She's Mad Real

Popular Culture and West Indian Girls in Brooklyn

Oneka LaBennett

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780814753125
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Overwhelmingly, Black teenage girls are negatively represented in national and global popular discourses, either as being “at risk” for teenage pregnancy, obesity, or sexually transmitted diseases, or as helpless victims of inner city poverty and violence. Such popular representations are pervasive and often portray Black adolescents' consumer and leisure culture as corruptive, uncivilized, and pathological.

In She's Mad Real, Oneka LaBennett draws on over a decade of researching teenage West Indian girls in the Flatbush and Crown Heights sections of Brooklyn to argue that Black youth are in fact strategic consumers of popular culture and through this consumption they assert far more agency in defining race, ethnicity, and gender than academic and popular discourses tend to acknowledge. Importantly, LaBennett also studies West Indian girls' consumer and leisure culture within public spaces in order to analyze how teens like China are marginalized and policed as they attempt to carve out places for themselves within New York's contested terrains.

1
Consuming Identities

Toward a Youth Culture–Centered Approach to West Indian Transnationalism

China takes the A train to the Fulton Street/Broadway Nassau stop to get to her job as a sales clerk at a clothing store near Ground Zero, one of two after-school jobs China holds. It is just after 4 p.m. on a Friday in August, and, on this particular afternoon, China rides the train with her best friend, Nadine, and two other friends, Neema and Mariah.¹ The subway car is full of businesspeople leaving early from Wall Street jobs, vacationing tourists, and a few local New Yorkers of varying ethnicities. The businesspeople are mostly White and dressed in suits. The tourists, dressed in shorts and tee shirts with cameras swinging from their necks and purses held close, are also White. Both the tourists and the businesspeople appear to be uneasy sharing such close quarters with the Black teenage girls. China and Nadine wear jeans, tight tee shirts, and sneakers, while Neema and Mariah wear cotton shorts with matching tank tops, and inexpensive, trendy sandals. The four girls are acutely aware of how the other commuters regard their presence on the subway car. The girls seem to spontaneously react to and feed the avoidance and the silent disapproval of the White passengers by yelling loudly across the subway car, taking up more seats than they need, and laughing boisterously. China, whose hair is dyed the same shade of gold as that of her idol, the R&B/hip-hop singer Mary J. Blige, is listening to her iPod. She sits on the opposite side of the subway car, facing the other girls. China sings loudly over the divide, entertaining her friends (who are in hysterics at her poor singing) and visibly annoying the other commuters around her.

CHINA: [singing melodramatically] Another lesson learned! Better know your friends! Or else you will get burned! Gotta count on me! ‘Cause I can guarantee that I’ll be fine. … No more pain, no more pain, no more drama in my life, no one’s gonna hurt me again.

China is severely off-key as she belts out the Mary J. Blige ballad “No More Drama,” from the album of the same name. Hamming it up, arms flailing, China does her best impersonation of Blige’s performance in the song’s music video, as her friends’ laughter and the stares of the other passengers intensify. Although the Blige song is about the pain of a broken heart, sung from the perspective of a woman looking back on her youth, the lyrics seem especially relevant to China’s life. At seventeen, she has already experienced prolonged separation from her mother, who initially left China in Barbados before reuniting with her when China was ten. China has come to rely heavily on her best friend, Nadine, a first-generation Trinidadian, who moved in with China’s family after Nadine’s mom took a job in a southern city during Nadine’s senior year in high school. Like many West Indian children and adolescents, even before immigrating to the United States, these girls were accustomed to being cared for by extended kin. Nadine’s and China’s experiences of being raised by grandmothers in the Caribbean for several years before reuniting with their mothers is a common practice of “child fostering,” a Caribbean kinship solution to the rifts accompanying immigration.² Both girls know the heartache of such separation, and the self-reliance they learned in their parents’ absence continues to shape their lives; they use their own hard-earned money for luxuries like iPods, cell phones, and professionally manicured false nails, in addition to necessities like food and clothes. China’s life story parallels Blige’s song in terms of both the hardship of parental separation and the “drama” that characterizes life for children in the Caribbean who learn to be independent at young ages and who face daily challenges and dangers, including tending to younger siblings and walking to school without adult supervision. To attend school, these children journey alongside speeding cars on poorly paved roads where pedestrians are routinely struck and killed.

