Black Girlhood, Punishment, and Resistance

Reimagining Justice for Black Girls in Virginia

Nishaun T. Battle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351973434
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Black Girlhood, Punishment, and Resistance: Reimagining Justice for Black Girls in Virginia provides a historical comprehensive examination of racialized, classed, and gendered punishment of Black girls in Virginia during the early twentieth century. It looks at the ways in which the court system punished Black girls based upon societal accepted norms of punishment, hinged on a notion that they were to be viewed and treated as adults within the criminal legal system. Further, the book explores the role of Black Club women and girls as agents of resistance against injustice by shaping a social justice framework and praxis for Black girls and by examining the establishment of the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls. This school was established by the Virginia State Federation of Colored Women's Clubs and its first President, Janie Porter Barrett.

This book advances contemporary criminological understanding of punishment by locating the historical origins of an environment normalizing unequal justice. It draws from a specific focus on Janie Porter Barrett and the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls; a groundbreaking court case of the first female to be executed in Virginia; historical newspapers; and Black Women's Club archives to highlight the complexities of Black girls' experiences within the criminal justice system and spaces created to promote social justice for these girls. The historical approach unearths the justice system's role in crafting the pervasive devaluation of Black girlhood through racialized, gendered, and economic-based punishment. Second, it offers insight into the ways in which, historically, Black women have contributed to what the book conceptualizes as "resistance criminology, " offering policy implications for transformative social and legal justice for Black girls and girls of color impacted by violence and punishment. Finally, it offers a lens to explore Black girl resistance strategies, through the lens of the Black Girlhood Justice framework.

Black Girlhood, Punishment, and Resistance uses a historical intersectionality framework to provide a comprehensive overview of cultural, socioeconomic, and legal infrastructures as they relate to the punishment of Black girls. The research illustrates how the presumption of guilt of Black people shaped the ways that punishment and the creation of deviant Black female identities were legally sanctioned. It is essential reading for academics and students researching and studying crime, criminal justice, theoretical criminology, women's studies, Black girlhood studies, history, gender, race, and socioeconomic class. It is also intended for social justice organizations, community leaders, and activists engaged in promoting social and legal justice for the youth.

1 Justice for Black Girls

Moving Toward a Historical Intersectional Criminology

What Is Historical Intersectional Criminology?

Historical Intersectional Criminology (HIC) examines how the deliberate social construction of identity politics shapes both punishment and the perception of punishment across intersectional identities within the criminal legal system. More specifically, HIC analyzes how punishment is intentionally applied on the basis of a person’s race, socioeconomic class, sexuality, or gender through discriminatory laws and policies. A number of communities in the United States – particularly those comprising people of color – are disproportionately criminalized and affected by disparities that have manifested in impoverished neighborhoods, lack of structural resources, and violence and discrimination within institutional spaces that should protect its inhabitants (Reiman & Leighton, 2012).

The theoretical framework of HIC traces and historicizes how Black people, people of color, and other marginalized groups have experienced punishment by examining the development of discriminatory social and legal practices over time, including the repeated cycle of legal injustice throughout history (Guild, 1936). Importantly, HIC also analyzes the responses of resistance offered by individuals, organizations, and communities to these practices. HIC offers the following six tenets for understanding how the US criminal legal system has supported discriminatory practices, how resistance spaces have developed to fight the effects of these practices, and how oppressed communities can create paths for healing and moving forward:

1. Policing the body through State violence.
2. Negative constructions of social identities.
3. Presumption of guilt based on discriminatory intersectional constructions.
4. Harsher sentencing and punishment within the criminal legal system.
5. Spaces of resistance spaces created to protect against State violence.
6. Legitimizing storytelling, cultural memory, and lived experiences as forms of intellectual activism and scholarship.

Purpose of This Book

This book uses an HIC lens to explore how Black girls in Virginia have historically been punished, the underlying purpose for their punishment, and the revolutionary counter-strategies that Black women intellectual activists have adopted in the past and present day to achieve justice for Black girls. Within the field of criminology, I hope to advance new ways of thinking about community and culture as a response to discrimination and State violence, as well as propose additional approaches for studying Black girls and girls of color. Ultimately, my hope is that this book will help lead to the development of transformative laws and policies that encourage broader social and legal justice for all people in the United States.

