Abstract
In the introduction of her book, Alexis McCurn poses the question: “Why is daily life such a grind for poor black women?” (p. 8). The Grind: Black Women and Survival in the Inner City attends to this question ethnographically, with intellectual dexterity and narrative precision. In a theoretically and empirically rich text that speaks across sociology, anthropology, geography, and gender, urban, and ethnic studies, The Grind joins a growing set of ethnographic monographs that draw from a critical insider-outsider positionality to disrupt accounts of urban populations of color as deviant, dangerous, and irrational social actors.
McCurn deftly leverages inductive reasoning to amplify the theorizing that black women in Oakland, California generate about their own lives. The major theoretical concepts that animate the book—”the grind,” “grinding,” microinteractional assaults, and “keeping it fresh”—emerge as indicators of McCurn’s serious commitment to empirics and black feminist theorizing. By unveiling black American women’s quotidian experiences of navigating space in a working-poor neighborhood of East Oakland, McCurn inverts the normative premise of urban sociological studies: rather than presenting black women as social problems to be solved in inner-city life, she documents how black women problem-solve their encounters with patriarchy and white supremacy in different spatial contexts.
The Grind reveals how black women recognize and respond to the survival challenges that accompany being perceived as social problems and social prey, sometimes simultaneously. However, rather than relegate these women to narratives of flat gender-racialized victims of violence, McCurn illustrates how black women’s navigation of daily structural and interactional violence necessitates particular modes of shifting affective, embodied, aesthetic, and intellectual labor. For scholars of labor, Chapter One is particularly instructive; McCurn builds a typology of “grinding” to articulate how black women handle “the intensity and drudgery of managing . . . daily life” (p. 23) within the formal and underground economies to survive under conditions of extreme duress. Yet McCurn presses us to think about the work of living as black women in multiple, overlapping spheres of urban neighborhoods that go well beyond the formal and informal labor markets. Throughout the text, The Grind illustrates the intensive daily labor black women are required to perform in order to survive under the paradoxical expectations of respectability politics. McCurn highlights the high emotional, social, and fiscal costs of this work, but shows that opting out of this labor can cost black women their lives.
One of the most striking elements of The Grind is its deep and unyielding commitment to articulating the diverse life worlds of black womanhood. The Grind is a book that I can imagine engaging students across graduate and undergraduate classes, including classes in theory, methods, intersectionality, race, gender, urban studies, criminology, family, and labor. It is precisely the type of piece that Ray and Tillman (2018) situate within the growing and transformative body of scholarship they call feminist urban ethnography, in that it transcends the discourse of “risk” that is typically applied to sociological studies of class-marginalized black women. The Grind stands as a testament to why #CiteBlackWomen is such a significant project. It illustrates how the under-recognition and circulation of black women’s scholarship starves the discipline of sociology from understanding poor and working-poor black women outside the Academy as our intellectual interlocutors.
McCurn has written a text that beautifully articulates how engaging #CiteBlackWomen has implications beyond the subfields that the book itself explicitly engages. To take The Grind seriously is to also take seriously that we are in a moment of rewriting the histories and futurities of sociology itself. McCurn writes: “As women construct these ways of managing the distress around them, they illustrate a kind of resiliency, commitment to community, and perseverance to get through another day” (p. 157). We can therefore extend McCurn’s work to thinking about the grinding that black women do within sociology and the Academy. How might we draw from McCurn’s insights about microinteractional assaults and the labor of navigating spaces under hostile conditions to reimagine the streets of the university? How might centering black women—in our writing, theorizing, and praxis—reshape how we come to our roles within the Academy? The Grind urgently compels us to respond to these questions as scholars, teachers, and community members.