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The first chapter presents the theoretical framework of this book by foregrounding structural violence, highlighting the nexus between culturally approved hegemonic female- specific power and the reproduction of gender inequality. It looks through the prism of symbolic violence and the way its perceived ordinariness, normality, or blandness is implicated in its misrecognition among school officials and the entire student body. It is especially devoted to chronicling the anthropological theoretical claims shaping the ethnographic data presented in this book, especially as they are related to the society’s major social categories: race, class, and particularly the intersectionality of race and gender. It is here that the author begins to propose a theory of gender-specific competition in which the often hidden and/or misrecognized objective of female competition is to lose—in order to win.

The third chapter follows the ethnographical narrative of one of the girls of the study, Nadine. Specifically, it examines the role of language in class and racialized intra-/inter gender issues between and among the Black, White and biracial study participants and their unending quest for status and normalcy. This is done by chronicling how a Black girl’s physical response to being called two of the vilest racial and gender terms—the n-word and the b-word—in the same sentence lead immediately to a 5-day suspension, while the White girl who uttered the words was deemed blameless in the conflict.

The second chapter provides a historical and contemporary overview of the internal structure of the school and the larger community in which it is embedded. It chronicles how today’s inequality in what one researcher identifies as “the promised land” (that is, suburbia) replicates the larger social, cultural, and economic forces that are implicated in the school’s academic practices and racial and gender expectations. Further, it is in this chapter that the author’s “nomadic subjectivities” and positionalities as an ethnographer are recorded. It relates specifically how the study was conducted and highlights the problems of obtaining the population of Black and White female students without the perceptions of teachers, school administrators, and parents.

The seventh chapter follows Ally as it reveals how a tall, self-identified, slightly overweight “good” White girl, longs to embody and reflect the idealized, hegemonic, gender-specific image affiliated with (elite) White women: beautiful, blond, petite and very thin. Her desire to embody elite Whiteness is so strong that she developed an eating disorder and was compelled to spend time in an appropriate clinic. Her unhealthy relationship with food continued during the study and was manifested in her inability to watch others eat, including her friends in the school cafeteria.

The Introduction recounts the experiences of the author in the study of racialized female-specific bullying, competition, and aggression in Black and White girls at the Underground Railroad High School. Describing a number of girls, the author demonstrates the tension between the two groups that is perpetuated by existing social norms and their social environment. It details the overall workings of the book in its examination of gender, race, and violence within the social sphere of schools.

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.

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.