In addition, by tracking how the law was applied differently on the basis of race, class, and gender for Black girls, I hope to reveal how they held a unique and collective positionality within the criminal justice system during this period – a positionality that informs our understanding of how punishment was applied. Furthermore, this book specifically explores the punishment of Black girls in Virginia during the Progressive Era (1890–1920). Many leading scholars in criminology have addressed female juvenile delinquency and the racial and gender dynamics affecting the treatment of girls during this period (Chesney-Lind, 1989; Chesney-Lind & Shelden, 2004; Young, 1994). Their work has advanced the understanding that the policing of female bodies is a direct manifestation of sexism, and is a phenomenon that has been documented substantially in intersectional studies of female sexuality and juvenile justice practices (Abrams & Curran, 2000). In this book, I aim to add nuance and depth to this important scholarship.

Finally, this book aims to examine the relationship of Black girls’ punishment within the modern political economy and criminal legal infrastructure. I hope to explain how different forms of racialized punishment have been used historically (and in the present day) to suppress and control the thoughts, actions, and freedom of Black girls – and to offer a new path forward for justice. Long-standing stereotypes and socio-legal oppression have been used to maintain a racist, classist, and sexist hierarchy that justifies the continued punishment of Black women and girls based on their intersectional identities (Davis, 1983; Collins, 1990). This book argues that, under the racialized hierarchy present within mainstream criminological frameworks, Black girls and other people of color continue to face many forms of “plantation politics” and discriminatory practices in present times. In addition, I argue that a variety of social institutions have remained resistant to understanding the unique positionalities of Black girls and girls of color, and have instead leveraged existing inequities to maintain an exploitative, white, patriarchal, capitalist regime. Because it is grounded in materialism, HIC is a helpful approach for examining how discriminatory practices are intricately attached to the maintenance of an economic system that supports racial hierarchies through the intentional construction and maintenance of social injustices and structural inequalities.

Historicizing State Violence against Black Bodies

This book includes poverty, mass incarceration, inept structural community resources, racialized hyper-surveillance, and the policing of Black bodies within a list of societal factors that should be identified as acts of State violence (James, 2000). State violence is not limited to institutional abuse by agents within the criminal legal systemit also takes the form of systematic discrimination and racialized punishment across socially constructed identities within various social institutions (Hagan, 1989).

This book also specifically traces the ways Black women have devised counter-strategies to resist State violence against Black girl bodies through the creation of protective collective spaces leading to social and legal change. It is imperative that the field of criminology begins to engage deeply in theoretical and methodological frameworks that legitimize the narratives of Black girls and their immediate experiences with racist, sexist, and gendered violence within institutional settings, and to view these experiences as explicit acts of State violence (Hagan, 2016).

Tracing the racial, class, and gender constructs that have influenced legal punishment through the investigation of oral storytelling and written narratives delineates how multiple identities can be understood within the context of implementing social change (Vickery, 2015; Andrews, 1986). Identities are constructed and developed through various power differentials – held by both individuals and institutions – and are supported by a larger macroeconomic paradigm specifically enacted against Black bodies through State violence (Potter, 2013; Potter, 2006). Developing this understanding allows for the emergence of important critical theoretical frameworks that can help trace resistance strategies, leading to the construction of progressive Black communities and communities of color.

The foundation of HIC is rooted in the legal exploitation of the Black body in the United States. This approach argues that the punishment of bodies through multiple forms of State violence, enacted on the basis of race, class, gender, sexuality, and other socially constructed variables is linked by a common thread: an exploitative, white, patriarchal, capitalist regime that sanctions violence against bodies by policing them. HIC is a useful means for examining how legal punishment and systems of punishment within confined spaces have evolved over time, and how tracing the historical intersection of punishment within criminology can foster policy change (Burris-Kitchen & Burris, 2011). However, this theoretical perspective is not limited solely to Black bodies – it is a lens through which to view people of color, and other marginalized groups that have been used as economic vessels for a country with constructed ideas of racial privilege.

