Written 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 1987) 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.
ABSTRACT
Liberal politics are subtended by several fatal, commonsense binaries: state vs. interpersonal violence; trans vs. non‐trans women; armed vs. innocent victims. Each of these binaries render ...Black women alternately invisible, incidental, and illegible. In this essay, I examine the hashtags #SayHerName and #CiteBlackWomen as citational practices of reparative enunciation that refuse these binaries. When citation is practiced as a form of relation, it offers a model for an ethical ethnographic practice in which we cite our research participants as thought and theory partners in an effort to speak back to the silences and violences of extant social science.
The 2014 killing of Akai Gurley, a Black New Yorker, at the hands of Chinese American rookie cop Peter Liang sparked months of protest and an increased interest in the fault lines between Asian ...American and Black communities in the United States. Drawing on ethnographic data, mainstream media, and recent activist projects like Letters for Black Lives, this essay critiques the notion of “empathy” as a foundation for meaningful multiracial alliance. Solidarity based on notions of shared suffering can create a false equivalence between different experiences of racialized violence. Instead, we explore the potential of
that pushes into the specificity, irreducibility, and incommensurability of racialized experiences. Though the issue of Black-Asian solidarity at the center of this analysis is situated in US racial politics, by introducing the concept of thick solidarity, this essay offers an affective approach toward thinking about the challenges and potentials of cultivating Global South solidarities more broadly.
Abolition is not a metaphor, and it is essential that our notion of “abolition” not get defanged and deracinated within the self‐evident boundaries of a discipline or even the academy. Amidst the ...tangle of complicity that is anthropology, there are also parts of the disciplinary toolkit that are useful for worldmaking: listening deeply, bearing witness, challenging the inevitability of the state, and building deep transnational and cross‐diasporic relation. In particular as surveillance, policing, and imprisonment become globalized as techniques of repression, anthropology can help disrupt US‐centrism while cultivating thicker solidarities. In this essay, I draw on Chela Sandoval's theory of differential political consciousness to roughly sketch five interlocking ideology‐praxes – five gears of abolition that at times are complementary, and at times contradictory. Within each gear, I lift up organizers and scholars whose work is shaping the theory and practice of abolition. Following the lead of activists, artists and movement builders, I invite academics to bring abolition home by contributing to ongoing campaigns happening on their campuses and in their neighborhoods.
This article explores the deployment of race, queer sexuality, and femme gender performance in the work of rapper and pop musical artist Nicki Minaj. The author argues that Minaj's complex assemblage ...of public personae functions as a sort of "bait and switch" on the laws of normativity, where she appears to perform as "straight" or "queer," while upon closer examination, she refuses to be legible as either. Rather than perpetuate notions of Minaj as yet another pop diva, the author proposes that Minaj signals the emergence of the femmecee, or a rapper whose critical, strategic performance of queer femininity is inextricably linked to the production and reception of their rhymes. This article engages a pair of music video releases that reflect the range of Minaj's gender performances as cinematic lenses into the strategic moves that Minaj is able to make from her femmecee stance. King Nicki's hypervisibility as a black femmecee and refusal to cede to any regime of recognition confound the multiple common senses that seek to produce her as a compliant subject.
