Pushout by Monique W. Morris

makes the difference for you?” I asked.
    â€œThe difference is the point of respect,” she said. “The football player probably don’t even like me like that. He just sees a big butt. The other people, like, know me inside, but they just want to play around. Like, the football player, he only sees my butt, he doesn’t see my personality.”
    Shamika described a continuous, incessant state of sexual harassment. She was coping, but the adults in her life owe her a safer environment than that—at school and elsewhere.
    â€œLike when I’m walking down Stony Island, literally old men be like . . . trying to hit on me. It’s mostly old men, and they don’t want to say nothing to me when I walk past, but as soon as they turn around and see my butt, they be like, ‘Oh, hold up, shorty. What’s your name? Can you talk to me for a minute?’ Like . . . that’s disrespectful. And then, when I don’t want to talk to them, it be like . . . like two days ago, [a man] was like, ‘Uh, can I talk to you?’ I didn’t feel like talking to him, so I just stayed quiet or whatever. Then, he went ahead and walked past and he was like, ‘Oh, but you got a fat ass though.’ Like, that is so disrespectful. You shouldn’t tell nobody that.”
    I wondered aloud if he had known how old she was.
    â€œNo, they don’t,” she confirmed. “No, and some of them, I tell my age . . . I be like, ‘[I’m] fifteen!’ And they be like, ‘You lying. You look like you’re at least seventeen or eighteen.’ . . . I’m like, ‘I can show you my [high school] ID right now!’”
    Shamika was fifteen years old at the time of our discussion, and she had just described a snapshot from her life under a constant barrage of sexual harassment. Every day, even after she disclosed her age. Every day.
    This is the cloud of abuse and harassment under which many girls who look like Shamika live. This is the climate in which girls are trying to negotiate their safety and discover their identity as students.
    â€œI feel like you can look at somebody’s face and tell, like, if they’re older or they’re younger,” Shai said. “I can look and see, she ain’t nothing but a teenager . . . she’s just tall. People like me, I hit my growth spurt in sixth grade. So, I was in sixth grade looking like I could be eighteen or something . . . it’s like, when I finally got in high school, it got worse.”
    â€œI feel like sometimes they don’t care,” said Charisma. “This guy was twenty-four with kids . . . So then, I was looking at him like, ‘Sir, how old are you?’ He was like twenty-four. I asked him, ‘How old do I look?’ He was like, ‘Nineteen or twenty.’ . . . But in the back of my head, I was like, ‘I do not look that age.’ . . . So then I was like, ‘I’m seventeen.” He was like, ‘We still can’t talk?’ . . . No!”
    Whether in the community or at school, age compression (discussed in Chapter 1) is a phenomenon that is often thrust upon Black girls. However, these girls are girls, not fully developed women in younger bodies. They are adolescents, and like most in their age group, they may test boundaries—particularly with respect to clothing—that are established by those with authority or by institutional rules. Yet they have seen that doing this, the normal stuff of teenagers, can make them targets for exclusionary discipline or additional surveillance. Unless they fight back.
    Transitions
    For Paris in New Orleans, who was transitioning from male to female in high school, the dress code along with the castigation of her identity expression from staff and faculty were a particular nuisance that caused her to question whether her school was a “good fit.”
    â€œEvery day that I came into school, I had to stop by