Between Good and Ghetto - (Rutgers Childhood Studies) by Nikki Jones (Paperback)

About the Book

Between Good and Ghetto reflects the social world of inner city African American girls and how they manage threats of personal violence. Drawing on personal encounters, traditions of urban ethnography, Black feminist thought, gender studies, and feminist criminology, Nikki Jones provides a richly descriptive and compassionate account, revealing multiple strategies used to navigate interpersonal and gender-specific violence and how gendered dilemmas of their adolescence are reconciled.

Book Synopsis

With an outward gaze focused on a better future, Between Good and Ghetto reflects the social world of inner city African American girls and how they manage threats of personal violence.

Drawing on personal encounters, traditions of urban ethnography, Black feminist thought, gender studies, and feminist criminology, Nikki Jones gives readers a richly descriptive and compassionate account of how African American girls negotiate schools and neighborhoods governed by the so-called "code of the street"ùthe form of street justice that governs violence in distressed urban areas. She reveals the multiple strategies they use to navigate interpersonal and gender-specific violence and how they reconcile the gendered dilemmas of their adolescence. Illuminating struggles for survival within this group, Between Good and Ghetto encourages others to move African American girls toward the center of discussions of "the crisis" in poor, urban neighborhoods.

Review Quotes

"Between Good and Ghetto is an expertly written and fascinating ethnography of the gendered racial dimensions of violence in the inner city. Jones does an excellent job in communicating the strength and sensitivity [of the girls she interviewed] to her readers while, simultaneously, producing a work of tremendous insight and immense sociological imagination."
-- "Contemporary Sociology" (9/1/2010 12:00:00 AM)

"A very compelling account of daily life as experienced by poor, urban, African American adolescent girls. Recommended."-- "Choice" (1/1/2010 12:00:00 AM)

"Intellectually and emotionally evocative. Jones's [book] is hard to put down due to her adept use of imagery and obvious passion for her work."
-- "Feminist Formations" (5/1/2012 12:00:00 AM)

"Nikki Jones' sharp, detailed investigation of the way fighting, on the street and in school, shapes the lives of young African American women combines shrewd analytical insight and clear evocative language to give readers an understanding of what it costs a 'good girl' to stay good, and what happens to those who 'go for bad.'"--Howard S. Becker "author of Outsiders and Writing for Social Scientists" (1/1/2009 12:00:00 AM)

"The young women in Between Good and Ghetto compel the reader to consider their lives and the violence they experience in relation to the shifting and dynamic concept of protection. What is perhaps the most significant and disturbing revelation in the book is that there are few contexts, behavioral strategies, institutional spaces, or ways of identifying that fully protect young inner-city African American women's physical well-being, emotional health, and empowered self-perception."
-- "Signs" (4/1/2012 12:00:00 AM)

"This book adds invaluable information and analysis to the growing debate on the violence perpetrated by girls, and the ethnographic method is exactly what is needed to further the question of whether today's girls--particularly those most marginalized due to class, race, and neighborhood--are more violent."--Joanne Belknap "author of The Invisible Woman: Gender, Crime & Justice" (1/15/2009 12:00:00 AM)

About the Author

Nikki Jones is an assistant professor in the department of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.