Pushout
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Paris wondered why her gender identity and expression would matter. I saw it as an illustration of how gender has become the third primary “consciousness” informing the experiences of Black women and girls.
Triple Consciousness in the Ghetto
Black racial identity in America has been a function of many things: a pseudo-scientific racial hierarchy that rendered Black people inhuman, violent political forces that enslaved and further dehumanized people of African descent, a sociocultural order that enabled an economic and intellectual hierarchy to take root, and spatial dynamics that structured a physical environment and opportunities for movement around the aforementioned hierarchies.
The ghetto is among the spatial dynamics that greatly influence a common, collective interpretation of Black feminine identity in the United States. In American Apartheid, Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton described the ghetto as “a set of neighborhoods that are exclusively inhabited by members of one group, within which virtually all members of that group live.”30 Massey and Denton went on to state that “the emergence of the black ghetto did not happen as a chance by-product of other socioeconomic processes . . . [it was] a series of deliberate decisions to deny black access to urban housing markets and to reinforce their spatial segregation.”31 Other scholars have parsed the ghetto into tiers, defining the slum ghetto as a “zone of minority-group residential dominance denoted by inadequate housing, high morbidity and infant mortality rates, and related social pathologies.”32
However, the isolation and neglect that facilitated ghetto or slumlike conditions for poor Black people in the United States has been present since Black bodies were enslaved, commodified, and traded for public and private use. American plantations established crude manifestations of racial ghettoization: the living spaces for Black field hands were separate, markedly inferior to those of White slave owners, and locations for random but persistent surveillance.33
Though haunted by slavery’s despicable trauma and legacy of exclusion, Black spaces were simultaneously “home” and “public.” In other words, the public nature of Black living spaces was marked by its absence of controlled privacy, reinforcing the idea that Black people were available to the public gaze at all times. This dynamic continues today in streets, buses, schools, and elsewhere. Indeed, this ethos has been extended to many of the learning spaces where the majority of Black children are educated. The public school is constantly subject to a judgmental gaze, externally and from within. This is doubly true given the ever-expanding surveillance of Black and Brown children.
Ghettoized Opportunity
In principle, access to a quality public education is not a gendered right. While the privileges of all women and girls are up against entrenched patriarchy, the selection of which girls are privy to a formal education has always been informed by race and class. Globally, education is by and large recognized as a key pathway out of poverty. However, not every type of education opens up that path, and the quality of education has everything to do with being prepared to thrive as an adult. School resources, the quality of teaching and curriculum, the quality of relationships with parents, and the community network to support all these elements shape the character of formal education. It should be no surprise that low-performing schools are also high-poverty schools that produce higher rates of dropout (as it is traditionally understood) and underperformance among its students, and that high performing schools are often low-poverty ones.*
A dropout is traditionally understood as a person who has made the decision to leave school. While in this book I am challenging how we understand this decision in the context of other conditions, data and other reports cited here refer to “dropouts.”
High-poverty schools are often churning out—or tacitly ignoring—children who are expected to remain poor. Nationwide, about sixteen hundred “dropout factories” are responsible for nearly half of all students who leave high school before earning a diploma and about two-thirds of the students of color who do so.34 About 58 percent of Black students and 50 percent of Latino students who made the decision to leave school were being educated in one of our nation’s high-poverty, low-performing schools.35 This suggests that a higher percentage of Black girls who dropped out of school—and who were likely struggling in school—were also likely to have been attending a low-performing school. Such a path has grave implications for the economic opportunity for these girls.
Destiny, a Black and Latina girl from California, noticed that in many of these low-poverty schools, girls were searching for pathways out of poverty that were not made clear by their educational community.
“I noticed that girls who get caught up in prostitution, they feel like working is more important than anything else,” Destiny said. “So, like, the girls that I know who are prostitutes, I hardly ever see them because they are, like, working all the time . . . It’s better to go to school and get a career, but it’s like, if you can get money, like right then and there, then why would I want to go to school for however many years?”
What is often lost on girls is that the more education a person (of any race) has, the more likely she or he is to be employed in higher-paying jobs.36 The unemployment rate of Black women with less than a high school diploma is 20 percent, while the rate for Black women with a bachelor’s degree or higher is 6 percent.37 Quality education matters.
