorough and consistent intersectional approach to human rights violations around the world. Although it is impossible to provide an exhaustive analysis of the many and varied types of intersectional human rights violations, this chapter offers multiple examples of intersectional human rights violations, including (1) gender-based violence, including both non-state actors who commit intimate partner violence and sexual violence in armed conflict; (2) maternal mortality and inadequate prenatal care in Brazil; (3) coerced sterilization among the Roma in Europe; (4) disproportionate discipline and punishment of Black girls in the United States; and (5) inconsistent LGBTQI rights. These case studies implicate different human rights, including the right to be free from violence, the right to education, and the right to the highest attainable standard of health. Each example demonstrates how a more nuanced, intersectional lens is necessary to capture the rights at stake and to contemplate appropriate remedies for victims of human rights violations in full.

Black Girl Thought in the Work of Ntozake Shange

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 32-47
Author(s):  
Naila Keleta-Mae
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black Girls ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Ntozake Shange ◽  
Black Girl ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Spheres Of Influence ◽  
Gender And Age ◽  
Black Girlhood

In this article I examine the performances of black girlhood in two texts by Ntozake Shange—the choreopoem “for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf” (1977) and the novel Sassafras, Cypress and Indigo (1982). The black girls whom Shange portrays navigate anti-black racism in their communities, domestic violence in their homes, and explore their connections with spirit worlds. In both these works, Shange stages black girls who make decisions based on their understanding of the spheres of influence that their race, gender, and age afford them in an anti-black patriarchal world dominated by adults. I draw, too, from Patricia Hill Collins’s work on feminist standpoint theory and black feminist thought to introduce the term black girl thought as a theoretical framework to offer insights into the complex lives of black girls who live in the post-civil rights era in the United States.

crushed little stars

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 16-28
Author(s):  
Jordan Ealey
Keyword(s):  
Black Girls ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Black Girl ◽  
Creative Practice ◽  
Black Girlhood ◽  
Girlhood Studies ◽  
A Site

This is a performative engagement with the theory and practice of Black girlhood. I begin with an excerpt from my play-in-process, crushed little stars, which is itself a meditation on the sad Black girl. I share this process of play not only to present play making as a powerful epistemological tool, but also to blur the boundaries between what constitutes theory as opposed to practice. I (re)imagine Black girl sociality as a site of restoration and healing against the racist, sexist, and ageist world with which Black girls are forced to contend. Accordingly, this project contributes to the diversification of girlhood studies, challenging the disciplinarity of the field by extending ethnographic and sociological perspectives to include the vantage point of performance and creative practice.

A ‘fair cop’: Queer histories, affect and police image work in Pride March

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 277-293 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma K Russell
Keyword(s):  
Impression Management ◽  
Affect Theory ◽  
State Violence ◽  
Police Brutality ◽  
Organizational History ◽  
Police Violence ◽  
Textual Representations ◽  
Lgbt People ◽  
A Site

This article investigates how proactive police image work contends with the politics of queer history by drawing from aspects of affect theory. It asks: How does police image work engage with or respond to ongoing histories of state violence and queer resistance? And why does this matter? To explore these questions, the article provides a case study of the Victorian Pride March in 2002. It analyzes textual representations of Chief Commissioner Christine Nixon’s participation in the parade to show how histories of homophobic police violence can be used strategically to fortify a positive police image among LGBT people and the wider community. Police image work carried out at Pride March becomes a means of legitimizing past policing practices with the aim of overcoming poor and antagonistic LGBT-police relations. The visibility of police at Pride March, this analysis suggests, contributes to the normalization of queerness as a site to be continually policed and regulated. Image work here also buttresses police reputation against the negative press associated with incidents of police brutality. This investigation contributes to the literature on police communications and impression management by demonstrating how police can mobilize negative aspects of their organizational history as an important part of police image work in the present.

Can I Get a Witness? Speculative Fiction as Testimony and Counterstory

2020 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 507-529
Author(s):  
S. R. Toliver
Keyword(s):  
Three Dimensional ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black Girls ◽  
Speculative Fiction ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Black Girl ◽  
Negative Experiences ◽  
Sources Of Knowledge ◽  
Dominant Narratives ◽  
Bear Witness

Drawing on Black feminist/womanist storytelling and the three-dimensional narrative inquiry space, this article showcases how one Black girl uses speculative fiction as testimony and counterstory, calling for readers to bear witness to her experiences and inviting witnesses to respond to the negative experiences she faces as a Black girl in the United States. I argue that situating speculative fiction as counterstory creates space for Black girls to challenge dominant narratives and create new realities. Furthermore, I argue that considering speculative fiction as testimony provides another way for readers to engage in a dialogic process with Black girls, affirming their words as legitimate sources of knowledge. Witnessing Black girls’ stories is an essential component to literacy and social justice contexts that tout a humanizing approach to research. They are also vital for dismantling a system bent on the castigation and obliteration of Black girls’ pasts, presents, and futures.

scholarly journals Paternalistic aims and (mis)attributions of agency: What the over-punishment of Black girls in US classrooms teaches us about just school discipline

