Morgan, Marcyliena. “No Woman No Cry: Claiming African American Women’s Place.” Reinventing Identities: The Gendered Self in Discourse. Eds. Mary Bucholtz, A. C. Lang, and Laurel A. Sutton. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. 27-45. Print.

In this chapter Marcyliena Morgan analyzes thress different cites of African American female discourse use: 1) children’s play, 2) adolescent girls’ verbal activities, and 3) adult interaction. She contests the notion that Black vernacular is male constructed and dominated, and that is only in reaction to racial oppression.

Through a cross-generational analysis of Black female discourse practices Morgan concludes that her illustrations of how African American girls, young women, and women grow and function as core social actors shows that they are a part of the vernacular culture, not at the periphery. She also theorizes that their identity is tied to the construction of what she calls a cool social face (41).

Cool Social Face

Social face is an impression formed of a person based on her or his self-presentation (Goffman 1967). The African American cultural concept that both critiques and symbolizes social face is the notion of being cool – “current and trendsetting, calm, detached, yet in control (cf. Major 1994; Smitherman 1994) (31). Morgan defines a “cool face” as “the ability to enact subtle symbolic cultural practices with eloquence, skill, wit, patience, and precise timing” (31).

Morgan asserts that Black women and girls protect and maintain this face though language games such as he-said-she-said games, instigating, and conversational signifying (41). Morgan urges scholars and analysts to reanalyze the research that has defined sociolinguistics and conduct new research that includes women as social actors.