“Keeping it Fresh”: How Young Black Women Negotiate Self–Representation and Controlling Images in Urban Space

Abstract

Few scholars have explored the collective experiences of young African American women and their creative strategies for negotiating daily life in distressed neighborhoods. This study draws on nearly two years of field research in East Oakland, California, to provide an ethnographic account of how young Black women negotiate daily life amid poverty and social isolation while managing the emotional impact of stigma associated with poverty. The accounts from young women in this study reveal the situated strategy of “keeping it fresh,” a form of impression management that contradicts prevailing notions of what poor Black women and girls ought to look like and, in turn, how they should be treated in public space. Women and girls who keep it fresh invest in constructing and maintaining a neat and stylish appearance enhanced by expensive clothes, shoes, and accessories acquired through informal networks. This form of self–presentation aims to discredit the evaluation of those who keep it fresh as poor and unworthy of respect, if only for a moment.