Pushout (3 page)

This book is written with love. We're in this struggle against racial oppression and patriarchy together, and unless we examine everyone's experiences, we lose the ability to support our girls and young women as they seek to bounce back from adversity, to be in their best health, to demand the best education, to earn a decent living, to be healthy partners, to help raise strong children who will thrive, and to play an integral part in shaping strong communities and a better world.

1

STRUGGLING TO SURVIVE

             
Mama's in the kitchen, burnin' rice,

             
Daddy's outside, shootin' dice,

             
Brother's in jail, raisin' hell,

             
Sister's on the corner, sellin' fruit cocktail . . .

T
here were fewer than ten girls in the facility that day, and all of them had been assembled into a small group for a book discussion I'd come to facilitate. Typically, girls there were between fifteen and seventeen years old, but as our exchange got under way, I noticed that some of the girls were younger. About halfway through the discussion, the youngest-looking face among them raised her hand.

I invited her to speak.

She nodded and then slid from behind her desk to stand. She adjusted the oversized county sweatshirt covering her petite frame and looked at me.

“Well, my name is Danisha, and I'm eleven years old,” she said. “And I'm a ho, that's what I do.”

Danisha had a baby face. Her dark brown skin was flawless—not yet touched by acne—and her coarse hair was frizzy around the temples but otherwise neatly pulled back into a small bun. I remember her as a quiet girl who kept staring at the Marcus Garvey T-shirt I was wearing, her eyes examining with interest the words printed on it:
SCHOOL OF LIBERATION
. Her apparent
interest in my shirt made me curious about her even before her arm shot up to declare how she had come to define herself.

She continued, sharing how the novel I had written inspired her to think about “leaving the life.” I was happy to hear that she was willing to consider alternative ways to circumvent the poverty and abuse she faced.

But she was eleven years old.
Eleven
. And she was already referring to herself as a “ho.”

In some communities, girls learn early on that selling “fruit cocktail” is one of the few options they have to escape poverty. It's an idea effortlessly absorbed by the psyche of young girls from the moment they can play patty cake. In the absence of safer, healthier ways to connect—and in the presence of multiple factors that reinforce harmful thoughts and choices—sex can and often does become a type of conditioned response that is rarely interrogated. Danisha should have been telling us about her teachers or her fifth-grade homework; instead, she was describing her sex hustle. Not only was her tone unapologetic, but it elicited confirming nods from the group, as if everyone was in agreement that what she was engaged in was actually “ho'ing”—or prostitution—rather than rape or sexual exploitation.

That exchange still haunts me, mostly because since that day, I have encountered many more Danishas in and out of detention facilities—girls struggling to overcome the exploitative conditions of poverty and abuse, who roam hallways and streets wondering if anyone really cares about their well-being. That was in 2001, and the sexual exploitation of children was just beginning to emerge as an issue for justice reform advocates, behavioral health professionals, and other adults concerned about the girls in the Bay Area who could be seen—day or night—strolling the streets as scantily clad sex workers.

I had been to this particular juvenile facility many times before, watching the boys and the girls walk by in orderly lines, their hands clasped behind their backs and their hair disheveled.
During these visits, I'd spoken to young people in focus groups and invited them to think about and discuss what might reduce their risk of reoffending. Even as a researcher trained to preserve objectivity, I hoped that my presence would somehow show these children—who were mostly Black at the time—that some of “us” could make it. So I was excited to find out that my novel about a family's ordeal with prostitution had grown popular among the youth confined in this facility, thanks in part to a very dedicated librarian who ran a robust literature and speaker series in various juvenile correctional facilities. Returning as an author this time, I could shed my research posture and relate to the young people differently. I could tell them what was on my mind, share my own experience of what it means to be Black and female in America, and open new conversations to support and inspire them. Then I met Danisha, and I was stuck.

Good Girls and Bad Girls

In her book
Between Good and Ghetto: African American Girls and Inner-City Violence
, Nikki Jones poses the following question: Why is it that inner-city girls must struggle so hard simply to survive?
¹

The question of survival among Black girls has always been about
whether
they are seen, and if so,
how
they are seen, particularly in economically and socially isolated spaces. Are they “background noise” in a larger view of urban life that prioritizes men and boys? Are they disruptive forces in the exploitation of Black communities? Are they loyal “ride-or-die chicks” who sacrifice their own safety and well-being in the name of love? Are they willing participants in their own oppression? Are they making a way out of no way at all? Are they good girls? Are they bad girls? These are not yes-or-no questions. The answers are anything but simple, and too often no one stops to ponder whether the questions themselves create or even worsen the very problems they seek to illuminate.

Born into a cultural legacy of slavery, Black American women have interpreted defiance as something that is not inherently bad. Harriet Tubman was defiant. So too was Sojourner Truth and countless other enslaved women who dared to reject oppression. Early constructs of power, both racialized and gendered, dictated who could look where and who could speak when. Enslaved Black women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were plagued by dehumanization and a sexual victimization that Angela Y. Davis has described as “barbarous mistreatment that could only be inflicted upon women.”
²
As children are routinely told to “speak only when spoken to” in many cultures, so too were those who occupied the
status
of minors. To be a “minority,” a colored person, or a woman in this context was to bear the mark of subjugation and relative insignificance. Over time, this wound has deepened through invisibility, violence, and objectification, and for Black girls who have lived in ways that align with and result from a castigated identity, the struggle to be a “good girl,” especially in the ghetto, is connected to performances of power.
³

For Black girls, to be “ghetto” represents a certain resilience to how poverty has shaped racial and gender oppression. To be “loud” is a demand to be heard. To have an “attitude” is to reject a doctrine of invisibility and mistreatment. To be flamboyant—or “fabulous”—is to revise the idea that socioeconomic isolation is equated with not having access to materially desirable things. To be a ghetto Black girl, then, is to reinvent what it means to be Black, poor, and female. Under these conditions, volume and force are powerful tools, but so too are love and loyalty. The “attitude” often attributed to Black girls casts as undesirable the skills of being astute at reading their location—where they sit along the social hierarchy—and overcoming the attendant obstacles. These were lessons learned through generations of struggle, and these lessons sit at the apex of what provides Black women and girls the audacity to demand being treated with dignity. However, when the way of the world includes a general lack of cultural
competence and an aversion to valuing the unique considerations of gender, these survival characteristics are degraded and punished rather than recognized as tools of resilience. Under these circumstances, girls fighting for their humanity end up being pushed out of schools, jobs, homes, houses of worship, and other places where they might otherwise feel whole.