Since the time when Linda Brown, Daisy Bates, and other Black women and girls stood on the frontlines of the battle to end racial segregation in schools, the educational story of Black girls has become more convoluted—largely because education plays such an important role in the economic opportunity for women and girls. When girls get access to a quality education, they tend to do well. But that is only part of the story.
The educational history of Black girls and how it is understood to this very day reflects an inconsistent and dichotomous narrative. In 1970, only 33 percent of Black women had graduated from high school. Today that proportion of Black women with a high school diploma or higher is 90.5 percent.38 Black women and girls have made tremendous gains in educational attainment—a fact that has been and should continue to be widely celebrated. However, this statistical narrative of progress obscures other narratives that reveal a continued struggle for both academic achievement and anything resembling equality.
The No Child Left Behind Act, the 2001 legislation that reauthorized the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), ushered in an era that prioritized high-stakes testing and established an educational climate that linked assessment of student achievement to the single measure of performance on these tests. According to the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, which has voiced an open critique of the growing reliance on standardized tests, youth of color are disproportionately affected by grade retention (being held back) as a result of this practice.39 Though largely ignored in national discussions about state-level high-stakes standardized testing, Black girls have struggled to perform well on such tests, which inform advancement in school or graduation.40 Performance on national standardized tests also reveals racial disparities among girls.41 These controversial, single measures of knowledge may deter Black girls from continuing on with their education or lead them to internalize that they are not worthy of completing school. They say things like “School’s not for me” or “I was never good at school,” when their performance may actually be impaired by many other factors, including socioeconomic conditions, differential learning styles, the quality of instruction at their schools, the orientation and presentation of questions on the test, their own mental and physical health, and disparities in access to early childhood education.
For those who do make it to college, the story is encouraging but still incomplete. We know that the benefits of an education have grown more for women than for men across all racial groups since 1994.42 Among White Americans, Black Americans, and Hispanic/Latino Americans, there is a gender gap in college enrollment.43 However, when we examine the trends among only women, we f
ind that while college graduation rates have increased among first-time, full-time White, Asian and Latina women, there has been no such increase among Black women.44
So what’s the real story? Are Black girls performing at an unprecedented high level, or are they failing and being marginalized? The answer is: both. And the reason for these competing narratives is complex.
Caricatures of Black femininity are often deposited into distinct chambers of our public consciousness, narrowly defining Black female identity and movement according to the stereotypes described by Pauli Murray as “‘female dominance’ on the one hand and loose morals on the other hand, both growing out of the roles forced upon them during the slavery experience and its aftermath.”45 As such, in the public’s collective consciousness, latent ideas about Black females as hypersexual, conniving, loud, and sassy predominate, even if they make it to college and beyond. Public presentations of these caricatures—via popular memes on social media, in advertising, or in entertainment—prescribe these traits to Black women. However, age compression renders Black girls just as vulnerable to these aspersive representations.
As children or as adults, Black girls are treated as if they are supposed to “know better,” or at least “act like” they know. The assignment of more adultlike characteristics to the expressions of young Black girls is a form of age compression.46 Along this truncated age continuum, Black girls are likened more to adults than to children and are treated as if they are willfully engaging in behaviors typically expected of Black women—sexual involvement, parenting or primary caregiving, workforce participation, and other adult behaviors and responsibilities. This compression is both a reflection of deeply entrenched biases that have stripped Black girls of their childhood freedoms and a function of an opportunity-starved social landscape that makes Black girlhood interchangeable with Black womanhood. It gives credence to a widely held perception and a message that there is little difference between the two.
Thirteen-year-old Mia from California echoed this when she described her own experiences avoiding truancy arrest.
“Half of us look older than our age,” she said nonchalantly. By whose standards?
