Shes Mad Real Popular Culture and West Indian Girls in Brooklyn [Paperback]

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.
InShes 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 Yorks contested terrains.

She's Mad Realprovides a panorama of theory, deep description, and praxis to understand these black teenage girls. LaBennett is writing against the grain, as urban black female adolescents are typecast by their race, age, gender, and presumed class position. Furthermore, as urban black teen girls, it is assumed that they are 'at risk' for becoming underage mothers with low educational aspirations and with little thought of how to becomes wage earners. LaBennett breaks that mold and brings other variables into the mix. LaBennett is deeply attuned to her subjects. Together, researcher and research subjects explore the wide world around them: hip-hop culture, opportunities for mobility, sexual life, issues of risk, relationships with momits all here! LaBennett develops incisive new interpretations of such concepts as & play-labor and & authenticity.Shes Mad Realboth joins a rich ethnographic l%