Downed by Friendly Fire: Black Girls, White Girls, and Suburban Schooling

(Paperback)

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Most Americans would never willingly revisit their high school experiences; the nation s school systems reflect the broader society s hierarchical emphasis on race, class, and gender. While schools purport to provide equal opportunities for all students, this rarely happens in actuality particularly for girls.In "Downed by Friendly Fire," SignithiaFordham unmasks and examines female-centered bullying in schools, arguing that it is essential to unmask female aggression, bullying, and competition, all of which directly relate to the structural violence embedded in the racialized and gendered social order. For two and a half years, Fordham conducted field research at Underground Railroad High School, a suburban high school in upstate New York.

Reviews

"Introducing a new interpretive framework with fresh and original analysis, Signithia Fordham is doing something really unique here. Her grounded, intersectional investigation of girls' peer-to-peer conflict is in constant interplay with an exploration of symbolic violence in girls' lives in different circumstances and on multiple levels, challenging our taken-for-granted notions not only about girls, but about the larger forces at play in our own lives."Lyn Mikel Brown, author of Girlfighting: Betrayal and Rejection among Girls

"In a no-holds-barred account, Signithia Fordham critically interrogates the enculturated forms of symbolic violence whose misrecognition sustains gendered, racialized, and classed inequalities in schools and, ultimately, in the wider U.S. society. She has produced a sophisticated intersectional study of the interplay between stigma, privilege, and power."Faye V. Harrison, University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign

"Downed by Friendly Fire will become a text that demands reconceptualization of what we come to know as violence in schools. It requires a closer look at the intersections of race and gender violence while holding one accountable in the ways that privilege and power are enacted systematically. A book that I recommend to teachers, administrators, and researchers alike."Education Review

Author Bio

Signithia Fordham is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Rochester and the author of Blacked Out: Dilemmas of Race, Identity, and Success at Captial High.