Black Girl Ordinary: Flesh, Carcerality, and the Refusal of Ethnography

Abstract

AbstractWritten at the confluence of Black girlhood studies and a critical anthropology of the state, this essay is an ethnography of social death in gentrifying San Francisco. I argue the gendered and raced patterns of school discipline at a San Francisco high school help us apprehend the afterlife of slavery. Within the context of schooling, the particular association of Black girls as loud and disobedient is well‐documented in the literature. Using flesh (Spillers ) as a hermeneutic to understand Black embodiment in the late liberal US, the essay centers on two young women who are targeted for school push out. Ultimately, the self‐making strategies employed by young Black women in San Francisco flummox the progressive political project and model “Black girl ordinary” as a practice of ethical refusal, both within and beyond the academy.