Fighting for Girls: New Perspectives on Gender and Violence

NINE: “IT’S ABOUT BEING A SURVIVOR . . .”: African American Girls, Gender, and the Context of Inner-City Violence

203 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 203 NINE “IT’S ABOUT BEING A SURVIVOR . . .” African American Girls, Gender, and the Context of Inner-City Violence Nikki Jones “It’s about survival!” —Tracey, Philadelphia “It’s about being a survivor, and we have to survive.” —Kiara, San Francisco Tracey and Kiara, African American women in their early twenties,1 shared these strikingly similar remarks with me during the course of my field research in Philadelphia (2001–2003) and San Francisco (2005–present). Despite coming of age on opposite coasts of the country, the two young women expressed a concern with “survival” that has become a defining feature of inner-city girls’ adolescence since the 1980s.2 Typically, the experiences of young women like Tracey and Kiara are overshadowed by the moral panic surrounding “mean girls” in the suburbs or the “crisis of the young black male” in urban settings. Yet, as I’ve discovered over the course of field research in neighborhoods marked by concentrated poverty and its associated social problems, both boys and girls who come of age in distressed urban neighborhoods develop a preoccupation with survival. In contrast to the lives of many middle-class, suburban adolescents, African American inner-city girls and 204 FIGHTING FOR GIRLS their parents, grandparents, or caretakers must make “hard choices” (Richie, 1996) about how to manage the various challenges associated with coming of age in today’s inner city, including threats of interpersonal violence and exposure to lethal violence. In this chapter, I describe the characteristics of the neighborhood settings in which African American, inner-city girls come of age, the “situated survival strategies” (Jones, 2010) girls develop to navigate these settings, and the gendered consequences of their doing so. I then draw on the narratives of Tracey and Kiara to illustrate how girls reconcile the gendered dilemmas of inner-city adolescence. I conclude the chapter with a final adolescent girl’s narrative (Terrie) that highlights the limitations of these strategies when it comes to girls’ vulnerability to gender-specific violence—a prevalent threat for adolescent girls who grow up in distressed urban neighborhoods. RACE, GENDER, AND INNER-CITY VIOLENCE The concern for survival that is revealed in Tracey and Kiara’s comments is informed by the settings in which inner-city girls come of age. Tracey, who worked as a violence intervention counselor in Philadelphia when I first interviewed her in 2001,3 grew up in a predominantly black neighborhood in the southern part of the city that has been shaped by various social forces. A large, post-industrial, northeastern city, Philadelphia has experienced many of the same structural and economic changes that have impacted cities across the U.S. over the last 30 years, including deindustrialization, the concentration of poverty, and hypersegregation of its inner-city areas (Wilson, 1980, 1987, 1996; Massey & Denton 1999; Anderson, 1999). In some respects, Philadelphia’s central city population has been hit harder by these changes than residents in comparable metropolitan areas. Philadelphia’s poverty rate in 2000, the year before I began my field research, was 22.9%—almost double the national rate of 12.4 percent. Rates of concentrated poverty increased in Philadelphia during the 1990s as they leveled or declined in other metropolitan areas across the United States. In some South and West Philadelphia neighborhoods (where I conducted much of this study), between 30 and 40% of the resident population live in poverty (Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy [BICUMP], 2003;Pettit & Kingsley 2003). It is now well known now that this combination of poverty and segregation tends to concentrate crime, violence, and other social ills in poor communities of color (Peterson & Krivo, 2005; Wilson, 1980, 1987, 1996; Massey & Denton, 1999; Anderson, 1999; Lauritsen & Sampson, 1998; Sampson & Wilson, 1995). Kiara grew up in a similarly distressed neighborhood in San Francisco. In the mid-1900s, the Fillmore neighborhood of San Francisco where Kiara was “born and raised,” as she says, was home to a vibrant African American community. During this time, the neighborhood was often referred to 205 “IT’S ABOUT BEING A SURVIVOR . . .” by locals as “the Harlem of the West.” After World War II, as the shipping industry and many of its African American workers moved away, city government officials declared the area a slum and large portions of the neighborhood were razed and replaced by housing projects. As inner-city conditions worsened across the country, the predominantly black Fillmore also experienced the...