The Grind by Alexis S. McCurn

Author:Alexis S. McCurn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rutgers University Press

CHAPTER 4

“Keeping It Fresh”

SELF-REPRESENTATION AND CHALLENGING CONTROLLING IMAGES IN THE INNER CITY

FOR MANY BLACK women, living in an inner-city community means living in a place that lacks many of the resources that are available in middle-class neighborhoods. This includes grocery stores as well as a variety of retail shops, banks, and other businesses and services. Managing daily life in a place where such resources are missing requires creativity on the part of the people who live there. The strategy of “keeping it fresh” is a result of such creativity. Women in the inner city use available material resources to challenge common expectations that tend to complicate their encounters with others. Through their daily self-presentation these women illustrate how the aesthetic performance of keeping it fresh works as a preventive approach used to buffer oneself from microinteractional assaults. As they challenge prevailing ideas about what it looks like to be poor, black, and female in the inner city—for example, by carefully crafting their style of dress and their deportment—they also aim to keep at bay the hostile public encounters that are often triggered by markers of their class status. Masking this status is crucial, as they still must manage their stigmatized categorical identities of race and gender.

What is the meaning of self-presentation for women living in the inner city? How and why do gender, impression management, systemic inequality, and the underground marketplace work together to inform how these women present themselves with regard to physical appearance? Keeping it fresh allows women to present a version of self that aims to achieve particular ends. Depending upon the audience, this strategy also operates as a means of gaining respect and recognition as something other than poor and in some instances works as form of class passing, if only for a moment.

Women in East Oakland rely on informal retail sale and trade systems in their local communities in an effort to keep it fresh. Goods purchased via the underground marketplace allow these women to maintain a neat appearance enhanced by expensive clothes, shoes, and accessories, which challenges dominant expectations of what it looks like to be poor, black, and female. What does it means to look “good” versus looking “poor,” and what struggles come with both? My respondents told of the desire to be perceived by outsiders as something different, something better than the image that accompanies being poor, black, and female. As many women reported, it feels good to look good. For most of the women in this study, the outcomes of public encounters largely remain the same while keeping it fresh. Yet respondents repeatedly showed that this strategic performance of a particular aesthetic, although not always successful in changing the perceptions and behavior of outsiders, works consistently to help them feel good and that alone makes managing daily public encounters a bit more bearable.

“IT’S THE ONLY WAY TO BE”

In East Oakland, women commonly reproduce a locally valued form of femininity by “keeping it fresh,” a phrase they use to refer not only to themselves but also to other women, men, and children.

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