China identifies with the adversity Mary J. Blige has overcome, as illustrated both in her music and in the performer’s personal narrative. Asked why Blige is her favorite singer, China responded:

She’s mad real. She don’t front for nobody. If you listen to her music you learn stuff about her life and how she struggled to get where she is. She’s not just singing about how she’s out at the club. She’s mad real.

While Blige’s personal struggles, which include overcoming poverty and drug addiction, resonate with China, her subway performance is less about China’s own “drama” and more an action staged in defiance of her surroundings.³ Unlike the many child performers, such as break dancers and candy sellers who earn a living on the subway, China’s mini-performance is improvised and not intended to please anyone other than herself and her friends. She negotiates the public space of the subway as if on the attack and uses her poor singing as an affront to the other riders. China and her friends are accustomed to adults, especially White adults, regarding them suspiciously in public settings. When they shop for clothes, salespeople and other shoppers observe their every move, certain that they are shoplifters. At school, asserting a West Indian identity can sometimes put China in the good graces of teachers, but in settings such as the subway and retail stores, China is stereotypically marked by her age, gender, and race.

Placing Black Youth

China and Nadine are among the West Indian teenage girls you will get to know in this book. While China’s raucous rendition of Blige’s song took place on a New York City subway, Black teenage girls are overwhelmingly represented in national and global popular discourses in negative terms, either as being “at risk” for teenage pregnancy, obesity, or sexually transmitted diseases or as helpless victims of inner-city poverty and violence. Examples include the pregnant, overweight, and abused young woman depicted in the film Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire and the fat-lipped and scarred pictures of Barbadian hip-hop/R&B star Rihanna after famously being assaulted by her boyfriend, singer Chris Brown. Meanwhile, popular images represent their male counterparts as dangerous menaces to society or as hapless casualties of pathological family life; common portrayals of Black inner-city teenage boys include dark-faced, hooded drug dealers, aspiring rappers, and, the character Precious’s male equivalent, the illiterate football player rescued by an affluent White family in the film The Blind Side. These representations do not fully convey the diverse, real life experiences of Black teenagers. However, such popular representations are pervasive and often portray Black adolescents’ consumer and leisure culture as corruptive, uncivilized, and pathological. This book is intended to intervene and to heed the alarm that educators, policymakers, parents, and the media have sounded with regard to the negative ways in which teens in general, and Black teenage girls in particular, are being “influenced” by popular Black youth culture. She’s Mad Real takes Black youth culture as its starting point, arguing that West Indian adolescents are strategic consumers of popular culture and that, through this consumption, they assert far more agency in defining race, ethnicity, and gender than academic and popular discourses tend to acknowledge. The consumer and leisure spheres are revealed not as unabashed arenas of pleasure and power but as dynamic sites in which marginalized Black teenage identities are produced and contested, confined and liberated. Indeed, we will see that youthful racial, gender, and nation-based identities are critically constructed in popular representations.

Popular representations of and about Black teenagers do not exist in a vacuum but, rather, are placed within local, national, and global contexts. This ethnography examines the relationship between place and Black youth culture, exposing the spatial construction of West Indian girls’ subjectivities. China and her friends attend an afterschool program at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum (BCM) in Crown Heights.⁴ The museum program and her job near Ground Zero are two wage-earning positions China holds in addition to attending high school. Yet, in public places such as subway cars, movie theaters, and clothing stores, China and her friends are viewed not as hardworking citizens and valued consumers but as threats to civic decorum. This book situates West Indian girls’ consumer and leisure culture within public spaces in order to interrogate the ways in which teens like China are marginalized and policed while they attempt to carve out places for themselves within New York’s contested terrains.

