Monique W. Morris

“For Black girls, to be "ghetto" represents a certain resilience to how poverty has shaped racial and gender oppression. To be "loud" it to demand to be heard. To have an "attitude" is to reject a doctrine of invisibility and maltreatment. To be flamboyant--or "fabulous"--is to revise the idea that socioeconomic isolation is equated with not having access to materially desirable things. To be a ghetto Black girl, then, is to reinvent what it means to be Black, poor, and female.”
― Monique W. Morris, Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools

“Black girls are likened more to adults than to children and are treated as if they are willfully engaging in behaviors typically expected of Black women—sexual involvement, parenting or primary caregiving, workforce participation, and other adult behaviors and responsibilities. This compression is both a reflection of deeply entrenched biases that have stripped Black girls of their childhood freedoms and a function of an opportunity-starved social landscape that makes Black girlhood interchangeable with Black womanhood. It gives credence to a widely held perception and a message that there is little difference between the two.”
― Monique Morris, Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools