Abstract
What do you do if you are a young, urban African American woman who does not want to fight with people? For one thing, you should not get in a relationship with an abusive boyfriend. You should also not live in your abusive mother's house, and you should be neither too pretty nor the kind of person who preys on pretty women. These are the kinds of impossible constraints Nikki Jones finds around the lives of the young women in Philadelphia who participated in her recent ethnography. The ways these women are structurally located by virtue of the dynamics of race, class, gender, age, and space mean that violence is something they constantly have to negotiate. Enacting it or resisting it is a choice, in part, but being able to resist violence requires that a young woman have a safe place to be, and that she goes to great lengths to be there nearly all the time. Space, then, matters for these women: safe space.
Intimate partner violence and violence perpetrated on children by parents are not the first types most people think about when they freely associate the word “urban.” So much has been written about homicide, assault, gang activity, and even suicide in American cities—and in our imaginations, these things happen in public, “on the street”—that it is easy to forget that domestic violence is a major threat to urban residents’ survival as well. In presenting the situations of teenagers who deal in some way with violence every day, Jones simultaneously argues that urban violence has gender components and that domestic violence has spatial components. Arguing this as convincingly as she does is no small accomplishment.
At the heart of Jones’ presentation is the tension she observes between young women's desire to be “good” and their pressure to, instead, be “ghetto”—to fight, to menace, to even disfigure other young women whose complexions are too light and hair too straight. Being “good” means aspiring to be a “nice Black lady” who dons the characteristics of respectability and stereotypically appropriate femininity. Those whose families demand “good” behavior from them are both freer and more trapped than others; their ultimate goal is to leave their city environment, so they literally stay in their houses or churches throughout much of their late childhoods so as to not get caught up in whatever “badness” lies in wait outside their doors. “Fighters” take a different path. They do not have the luxury or the will to stay home and read every day (sometimes because it is as violent there as it is on the street), and they have been taught to police their own physical boundaries with regular displays of strength. Jones incisively analyzes how these two types need each other for juxtaposition—neither one can maintain her reputation without comparison to the other, even while both are merely striving for a sense of power over their own chaotic life circumstances. She also considers the heartbreaking ways this tension affects young women's maturity and development, such as some women's decisions to have only “associates” instead of “friends” because they would have to fight if their friends needed help but they could remain “good” and stay out of trouble if they only have associates.
Jones’ ability to describe messy situations with both detail and clarity draws a reader in and makes me feel like I am either watching a soap opera or eavesdropping on someone's very provocative conversation. When Jones describes the heavy burden reflected in her participants’ eyes and the sound of pain in their voices, you see it; you hear it. What this attention to empirical detail and nuance causes Jones to sacrifice, though, is connection with a well–developed theoretical framework. Jones’ narrative is oriented around Elijah Anderson's concept of “the code of the streets,” and she skillfully demonstrates how this code must be enacted in creative, gender–specific ways by the young women in her study. As an explanation, though, it is overly simplistic. The code is one of many things women have to negotiate as they figure out how to keep themselves safe. But Jones unveils situations in which girls fight girls, and girls’ mothers fight girls’ mothers—how does the code explain this? She describes a teenager's decision over whether to get a third abortion or have her third child while she lives in a halfway house to escape both her boyfriend's and mother's abuse—how far does the code take us with that? Jones demonstrates the gendered nature of both the code and the violence that urban teenaged women face, but she does not fully explain the tension between “good” and “ghetto” in a theoretically satisfying way.
Although her discussion of her data throughout the book is quite complex, in her conclusion Jones seems to subscribe to the master narrative that if only there were jobs in the city, everyone would want a white–picket–fence life, and young women's need to enact, resist, or orient their lives around violence would disappear. This is not to say jobs are not important—they may, indeed, be the most important factor in these women's lives. But if it all comes down to jobs, then Jones’ analysis of the particular experiences of young African American women adds little to our current understanding of the sources of strife in American cities. Her data and her ability to describe enormously complicated empirical situations are particularly superb. If she were to move beyond the code of the streets and an underlying sense of economic determinism to a theoretical analysis of the contradictions wrought by the intersections of these young women's structural disadvantages, we would learn even more about the spatial dimensions of gendered violence.