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-77
Author(s):  
Lily Lamboy ◽  
Ashley Taylor ◽  
Winston Thompson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Secondary Schools ◽  
Low Income ◽  
School Discipline ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black Girls ◽  
Complex Case ◽  
Normative Reasoning ◽  
Racial Injustice ◽  
School Punishment

In this article, we explore the interrelated phenomena of teachers’ paternalistic aims and their misattributions of the agency of their students within particular schooling contexts of systemic racial injustice in the United States. We argue that, because teachers in these contexts assess agency in patterned, predictable ways that stem from – and reify – preexisting unjust patterns of oppression, teachers are unreliable evaluators of the conditions necessary for just punishment. To build this argument, we explore a complex case in which authorities regularly fail to meet these conditions: the punishment of Black girls in low-income, urban, predominantly non-White primary and secondary schools in the United States. Through our analysis, we offer a new concept, excess agency misattribution, which raises serious questions about subjective justifications for punishment in contexts of entrenched injustice. By delineating how the perceptions of teachers influence both the putative justifying aims and targeted recipients of punishment, we demonstrate how the existing terrain of school punishment practices ought to affect our normative reasoning about the fairness of punishment in these contexts.

And Who Will Revere the Black Girl

2021 ◽  
pp. 089124322110293
Author(s):  
Dominique C. Hill
Keyword(s):  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Black Girls ◽  
State Violence ◽  
Black Feminist Theory ◽  
Court Cases ◽  
Dress Code ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Black Girl ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
Black Girlhood

While the mainstream media continues to narrowly define justice and reduce the site of its presence or absence to murder scenes and court cases, justice is often foreclosed long before someone is murdered and we must #SayHerName. To expand the project of Black mattering beyond race and physical death, this essay animates how body policing through school dress code policy sanctions racial-sexual violence and provide girls with an ultimatum: either abandon body sovereignty and self-expression, or accept the consequences of being read as a distraction, a problem. (Re)membering classic Black feminist theory and the 2013 case of Vanessa Van Dyke, this essay locates these underrecognized facets of state violence as an extension of the #SayHerName project. Through a Black girlhood studies framework, the author underscores embodiment as an essential measure of justice and reframes mattering through the importance of Black girls’ crowns.

Guantánamo, Cuba: Poetry and Prison on Divided Ground

2020 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 299-315
Author(s):  
Esther Whitfield
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
War On Terror ◽  
The United States ◽  
Regional Literature ◽  
Human Rights Abuses ◽  
The Public ◽  
Detention Centers ◽  
The Many ◽  
A Site

Abstract Guantánamo as a site whose legal contortions and human rights abuses have global reach and urgency has long been the focus of the many scholars, lawyers, and activists who have fought to keep its detention centers in the public eye. And yet, alongside advocates who have insisted on the site’s urgent moral ties to the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and the international community broadly defined—and in defiance of both a US war on “terror” and a Cuban war on “imperialism”—there have persisted smaller-scale gestures aimed at situating the Guantánamo naval base as geographically continuous with, and affectively connected to, Cuba. This article reads the poetry of Mohammed el Gharani and Ibrahim al-Rubaish, former detainees included in Marc Falkoff’s collection Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak, and of José Ramón Sánchez, longtime resident of the Cuban city of Guantánamo, as a form of regional literature produced on contested ground. It proposes that, when read across the dividing line and between languages, poetry presents a more intimate and locally specific Guantánamo than the widely known version.

Black Girls Swim

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 63-79
Author(s):  
Samantha White
Keyword(s):  
Physical Activity ◽  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black Girls ◽  
Black Girl ◽  
Black Girlhood ◽  
Beauty Ideals ◽  
Sports And Physical Activity

During the early part of the twentieth century, Black girls in the United States attended Young Women’s Christian Associations (YWCAs) where they received instruction in sports and physical activity. Using archival research, in this article I examine the role of swimming in Black girls’ sports and physical activity practices in Northern YWCAs. With a focus on the construction of Black girlhood, health, and embodiment, I trace how girls navigated spatial segregation, beauty ideals, and athleticism. I highlight the experiences of Black girl swimmers—subjects who have often been rendered invisible in the historical and contemporary sporting landscape.

Opening Up Space for Global Black Girls

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 11-33
Author(s):  
Gabrielle Civil ◽  
Zetta Elliott
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Performance Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black Girls ◽  
Embodied Knowledge ◽  
Creative Potential ◽  
Black Girl ◽  
Young Readers ◽  
Opening Up

In this innovative dialogue, Gabrielle Civil and Zetta Elliott consider how their work inside and outside of the academy “opens up space” for Black girls in the United States and throughout the African diaspora. In her performance art and curation, Civil activates the presence and absence of diasporic Black girls and celebrates their creative potential. In her books for young readers, Elliott disrupts literary conventions by centering Black girl protagonists and using the fantasy genre not for escape but empowerment. Linking the critical and creative, this dialogue showcases reflection and embodied knowledge of Black girls and women.

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