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

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.