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4 Bad Days “If You Hit Me, I’m Gonna Hit You Back” Black girlhood should not be a fight. Stories about fighting, violence, and punishment frequently emerged in the interview transcripts of SOLHOT girls.1 When I asked them to tell me about their good and bad days, all of their bad-day stories were about fighting and punishment. Mostly they talked about fights between girls and acts of violence that resulted in some kind of disciplinary action. The reports and dramatic reenactments of fights along with the subsequent regret, pride, and remorse were retold as an everyday occurrence. Their detailed accounts about fighting were especially prominent because the girls responded so briefly to all other questions. Before going over the transcripts, I had not for a moment desired to write about fighting and Black girlhood. I did not want to talk about Black girls and fighting because it seems so, well, predictable. Fighting, typically framed in the research (and therefore also in educational policy) as a “behavioral problem,” is nonproductive. Also, I did not want to invoke mythologies of personal responsibility or stereotypes of inner-city violent Black girls. Fighting Black girls are commonly sensed to be in deficit, lacking in character and home training, and quite honestly I just did not want to go there. 1 The interviews were conducted during their sixth and seventh grades. The girls ranged in age between eleven and thirteen. Eight girls were interviewed the first year. Out of these eight, five of the same girls were interviewed the next year. Twelve interviews were conducted in total. Of the two girls who were not interviewed, one moved out of town and the other was absent on the day the interviews were conducted . All of the girls identify as African American. A transcriptionist transcribed all of the interviews. The second year, a graduate student conducted the interviews, and they were all transcribed by a research assistant (a different graduate student). In the transcripts presented in this chapter, I (Ruth Nicole Brown) am identified by I2, and the homegirl is identified by I. Researchers currently writing about girls and fighting share a similar concern with the lackluster ways Black girls, girls of color, and inner-city youth were previously framed in academic accounts. In Why Girls Fight: Female Youth Violence in the Inner City, Cindy Ness (2010) persuasively documents fighting as a necessity survival mechanism for those who grow up in lowincome urban neighborhoods and gives attention to how mother-daughter relationships influence girls’ behavior. Careful to not blame mothers, Ness (ibid., p. 91) identifies a “double-generation dynamic” at play when mothers and grandmothers who grew up with the need to defend themselves in the public sphere encourage their daughters to do the same. Beyond sociological influences, Lyn Brown (2003) argues that misogynist and patriarchal messages embedded in popular media normalize fights between girls at the expense of showcasing solidarity and the power of sisterhood that are also a vital part of same-gender relationships among girls of all races and backgrounds. Both Ness and Brown speak back to disciplinary conventions while maintaining that fighting is a completely responsible outcome in a completely less-than-ideal social and cultural context that marginalizes girls and women. The literature on positive youth development cites violence-prevention programs, mentoring, caring relationships with adults, and recreational programs as practical solutions to the problem of youth violence, each promising various amounts of success (Jones et al., 2009; Rhodes, Bogat, Roffman, Edelman, & Gallasso, 2002). In regard to African American girls, Jody Miller (2008) suggested that relationships with caring adults is critical to addressing violence against girls in disadvantaged communities because they are so routinely blamed for their victimization; strong individuals who are genuinely concerned can facilitate disclosure, challenge the insidious message that they are at fault, and guide them to available resources and programs for assistance (p. 213). Programming is the typical recommendation to stop fighting, acknowledged as common adolescent behavior (Cotton et al., 1994, Talbott et al., 2002). In Saving Our Lives Hear Our Truths, there is no programmatic response to fighting. Furthermore, situated in a small urban city surrounded by agriculture and farmland, girls in SOLHOT live in a place often constructed as the opposite of (and therefore better than) the inner city because of its imagined relative lack of violence. However, for the girls and homegirls in SOLHOT who frequently travel between urban and non-urban spaces, violence and fighting are unavoidable, endemic to living under...

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