Between Good and Ghetto: African American Girls and Inner-City Violence

Introduction

1 1 Introduction EARLY ON A WEEKDAY MORNING, a few minutes past the beginning of the school day, the line of students that snakes into the front door of Martin Luther King High School in South Philadelphia is no longer in sight.1 Known locally as “the prison on the hill,” the large, grey building sits atop a modest rise in one of the city’s most troubled neighborhoods . Across the street from the school’s main entrance is a cement parking lot that sometimes doubles as a playground for the neighboring public elementary school. The school is bordered by a busy freeway on one side, and the Carver projects, a collection of low-rise public housing apartments, on the other side. Some units that once faced the school’s back entrance have been torn down. Slowly, they are being replaced by newly designed structures that resemble small-scale town homes. Police officers patrol the housing project’s borders often, and occasionally officers respond to calls from inside the high school as well. On most days, however, uniformed guards screen students and visitors and monitor school safety. Security checks, endured by hundreds of Martin Luther King High’s students each morning, resemble the methodical screenings required of all visitors to the city’s courts, Criminal Justice Center, and correctional facilities.2 The high school’s security clearance procedures serve as a not-so-subtle reminder that for many adolescent, inner-city boys and girls, the beginning of the school day is not an escape from the threats of violence that accompany life in the neighborhoods that surround the school. B e t w e e n G o o d a n d G h e t t o 2 I approach the school’s entrance and look on as a brownskinned , teenaged girl a few steps ahead of me in line begins the screening process. She walks up the steps leading into the building , removes her backpack from her shoulder, and places it on a belt that moves the bag through an X-ray machine. Any metal object in her bag—a small knife or a razor blade, for example— should cause the machine to beep loudly. A moment passes— no beeps sound. As her bag moves through the X-ray machine, the student steps through a doorframe-shaped metal detector. Again, no beeps. A uniformed security officer stops her on the school side of the security gate. With little obvious prompting, she raises her arms parallel to the ground and looks to the side. I notice the seriousness of her expression as the security guard pats her down. He moves his hands under her arms and pats her back. He then quickly glides his hand across one outstretched arm and then the other. Then both hands travel down her sides. He moves both hands down her right leg and then her left. Finally, he squeezes her jeans pockets, lets out a short, nervous laugh, and releases her. She returns his laugh with a reluctant smile, grabs her bag from the security belt, and heads to the next table, just a few steps away. There she swipes her identification card in a card reader that is positioned in front of another guard, who is facing a monitor. The student’s name and picture flash on the screen. The guard looks at the screen and then looks at her. She walks away. “Wait,” the guard calls, “take your late pass.” The student returns, takes her pass, and walks off in silence to begin her school day. This girl’s ritualized passage into her high school is just one indicator of how the circumstances of inner-city life, and especially the threat of interpersonal violence, structures teenaged girls’ daily lives. Each school day morning, this adolescent girl, like her peers, receives the same screenings as the boys. Girls are not exempt from a hands-on search or from any other form of school-based surveillance simply because they are girls. Indeed, adolescent girls who attend troubled public high schools are increasingly subject to such screenings and sanctions as worries about school violence have expanded to include fights between girls. Such battles, including ones in which combatants brandish knives or box cutters, occur often enough to legitimate the fears of school administrators, teachers, parents, and students. The conversations I had over the three years of fieldwork for this book revealed...