According to Nikki Jones,

[“good girls”] do not look or act like men or boys. Good girls do not run wild in the streets; instead, they spend the majority of their time in controlled settings: family, school, home, or church. Good girls are appropriately deferential to the men in their lives. Good girls are not sexually promiscuous, nor are they anything other than heterosexual. Good girls grow up to be ladies and once they have achieved this special-status position, they become committed to putting the needs of their family first.
⁴

Good Black girls are supposed to be all of these things, even while the males around them are not held to the same standard. When Black girls rebel against these expectations, they risk being labeled a “bad” girl, a “ghetto” girl, or, in more recent vernacular, “ratchet.”

Bad Black girls are those who are eager for sexual exploits—with men or women. They may curse, drink, smoke, fight, steal, and/or lie. All of these characteristics built the mythical “bad” Black woman who, according to Fannie Barrier Williams in 1904, made the Black woman “the only woman in America for whom virtue was not an ornament and a necessity.”
⁵
Black girls who have challenged authority or attempted to negotiate poverty and racial isolation by participating in underground economies have been sent away to group homes, training schools, detention centers, and other institutions that attempt to transform “bad girls” into “good girls.”

Who these girls are and why it is so hard for them to simply survive are questions tied to the larger forces that create and sustain
the politics of survival in America, particularly those prevalent in high-poverty areas. These are questions that beg an examination of the laws, practices, and consciousness that facilitate our understanding of who struggles and how that struggle manifests. Being “sick and tired of being sick and tired”—words made famous by civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer—is a concept that is immediately understood by Black women.

Twenty-five percent of Black women live in poverty.
⁶
The unemployment rate for Black women age twenty and over at the end of 2014 was 8.2 percent, compared to 4.4 percent for White women and 5 percent for all women.
⁷
In 2012, Black women earned 89 percent of what Black men earn, and only 64 percent of what White men earn.
⁸
Black women are also disproportionately employed in low-wage occupations—jobs that pay them less than $21,412 per year. And while they do not constitute the majority of women on public assistance, Black women are disproportionately represented among those who receive what are collectively known as welfare benefits (e.g., SNAP or food stamps, Section 8 housing vouchers, etc.). Black women are about three times more likely to be imprisoned than White women, and one in nineteen Black women will be incarcerated at some point in her lifetime.
⁹

These are struggles that many Black women have felt since their girlhood. Forty percent of Black children live in poverty, compared with 23 percent of all children nationwide.
¹⁰
For Black girls under the age of eighteen, the poverty rate is 35 percent.
¹¹
Black girls drop out of school at a rate of 7 percent, compared to 3.8 percent of White girls.
¹²
At 18.9 percent, Black girls have the highest case rate of “person offenses” (e.g., assault, robbery, etc.).
¹³
And they have a higher rate (21.4 percent) of being assigned to residential placement than Latinas (8.3 percent) and White girls (6.8 percent) combined.
¹⁴

Sometimes their struggles are matters of life and death. Homicide is the second-leading cause of death for Black girls and women ages fifteen to twenty-four.
¹⁵
The rate of domestic or intimate
partner violence is highest among Black women and girls ages twelve and older (7.8 percent), compared to their White (6.2 percent), Latina (4.1 percent), and other (3.8 percent) counterparts.
¹⁶
The struggle is real. Yet when girls strike back against this fatigue, society casts them as deviant—as disruptive to the order of a (supposedly race- and gender-neutral) social structure without consideration of what might be fueling their agitation.

These circumstances did not emerge through osmosis. The contemporary social conditions that Black girls experience are an extension of long-standing, judgmental popular perceptions about Black girl responses to injustice. Take, for example, Claudette Colvin. Nine months before Rosa Parks made a similar decision that would launch the Montgomery bus boycott, fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin protested the segregation of Montgomery buses by refusing to give up her seat to a White passenger. But most people do not know her name. Why is that? Well, she didn't fit the profile of a “perfect” protestor. Though Colvin was a member of the Youth Council of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), she was so incensed by the demand to give up her seat that she shouted. She resisted with her body. And she was arrested.

In the days and weeks that followed, she was viewed as belligerent and “unreliable.”
¹⁷
Then it was discovered that she was pregnant and soon to become an unwed teen mother. Colvin was cast as a troublemaker and pushed out of one of the country's most vivid civil rights memories, as well as public and private discourses on the role of poor Black girls in the shaping of American democracy.
¹⁸

Colvin herself has also acknowledged the role of colorism—a socially constructed hierarchy where lighter-skinned people are perceived as more socially acceptable than darker-skinned people—in shaping the negative reaction to her as a spokesperson for integration. Colvin's skin was dark and did not “fit the profile”
of a middle-class woman who might be viewed as more strategically appealing to the civil rights movement.
¹⁹

This is a scenario all too familiar to many brown-skinned girls who respond to injustice the way that Colvin did—by daring to get loud, daring to challenge their place.