Sabotage and the Black Girl Commons

Racist regionalism and the disparagement of migrants compounded with gender and minor status related to age to articulate ‘negro girl’ as a category included parasitically within Philadelphia’s post-Second World War infrastructures. Shoehorned into tedious home economics courses at school and expected to augment family reproductive labor as daughters until they married and/or found work as domestics, their lifetimes were set by others for a combination of uncompensated reproductive labor and servitude. Those confined by racialized gender, age, and class, however, articulated discordant arrangements of time, space, and life course. I gather these acts in their dynamic relationship to surveillance, violence, and carcerality toward the conceptualization of sabotage and toward a corollary concept, the black girl commons. Taken together, the subjects at the center of this work reappropriated or expropriated time outside the routinized, habitual, and normalizing regimen associated with nascent constructions of teenage life course that delimited their activities to confining education, reproductive labor, or sanctioned extracurricular activity.