Black teenage girls are often negatively represented in national and global popular studies, either as being “at risk” for teenage pregnancy, obesity, or sexually transmitted diseases, or as helpless victims of inner city poverty and violence. These pervasive popular representations often portray Black adolescents’ consumer and leisure culture as corrupt, uncivilized, and pathological. In her insightful new study She’s Mad Real (New York University Press), Oneka LaBennett '94 draws on more than a decade of researching teenage West Indian girls in the Flatbush and Crown Heights sections of Brooklyn to argue that Black youth are, in fact, strategic consumers of…