The United States, viewed through a lens of exploitative capitalism, has created a criminal culture for Black people, people of color, and poor people – an injustice that lies at the core of the criminal justice system today. After all, during the era of slavery, Black bodies were used to build the country from the bottom up. This exploitation of Black bodies’ labor has since manifested as a general dehumanization of the Black body, in which acts of State-sanctioned violence including rape, brutality, extrajudicial punishment, division among Blacks, and terrorism have become normalized and justified (Schwartz, 2016). The collective identity of Blacks was created under a white patriarchal system and designed to suppress these bodies in order to maintain an exploitive environment and to thwart any possible resistance efforts by Blacks (Sheldon, 1979).

Criminology must begin to formalize studies of the ways in which State violence has been deployed against the bodies of Black girls and girls of color through the implementation of severe sentencing practices in the criminal legal system, and it should also reassess the ways in which Black girls are studied within the field itself. To date, many studies in the field employ racist theoretical lenses and methodologies that do not take into account the Black body as a whole being, or the role that Black people have played in developing communities and institutions that promote justice across racial, class, and gender lines. Black women and women of color who have built communities for the betterment of society have adopted specific strategies that address Black girls’ consciousness and vision while creating intersections with community members and organizations invested in protecting girls of color and providing opportunities for them to continue this legacy of building a democratized society (Mohanty & Carty, 2018).

State-sanctioned violence and the exploitation of Black girls have never been a hidden phenomenon. As Shirley Wilson Logan (1999) argued in her examination of the persuasive discourse of Black women intellectual activists during the nineteenth century, socially constructed identities used to further social and legal oppression were created as a result of the accelerating correlation between labor and punishment. In response, Black Club women and intellectual activists during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries wrote politicized essays underscoring the need for the reimagining and reframing of the narrative about Black girls and women, pointing to damaging stereotypes that created hostile environments of injustice, which Black women and girls were continuously forced to navigate (Bay, Griffin, Jones, & Savage, 2015; Logan, 1995).

Later in this book, we will take a closer look at Black Club women such as Janie Porter Barrett and associations including the Virginia State Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs, which established institution-building as a primary imperative for fostering social justice for Black girls and teaching them to reclaim and define their own identities (rather than doing so in direct opposition to a system defying their self-realization). I will examine how the commodification and character maligning of Black girls’ intersectional identities were – and are still – used to maintain and reproduce social and legal inequalities within a larger structural framework.

This book investigates several key areas of how punishment has been rendered within the court system and as forms of social injustice, and institutional violence. It also illuminates the ways in which Black girls have navigated structural inequalities, creating their own spaces of social and legal justice while working to raise awareness about social and legal injustices overall. Drawing from applicable tenets in existing theoretical frameworks grounded in historical materialism – including Intersectional Criminology and Black Feminist Criminology, Black Feminist Theory, and Critical Race Feminism – allows us to trace the historical punishment of the Black female body by the State over time.

HIC centers the Black body as the starting point for economic exploitation in the criminal justice system and various institutional regimes sustained through racialized laws and policies. This system continues to implement exploitative racial constructs against Black bodies, people of color, and marginalized bodies for economic profit. HIC also traces how racialized and dehumanizing laws and policies emerged to normalize State violence against a growing free Black population (Carbado, Crenshaw, Mays, & Tomlinson, 2013).

These racialized constructs evolved throughout the twentieth century, and they continue to have an impact on legal infrastructure today, in the form of harsher punishment practices. Furthermore, Black people were constructed and associated with criminality as a way of maintaining an economic oppressive system embedded and dominated by white supremacist views (Muhammad, 2011). In order to maintain a social and legal hierarchy for the socioeconomic benefit of white people, the structural concept of whiteness – which was specifically situated within a family context – provided social and legal protection for white women in particular, enabling them to secure some level of social and economic mobility within social circles under the idea of private ownership (Engels, 1990). Racial and gender binaries emanating from racial legal codes generated the idea of a criminal class as a dominant societal theme, while a racial savior class served as a justification of domestic terrorism by white lynch mobs (Brundage, 1993) for the promulgation of “democracy.”