She’s Mad Real: Authenticity, Femininity and Popular Black Youth Culture

She’s Mad Real paves new ground by engaging concerns about female adolescent identity formation vis-à-vis consumer culture with the social construction of West Indian notions of belonging. It addresses questions such as: What constitutes Blackness in today’s global world? Are teenage girls equipped to form strong self-definitions in the face of a hip-hop culture that is largely characterized as corruptive? The pursuit of “authentic Blackness” takes center stage in youthful constructions of Black femininity, and China emphasizes this centrality when she describes Mary J. Blige as “mad real.” She plainly articulates African diaspora scholars’ theorizations regarding the importance of authenticity in popular Black youth cultures (Fleetwood 2005; Gilroy 1993; Gray 1995; Hall 1996; Jackson 2005; Kelley 1997; Ogbar 2009). This book puts West Indian and African American girls in dialogue with scholars who have analyzed the paradoxes attached to notions of Black authenticity. The West Indian and African American girls you will meet strive to identify “real Black people” among the contradictory media images routinely offered to them. This is, of course, a tangled and precarious exercise. For West Indian youth in particular, “realness” is contingent and deeply problematic—they struggle to negotiate “authentic” West Indian selves while sometimes simultaneously identifying with African Americans. The quest for authenticity also has significant implications for the youths’ gender identities. For China and her friends, calling a performer like Mary J. Blige “mad real” is the highest compliment they could bestow because it connotes a feminine style that confronts and circumvents mainstream racialized and classed notions of beauty. Thus, being “mad real,” “really for real,” and “keepin’ it real” reemerge throughout this text as a central trope.

The anthropologist John L. Jackson Jr. has critiqued how authenticity functions in contemporary academic discourses, charging that a reliance on authenticity “explains what is most constraining and potentially self-destructive about identity politics” (Jackson 2005: 12). Jackson follows philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah in highlighting the shortcomings of social authenticity, arguing that this form of collective identity formation relies heavily on “scripts,” or narratives “that people use in shaping their life plans and in telling their life stories” (Appiah 1996; Jackson 2005: 12). Jackson writes:

These scripts provide guidelines for proper and improper behavior, for legitimate and illegitimate group membership, for social inclusion or ostracism. We use these scripts as easy shorthand for serious causal analysis, and scholars who invoke “racial authenticity” usually do so to talk about how such scripts delimit individuals’ social options—describing how racial identity can be made to function a lot like social incarceration, a quotidian breeding ground, claims Paul Gilroy, for even more brutal forms of fascism (Gilroy 2000; Jackson 2005: 13).

Rather than interrogating authenticity to “delimit individuals’ social options,” in this book we will come to see girls’ reliance on “being mad real” as central to their subjectivity formations as critical social actors. While a number of scholarly analyses interpret the pursuit of realness as serving to essentialize Black people and limit Black youths’ chances for success by situating them outside White mainstream America, She’s Mad Real reveals how girls use invocations of realness to (re)write their own social scripts (Fleetwood 2005; Gilroy 1993).

