2. Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).
3. In one of the more perversely delightful studies of recent memory, this article about diversity and college websites finds that “78% of institutions used photos that overrepresented the percentage of minorities at the institution.” Jeffery L. Wilson, and Katrina A. Meyer, “Higher Education Websites: The ‘Virtual Face’ of Diversity,” Journal of Diversity in Higher Education 2, no. 2 (2009): 91.
4. Political scientist Candis Watts Smith says in her larger study of black ethnic immigrants that approximately 40 percent of those identified as black enrolled in Ivy League colleges are black immigrants. Candis Watts Smith, Black Mosaic: The Politics of Black Pan-ethnic Diversity (New York: New York University Press, 2014).
The Price of Fabulousness
1. Michael Scaturro, “He Literally Wrote the Book on Fabulousness,” New York Times, June 8, 2018.
2. Rita Kiki Edozie and Curtis Stokes, eds., Malcolm X’s Michigan Worldview: An Exemplar for Contemporary Black Studies (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2015).
3. White people calling the police on black people in 2018: an abridged timeline:
April 12, barista calls police on black men at Starbucks: http://www.eater.com/2018/4/27/17263584/starbucks-arrests-third-place
April 21, white man calls police on group of black women golfers: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/grandview-golf-club-man-who-called-police-on-black-women-golfers-denies-racism
April 30, white woman calls police on three black people exiting their Airbnb rental: https://www.facebook.com/directedbykells/posts/10160498802675121
May 8, white woman calls police on black Yale student for sleeping in common area: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/09/nyregion/yale-black-student-nap.html
June 4, black woman arrested after white woman falsely accuses her of shoplifting: https://wreg.com/2018/06/07/woman-says-she-was-racially-profiled-at-victorias-secret-in-collierville
June 23, white woman calls police on black twelve-year-old mowing grass: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/06/30/a-white-woman-called-police-on-a-black-12-year-old-for-mowing-grass
June 23, white woman calls police on black teens at pool: https://www.facebook.com/rhema.inhislyfe/posts/10100550190183435
June 23, white woman calls police on eight-year-old black girl selling water: https://twitter.com/_ethiopiangold/status/1010577140595560448
July 1, white woman calls police on black woman for smoking cigarette: https://www.theroot.com/newportnancy-wants-black-neighbor-evicted-for-smoking-1827320227
July 2, white woman calls police on family of seven eating dinner: https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/eating-black-subway-calls-police-family-using-restroom-many-times-180331037.html
July 4, white man calls police on black mother and baby at pool: https://nypost.com/2018/07/06/white-man-loses-job-after-calling-police-on-black-family-at-pool
July 13, white man calls police on black woman trying to use coupon at CVS: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/remysmidt/white-cvs-employee-cvs-calls-cops-black-woman-using-coupon#.cikxA0d19
July 17, white man calls police on black man for fouling him during a basketball game: https://nypost.com/2018/07/17/man-calls-cops-after-hard-foul-in-pickup-basketball-game
July 25, white woman calls police on black woman waiting for an Uber in the rain: https://www.theroot.com/brooklyn-becky-cops-called-on-suspicious-looking-black-1828057076
4. Jim Walter Homes sold manufactured home “kits.” For a little money down one could also lease land for the home through the company. The company went out of business in 2009, but not before half of my extended relations begged, borrowed, and stole for their own Jim Walter–branded piece of the American Dream. Read more about the history of this manufactured home builder here: http://www.searshomes.org/index.php/tag/jim-walter-homes.
Black Girlhood, Interrupted
1. Ruth Nicole Brown, Black Girlhood Celebration: Toward a Hip-Hop Feminist Pedagogy (New York: Peter Lang, 2009).
2. Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi (New York: Dell, 2004).
3. Monique Morris, Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools (New York: The New Press, 2016).
4. Rebecca Epstein, Jamilia Blake, and Thalia Gonzalez, “Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girls’ Childhood,” June 27, 2017.
5. Abbie Bennett, “‘NC Is the Only State Where No Doesn’t Mean No’: Court Case Ruled Women Can’t Back Out of Sex,” News & Observer, June 22, 2017, http://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article157694194.html.
6. Women generally are not considered reliable subjects in the criminal justice system. Feminist legal scholars have shown this repeatedly and often using examples of how women are expected to perform domesticity in cases of domestic violence. For black women that performance is complicated by the science and legal practices used to argue domestic cases. These cases often rely on medical testimony or records of abuse to corroborate women’s testimony. Standard medical practice relies on observable evidence of abuse to create that bureaucratic evidence trail. This includes using tools to capture images of bruises and relying on doctors’ and nurses’ visual inspection for bruises. Both of these methods systematically underidentify domestic violence in black women because bruising of dark skin is harder to identify and rarely adjusted for in medical imaging equipment. As a consequence, black women who are already constructed as unreliable legal subjects are also constructed as un-abusable medical subjects. This leaves black women more vulnerable to domestic abuse and less likely to receive legal or medical assistance for that abuse. To learn more, see Adele M. Morrison, “Changing the Domestic Violence (Dis)course: Moving from White Victim to Multi-cultural Survivor,” UC Davis Law Review 39 (March 2006): 1061, on how the medical system and legal system construct female subjects in domestic violence cases. And see how proposed innovations in the equipment used to scan for bruising could provide better screening for black women, especially darker-skinned black women: “Rochester Team Casts Light on a Hidden Problem in Domestic Violence Cases,” University of Rochester Newscenter, July 26, 2018, http://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/rochester-team-casts-light-hidden-problem-domestic-violence-291592.
7. Charlamagne Tha God, Black Privilege: Opportunity Comes to Those Who Create It (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018), 107.
Girl 6
1. Coretta Pittman, “Black Women Writers and the Trouble with Ethos: Harriet Jacobs, Billie Holiday, and Sister Souljah,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 37, no. 1 (2006): 43–70.
2. David Brooks, “How We Are Ruining America,” New York Times, July 11, 2017.
3. There is not a nice way around this, so I will just say it. There is a prestige hierarchy in media. Whether we like it or not, a top tier of publications exist and they do influence public opinion and media punditry. Classic studies in sociology of what we call “interlocking directorates,” or the powerful economic and cultural institutions that shape hegemonic elite discourse, exist. New media has fragmented that reality somewhat but not entirely.
4. Tressie McMillan Cottom, Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy (New York: The New Press, 2017).
5. In May 2018, a federal judge decided it was unconstitutional for Trump to block people on Twitter while he is president: http://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/23/trump-cant-block-twitter-followers-federal-judge-says.html.
6. Bill Heil and Mikolaj Piskorski, “New Twitter Research: Men Follow Men and Nobody Tweets,” Harvard Business Review 1 (2009), http://hbr.org/2009/06/new-twitter-research-men-follo.
7. Jake Johnson, “Bringing on Badly Needed ‘Prophetic Voice,’ New York Times Hires Michelle Alexander as Full-Time Columnist,” Common Dreams, June 21, 2018, http://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/06/21/bringing-badly-needed-prophetic-voice-new-york-times-hires-michelle-alexander-full.
8. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Inc
arceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2009).
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