Abstract
A significant and contemporary contribution to our understanding of racial microaggressions, presentation of self, and low-income women’s survival strategies, Alexis McCurn’s The Grind: Black Women and Survival in the Inner City addresses these issues in her beautifully written ethnography of African American women living in a distressed East Oakland, California, neighborhood.
McCurn argues that low-income African American women in East Oakland struggle daily with microinteractional assaults shaped by intersections of their social and their spatial location in the inner city. Further, she elucidates the ways in which black women’s social agency is evident. The book’s focus is four substantive chapters. Chapter one explains the significance of “grinding,” that is, parenting and working to make ends meet in East Oakland. The second chapter elaborates on the concept of microintentional assaults and provides examples of women’s experiences with them in East Oakland. In her third chapter, she examines sexual harassment of black women in East Oakland. The fourth chapter highlights the multifaceted ways in which women of color use their agency to cope with the difficulties of living in an economically distressed neighborhood, including the notion of “keeping it fresh.” Women express the need to manage public perceptions of their class status and basic human worth by wearing designer garments. This armor serves as a shield to protect women and their children from humiliation of poverty that is amplified by racism and sexism. Access to such attire is made available through the informal economy of East Oakland.
The most significant contributions made by The Grind are McCurn’s conceptualization of microinteractional assaults and her description and analysis of “the specific strategies black women use to negotiate encounters while in urban public space” (7). Drawing from the literature on racial microaggressions and race, gender, and class intersectionality (Crenshaw 1989 [though uncited in The Grind]), McCurn explains: “My analysis of microinteractional assaults complements previous scholarship by focusing on a form of social injury that occurs at the intersection of race, gender, and class and reflects the complicated experience of having more than one marginalized status while living in a distressed inner-city neighborhood” (6). Though McCurn claims that her analysis is unique in that she analyzes the experiences of poor and working-class black women, a number of other scholars have taken up such study using qualitative methodologies (e.g., Jarrett 1997; Mendenhall 2017).
However, studies of black women in Oakland, California, are certainly few. The intensive study of this setting is the book’s third most important contribution. Dr. McCurn’s qualitative data collection effort is most impressive. She conducted field research over a two-year period during which she lived in the East Oakland community under examination. There she observed, wrote ethnographic fieldnotes, and conducted ethnographic interview. McCurn notes that over an 18-month period, she devoted almost thirty hours a week to systematically observing the daily routines of residents (161). Certainly, this made for a rich data set from which to draw. Further, she conducted, transcribed, and coded 16 formal interviews and 20 informal interviews and conversations. Of the instances of microinteractional assaults, McCurn notes that she documented 75 cases through her data collection. Clearly, ethnography was a powerful methodology to address McCurn’s research questions. Finally, the author had great familiarity with the community, given that she grew up there.
A theoretically rich and groundbreaking study for students of ethnography, The Grind should be required reading for courses in qualitative methodology, urban sociology, and family sociology. Researchers examining structural impediments and individual/collective agency among members of distressed communities will find McCurn’s study invaluable.