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Following 9/11, one of the most contested and complicated terms was the concept of home, both as a constructed nation state and an excessively romanticized belonging converged under both governmental and social spheres. In the second chapter, this concept of belonging is focused on by how the state and its citizens produce and act on this notion of belonging. The popular and visual culture translation of this state- mandated “homeland” facilitated the recategorization of all of America— ostensibly united and strengthened— into two populations: those who belonged and those who did not.

The fourth chapter chronicles how one participant, Brittany, rejected her presumed White biological identity and opted, instead, to pass for Black. Compelled to leave her Black peers in the core city and live with her father in the suburban community because her custodial parent, her mother, feared that her daughter is becoming Black, Brittany defied hegemonic normality and was consigned to a non privileged social space, not so much by her peers but by the adults at the school, as they describe her, “she talks like a Black girl.”

The fifth chapter presents the narrative of a middle class Black girl, Keyshia, who is the former BFF of the Black girl, Nadine, whose narrative is presented in chapter three. Unlike her former friend whose Black identity is never challenged, this student sees herself as not quite “Black enough.” In response to this perception, she appears to embrace her lower class Black friend by stealing her boyfriend and opting to disengage from her usual stellar academic performance, a change so profound that everyone notices, but no one intervenes or offers support.

The conclusion of Downed by Friendly Fire briefly revisits the claims of symbolic and structural violence made in the earlier chapters, harvesting the narratives of the study participants for evidence of how each of them resists or embodies (or sometimes both embodies and resists) the imagined banality of normalcy. Moreover, it is where the authors makes the final case for the excavation, resuscitation and rehabilitation of violence—by another name.

The sixth chapter, following Chloe, details how a biracial student misrecognizes the violence embodied in socially approved normalcy and fails to connect her social problems to the structural violence endemic to the race and gender subordination documented in this book. Statusitis and her insatiable quest for hegemonic normalcy, especially regarding her hair, leads her to a kind of depression that is so severe she often finds it impossible to go to school.