The recent protests on police violence finds scholars and activists grappling with the continued marginalization of black women and girls in discussions on policing. My work uses in-depth interviews to examine this process through the eyes of black women from across the social class spectrum. Drawing from black women's reflections on the police talks in their families, I identify "learning her place" as a childhood discourse that reproduces black women's position on the margins while fostering the development of black feminist consciousness.
Shannon Malone Gonzalez is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at The University of Texas at Austin. Her research sits at the intersection of black feminism and critical criminology in investigating police violence against black women and girls in the United States. Using interviews, observations, and surveys, her work interrogates the social conditions that shape and marginalize black women and girls’ experiences with police across institutional and cultural contexts. Her research has been published in Gender & Society and Social Problems, received awards from the American Sociological Association and Association of Black Sociologists, and has been funded by the National Science Foundation and Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy.