Justice Like Lightning: Reimagining Black Girlhood Through Black Lightning and Ratchetness

• In Event: Hip-Hop, Comics, and Speculative Education: (Re)Storying Equitable Education for the 23rd Century

Abstract

On January 16, 2018, Black Lightning, an American superhero drama, premiered on the CW. Based on a character of the same name, the show presents a retired version of the comic book character returning to his vigilante justice roots and protecting his family and friends in the fictional city of Freeland, Georgia. Although academic articles are few, numerous think pieces were written about the show’s focus on real-life concerns, including police brutality (Galbrath, 2021), institutional racism (Thompson, 2018), child separation (Pulliam-Moore, 2018), and mental health (Burt, 2018). Still, conversations about Black girlhood and Black girl representation are noticeably absent. In fact, articles centering Jennifer Pierce, Black Lightning’s youngest daughter and the only young Black girl in the main cast, are often relegated to her romantic and familial relationships, her superhero abilities, her position as a part of her family’s superhero team, and her proximity to Black womanhood.
Thus, in this paper, I center Jennifer Pierce, the young Black girl whose girlhood is decentered. To focus my investigation, I ask the following research questions:
In what ways does Jennifer Pierce embody a politic of Black girl refusal as an alternative to a politic of respectability?
How is Jennifer’s politic of refusal a representation of Black girl liberation?
To attend to these research questions, I engaged in a reflexive thematic analysis undergirded by the Black Ratchet Imagination (BRI). The BRI was essential to this investigation because Stallings (2013) claimed that the BRI allows Black people to engage in a politics of refusal through which we have the ability to reject respectability and limitations on Black identity and unleash the imaginative and activist spaces deemed improper by dominant society.
By defining the term in this way, Stallings connected ratchetness to liberation, refusing racist ideologies that attempt to restrict Black people to dominant norms confining speech, behavior, and social interaction (Pickens, 2015). I used reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2019) to analyze 58 episodes featuring Jennifer Pierce’s character. This method requires researchers to “be fully cognizant of [their] philosophical sensibility and theoretical assumptions” (p. 594).
To begin, I familiarized myself with the data by re-watching the show. As I watched, I considered how my background in Afrofuturism and womanism influenced by readings of the text and searched for instances I may have missed because of those inclinations. Initial codes included items like, body not her own; normalcy vs. meta; stubborn teenager trope; standing her ground; and forced respectability. After the initial coding process, I looked for patterns of shared meaning, “summaries of the range of meaning in the data related to a particular topic or ‘domain’ of discussion” (Braun & Clarke, 2019, p. 592). From this analysis, I found that Jennifer consistently negates respectability politics by refusing to adhere to adult, school, or worldly expectations of Black girls and that this refusal allowed space for her to unleash her imaginative and activist identities unburdened by outside restriction.

Author

• Stephanie R Toliver, University of Colorado - Boulder