Instead of seeing Black girls’ invocations of “being for real” as a form of objectification that obscures agency and denies humanity (Jackson 2005), we can interpret attempts at identifying and claiming authenticity or “realness” as critical responses to popular and public policy discourses that ignore the complex realities of their lives. China’s subway performance is a clamorous demand to be heard, and her identification with Blige signals her determination to overcome daily challenges. For China and her peers, finding authenticity in consumer culture and claiming public space are contradictory exercises marked by crossing perilous boundaries between the private and the public spheres, between consumption and production, and between work and leisure. As they navigate these boundaries, youth of color are often misunderstood, viewed as criminals, or rendered invisible. Compare the description of China and her friends with one of some subway performers on the same train line: “Show time! Show time! It’s show time folks! Show time!” Any frequent rider of the New York City subway in recent years recognizes this prompt. It marks the beginning of a familiar scene. When the uptown A trains stops at Canal Street, most seats on the train are occupied. Three brown-skinned children enter. There are two boys; one appears to be about thirteen years old, and the other one, who is much taller and who is carrying a boom box, looks to be about sixteen. The smallest child is a skinny little girl who cannot be more than ten years old. Setting the boom box down next to the doors, the taller boy delivers the “It’s show time!” cue. Seeing that a performance is about to ensue, a few people seated closest to the group move further away. As Michael Jackson’s “You’ve Got Me Working Day and Night” plays on the boom box, the little girl starts to move, with the boys flanking her, their backs against the subway doors. As the train careens forward, the little girl does back flips, cartwheels, and handstands. Michael Jackson’s voice soars: “You got me workin’, workin’ day and night … And I’ll be workin’, from sun-up to midnight!” The little girl is fazed neither by the screeching abrupt stops of the train nor by the protruding feet and shopping bags of commuters. Some tourists look on in amazement, cheering the little girl on, while others appear annoyed by the impending threat of limbs flying through the air. Wearing cotton shorts and a dirty tee shirt, the girl looks fragile as she contorts herself, deftly avoiding the subway car’s center pole. Seasoned straphangers have seen this show before and continue reading their books and their copies of the Daily News. Next, the tallest boy begins his routine, consisting of more sophisticated break-dancing moves. The boy’s muscles bulge as he spins on one hand, then spirals on his head, his legs somehow managing not to hit poles and people. The last boy is the most talented. He works the subway car pole in a move that oddly resembles a stripper’s routine, but, when he flips his body 360 degrees, his lanky legs hit the subway car ceiling with a loud thud. Passengers gasp at the sound and applaud as the little girl makes her rounds, collecting money in a black backpack. I hand her a one-dollar bill and count at least an additional ten dollars going in to her collection. A passenger comments as he hands over a dollar bill, “Look at this! Twenty dollars in ten minutes! How old are you?” The little girl smiles and says, “I’m eight.” Before I get a chance to ask any questions, the group vanishes through the momentarily open subway doors. The train lurches on.

There are variations on the scene I’ve just sketched. Most frequently, the performers are Black or Latino and are preadolescent or teenage boys. The little girl I described is the only girl I have seen in such a performance. An alternative and perhaps more common scenario is one in which a group of three or so teens, again usually boys, enters a subway car, announcing they have candy for sale. “Candy! Get your peanut M&Ms, Snickers, Reese’s Pieces! One dollar!” When I first noticed the candy sellers, years ago, the youth would proclaim, “Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen! We’re selling candy to raise money for our school trip!” More recently, however, children like these have announced, “I’m just keepin’ it real. I’m not selling candy for a school trip or anything. Just trying to stay off the streets and get a little money in my pocket.”

Although the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) prohibits peddling on subway cars, I have never seen police officers enforce this rule in relation to young candy sellers or break dancers. That these youngsters are primarily Black and Latino both speaks to and feeds notions of racialized and age-based inequalities in New York City. Their acts of literally commandeering the public, ostensibly MTA-controlled space of the New York City subway cars can, at first glance, be read as an effort to “take back” public spaces that overwhelmingly displace and marginalize youth of color. For tourists, these youth affirm images of New York City as gritty and spontaneous, while feeding stereotypes of needy “inner-city” youth. New Yorkers wonder if this is a scam—if someone “puts these kids up to it.” The fact that they all seem to speak from the same rehearsed script and that their routines share similar elements raises questions about whether they are coached by adults who might be taking the profits. Some comments on Internet blogs come from riders who regard the youth as nuisances who, in attempting to hawk their goods and talents, “bombard” commuters, while other commentators sympathize with what they assume to be needy kids. Reporters have sought to get to the bottom of these entrepreneurial activities, which, at least in the case of the candy sellers, are indeed usually orchestrated by adults. According to ABC News, about fifty thousand children nationwide are involved in candy-selling rings led by nefarious adult crew leaders with criminal records. Reportedly, the children are often either from housing projects or homeless, picked up in vans and bused to subway stops or suburban neighborhoods, where they ring bells and peddle candy (Leamy 2008: n.p.). The children are exploited, working twelve-hour shifts with no bathroom breaks and receiving pennies on what they earn (Leamy 2008). Yet, as much as the candy-crew leaders exploit these children, efforts to assign blame for their predicament echo entrenched discourses that pathologize urban children and their parents. The ABC News report, for example, states, “Parents go along with it because they don’t care or don’t know better” (Leamy 2008). This explanation does not allow for parents who are themselves socially and economically isolated, lacking employment, housing, and access to child care. The story seems to be more nuanced for the break-dance crews (also known as b-boy crews), some of which are composed of devoted and remarkably disciplined dancers steeped in the hip-hop dance traditions of the Bronx. Distinct from the group of child dancers described earlier, because there is less evidence of exploitation and because they hail from a Bronx tradition of the public production of hip-hop, b-boy crews regularly perform on subway platforms and in cars “making money foot over hand” according to the New York Times (Goodman 2009). Generally older than the youth I witnessed, members of these crews have been arrested for panhandling, but a few nights in jail have not been enough to make them abandon the pleasure and profits they garner from performing on the subways (Goodman 2009).

The complex and contradictory stories of all of these youth remain largely unknown to most casual observers. Their presence in New York’s public spaces is regarded alternatively as a nuisance and as an entertaining oddity. They are avoided, pitied, or exoticized. They are either exploited pawns or crafty entrepreneurs. In the sketches of young subway dancers and candy sellers we have seen, these urban minority youth are negotiating the spheres of labor, leisure, and consumption to turn a profit and to demand the attention of a public that rarely engages with them. The examples of the candy crews and break dancers reveal that, even on the surface, minority teens are making creative, nontraditional, and dangerous efforts to earn wages in a labor market that exploits them and leaves them largely disenfranchised.

The historian Robin Kelley’s term “play-labor,” whereby “the pursuit of leisure, pleasure and creative expression is labor,” can be applied to the dancers and candy sellers who, like many African American urban youth, “have tried to turn [their] labor into cold hard cash” (Kelley 1997: 45). Kelley theorizes that, for urban minority youth with few resources and unequal access to employment, the lines between play and labor become blurred, and play becomes a means to earn wages. The child performers’ version of play-labor clearly fits within Kelley’s framework, in the sense that dancing to hip-hop has been interpreted as a central component of urban youth’s leisure or play culture, while it has also, from its inception, been a mechanism for earning money. Compared with that of the child performers and candy sellers, China’s impromptu singing is a less remarkable but also disruptive form of public play that is not aimed at earning wages but that does the work of annoying, confounding, and distancing the adults around the girls. China’s antics do not inspire tourists to dole out cash so much as they provoke them to hold tighter to their purses. Yet, China and the subway performers are linked in the sense that both (re)produce Black youth culture, in the form of singing or dancing and by physically co-opting public space. But the limited descriptions provided here do not give us the whole picture, even when accounting for ABC News’s efforts to “dig deeper” into the candy sellers’ case. Are the subway performers and peddlers representative of New York City’s Black teenagers? Kelley notes that “some African American youth” negotiate what he sees as a hazy divide between play and labor and that, for these youth, play is more than “an expression of s...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Consuming Identities: Toward a Youth Culture–Centered Approach to West Indian Transnationalism
• 2 “Our Museum”: Mapping Race, Gender, and West Indian Transnationalism
• 3 Dual Citizenship in the Hip-Hop Nation: Gender and Authenticity in Black Youth Culture
• 4 “I Think They’re Looking for a Skinny Chick!”: Girls and Boys Consuming Racialized Beauty
• 5 Conclusion: Placing Gendered and Generational Notions of West Indian Success
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author