Written at the confluence of Black girlhood studies and a critical anthropology of the state, this essay is an ethnography of social death in gentrifying San Francisco. I argue the gendered and raced patterns of school discipline at a San Francisco high school help us apprehend the afterlife of slavery. Within the context of schooling, the particular association of Black girls as loud and disobedient is well‐documented in the literature. Using flesh (Spillers ) as a hermeneutic to understand Black embodiment in the late liberal US, the essay centers on two young women who are targeted for school push out. Ultimately, the self‐making strategies employed by young Black women in San Francisco flummox the progressive political project and model “Black girl ordinary” as a practice of ethical refusal, both within and beyond the academy.

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Liberal politics are subtended by several fatal, commonsense binaries: state vs. interpersonal violence; trans vs. non-trans women; armed vs. innocent victims. Each of these binaries render Black women alternately invisible, incidental, and illegible. In this essay, I examine the hashtags #SayHerName and #CiteBlackWomen as citational practices of reparative enunciation that refuse these binaries. When citation is practiced as a form of relation, it offers a model for an ethical ethnographic practice in which we cite our research participants as thought and theory partners in an effort to speak back to the silences and violences of extant social science.