By centering the oppression of women and, particularly in this text, the social, legal, and economic plight of Black girls, HIC examines the commodification of Black women and girls’ punishment, which is rooted in a political and economic system upheld by “white, male, capitalist patriarchy,” as coined by bell hooks (2000). One major theme throughout this book is how Black girls have been positioned defensively in social institutional spaces due to the normalization of the criminalization and policing of their bodies. In response, Black women and girls developed “sacred collective spaces” as a means for protecting themselves and helping them to navigate entry into the criminal legal system and other inequitable social realities. Finally, this book examines how the criminal legal system has enacted State-sanctioned violence through legal and extrajudicial lynching in the court system.

Tracing the genealogy of discourse on women and their capacity for violence has primarily focused on a created dichotomy of the “good girl” versus “bad girl” trope (Jones, 2009). This divide creates an expected sense of entitlement for girls and women who are attached to white male patriarchy; yet gendered analyses has shown that no one wins under this system of exploitation (hooks, 2000). The history, study, and early treatment of Black girls in the juvenile justice system have a tradition of policing their bodies by monitoring and constructing girls’ sexuality. An underlying “Jezebel” trope has come to govern the ways in which girls, and Black girls in particular, are studied within criminology (Pasko, 2010).

Tracking the Legacy of Black Resistance

On May 22, 1962, Malcolm X gave a speech in Los Angeles in which he raised the question of where and when audience members had begun to hate themselves. He then went on to famously describe the plight of Black women in the United States: “The most disrespected person in America is the Black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the Black woman. The most neglected person in America is the Black woman.”

In reality, the United States was built upon the ownership of Black bodies and the exploitation of their labor. In turn, socially constructed identities developed out from conditions that were designed to suppress Blacks as people. In describing the origins of slavery in Virginia, Ballagh (1902) observed that “domestic slavery could find no sanction until the absolute ownership in the bodies of the negroes was vested by lawful authority in some individual.” Malcolm X’s words highlight this grotesque accomplishment of terror against the Black female body. Furthermore, Hattery & Smith (2018) link the prison-industrial complex to an evolving material condition of the plantation economy. As Michelle Alexander (2012) explains in The New Jim Crow, the US economy and court system have embraced a long-standing ideology that recycles Black bodies through the prison-industrial complex, a cycle rooted in violence against particular bodies and the creation of a criminalized class created to justify the overrepresentation of Black bodies in prison.

Interestingly, during the Progressive Era, there were economic and criminal costs for attempted lynchings. In 1920, it cost $25 and 10 days in jail for an attempted lynching in Virginia, but just a year later, the sentence increased to $100 and one year in jail (Chadbourn, 1933). This increase in punishment was likely not for the benevolent benefit of Black people – it was to maintain economic prosperity. If Black bodies continued to be killed off, their bodies could not be used for labor and future exploitation in the criminal court system. Historically, however, most lynchings of Black people went unpunished by the courts, particularly if it was believed that a Black man had committed a sexual crime against a white woman. In contrast, when white men were convicted of rape against a Black girl or woman, they typically received light sentences of a year or two (Fitzhugh, 1997; Brundage, 1993). Theories of girlhood from a structural analysis have articulated how daughterhood and capitalism commodify the bodies of Black girls, which leads to questions about the directions that girls will take as women (Driscoll, 2002).

No matter how viciously the system of white capitalist patriarchy has attempted to suppress the souls of Black folks (DuBois, 1903), Black adults have remained steadfast in their belief in their right to be treated as humans. As Stevenson (2015) argues in her examination of slave punishment and support, slaves were not only conscious of their right to be treated with dignity – including the minimum expectation of being treated fairly and kindly – but were also very clear about the value of their work, often discussing among themselves what their calculated earnings should have been. This suggests that some slaves’ identities were not intertwined with the larger exploitative economic regime and that they understood the importance of believing in themselves, with the hopes that one day their collective resistance would ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Justice for Black Girls: Moving Toward a Historical Intersectional Criminology
• 2 I Am My Sister’s Keeper: Developing a Black Girlhood Justice Framework
• 3 Black Women’s Clubs and a Vision for Justice
• 4 Janie Porter Barrett’s Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls: Building a House for Justice
• 5 Commonwealth versus Virginia Christian: The State Kills Its First Black Female
• 6 Tracing the Freedom Path and Building Sisterhood: Girls for a Change
• References
• Index