Black Girls and the Beauty Salon: Fostering a Safe Space for Collective Self-Care

Abstract

Black girls regularly experience gendered, racial structural violence, not just from formal systems of law enforcement, but throughout their daily lives. School is one of the most central and potentially damaging sites for Black girls in this regard. In this paper, I draw attention to the role of the beauty salon as a space of renewal for Black women and girls as they navigate systems of oppression in their daily lives and report on the ways in which a specific beauty salon in Chesterfield County, Virginia, supported a group of Black high school girls. The study focuses on the exposure of Black girls to carceral measures in school settings and speaks to the role of African-American beauty salons as spaces where collective care from violence can manifest and strategies to interrupt racialized gendered violence against Black girls can emerge. As Co-Investigator of this study funded by the Department of Justice, I created the “scholar-artist-activist lab,” consisting of a small group of undergraduate and graduate students facilitating workshops with a mixed gender group of Black high-school students, to discuss, interact, and participate in social justice-centered exercises. I focus here on the experiences of the Black girls who participated in the study.

“We Knew No One Else Had Our Back except Us”: Recommendations for Creating an Accountability Care Framework with Sex Workers in Eastern Canada

“…Community care involves a comprehensive web that encompasses other individuals, programs, and agencies (Godfrey et al 2011). For example, Battle (2021) shares the powerful impacts of a beauty salon in Chesterfield County, Virginia, in supporting black girls navigating gendered and racialized structural violence in their communities. In this manner, a safe space for community care created opportunities to interrupt violence in the lives of these young women.…”

“…These nuanced understandings of supports and care can provide a helpful framework in understanding the experiences of sex workers, as well as understanding care as a "critical survival strategy" (Hobart and Kneese 2020, p. 2). Yet, despite the literature on the importance of self, community, and collective care in other populations (Battle 2021;Godfrey et al 2011;Ginwright 2018), there is a paucity of research on holistic levels of care for sex workers specifically. Emerging evidence suggests care in the form of peer support is a strong mechanism for resisting stigma related to sex work.…”