Although highly resourced suburban schools are widely regarded as the best, they too often operate as geographic sites of anti-Black-girl violence. So-called equity and reform policies and practices, such as restorative justice and positive behavioral interventions and supports, push Black girls into a constant state of school captivity and bind them to unending cycles of punishment. These disciplinary reforms exert anti-Black-girl violence and suffering through distinct, gratuitous, mundane assaults that ungender Black girls and deny their humanity.

Nevertheless, Black girls create their own sites of refuge in the very school buildings where they face harm. Drawing on her expertise in education policy, feminist theory, and Black girlhood studies, Ashley L. Smith-Purviance examines ethnographic fieldwork in two predominantly white suburban middle schools and reveals the resistance mechanisms Black girls utilize in Black Girl Magic, their co-created fugitive Black girl space, to survive this violence. Unschooling Black Girls emphasizes the necessity of spaces that Black girls create alongside Black women, to combat and escape anti-Black-girl violence in traditional educational spaces.

Ashley L. Smith-Purviance is assistant professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, and African American and African studies at The Ohio State University.