The legacy of slavery and segregated opportunity socialized punishment and discipline (as opposed to, say, love and opportunity) as an appropriate response to “bad” Black girls who rebelled against normative ideas about proper feminine behavior. The current practices and prevailing consciousness—in homes, neighborhoods, schools, and other places young people occupy—regularly respond to Black girls as if they are fully developed adults. And in turn, the responses to their mistakes follow a similar pattern. Society treats them this way, and our girls believe the hype. And when they do, adults ignore the power dynamics that affect youthful decision making. They also miss the specific ways in which Black girls learn adaptive behaviors—ways of responding to oppressive conditions defined by race, sexuality, class, and gender. Any or all of these may come into play as girls confront growing pains within structures where (their) age is ultimately nothing but a number.
Black women and girls in America are subjected to dormant assumptions about their sexuality, their “anger,” or their “attitude.” They have long understood that their way of engaging with the world—how they talk, how they walk, how they wear their hair, or how they hold their bodies—is subject to scrutiny, especially by those in positions of relative power. They feel the gaze. They intuit its presence. They live with this knowledge in their bodies and subconsciously wrestle with every personal critique of how they navigate their environments.
Poverty matters, too. The idea that Black girls in ghettos behave in ways that cast them as “low-class” places a glass ceiling on their opportunity—a stained glass that obscures their vision of what is possible. The interactions between race, gender, and poverty may block a young woman’s ability to even see her success, particularly if she has been conditioned to respond to her poverty by selling “fruit cocktail.” If Black girls do manage to locate their dream and partner it with an opportunity, the lack of Black female role models in certain professions and the active way in which Black girls are discouraged from pursuing certain professions (e.g., those in the STEM fields) make visioning their futures difficult.
A poor or low-income Black girl might be enrolled in school, but she may not be encouraged to demonstrate her leadership skills on a school sports team or in other areas of school leadership. She may be the first face that greets you in the office or the voice you hear when you call to make an appointment, but her opportunities to break through to the next level or to become a leader are all too often limited or nonexistent. Her senses might even intuit that upward mobility is possible, but if she manages to crack through the ceiling, her mobility will likely be impaired. And, impaired or not, she will still have to navigate the misinformed gaze of Black femininity. She will still feel the pressure to work twice as hard to be respected for her contributions.
Sixty years after Brown v. Board of Education, our nation remains in the throes of defining what a quality, desegregated education looks like for all children. But one thing is certain—the civil rights movement was not about our girls (or our boys) being assigned to racially integrated yet structurally unequal high-poverty and low-performing schools. That struggle was about expanding opportunity, not limiting it.
The real and perceived experience of being a Black female student is informed not only by historical ideas about girls attempting to navigate spaces that have underserved their educational needs but also by how well Black girls have performed against the odds. When asked to describe public school in their own words, girls routinely say that their schools are filled with classrooms and hallways where people “fight” and are disciplined, where security personnel roam the halls, and where they learn about a democracy they don’t experience in school.
Many of the Black girls that I have spoken with perceived their district or community schools as chaotic and disruptive learning spaces in which fighting and arguments were the norm and where adolescents were vying for attention and social status. These conditions led some—like Mia, who was in middle school—to consider going to school a waste of time.
“All the schools . . . like, they’re hecka bad. Like . . . people be smoking up in the gym, and it’s always a fight every single day,” she said.
“They gotta have like four cops in the school building,” she continued. “Like, every single day, all day, ’cause somebody tried to bring a gun, and somebody tried to do something stupid. I don’t know . . . Sometimes, if you’re already like that, and you’re already raised up to be around people like that, like, you just get used to it and you don’t really care, you know? And then you start doing bad.”
We know children mimic behaviors. We also can understand why someone might not want to stay in an environment they consider dangerous.
“I’d just be out,” Mia said. “I wouldn’t be at school. . . . You can’t even really learn. . . . So it ain’t no point in getting up, it ain’t no point in going to school, because you cannot learn—not when everybody’s yelling, not when everybody’s fighting and screaming, throwing erasers and shit at the teacher.”
Fifteen-year-old Shanice, also from California, observed a similar dynamic in her classroom. She said that her classrooms were filled with “loud kids . . . A teacher pass out the work and sit back down. . . . The whole school’s just loud. . . . The kids, they loud. And it’s like, sometimes the teachers don’t care, they ignore it and keep going.”
Only Shanice didn’t see the benefit of playing by the rules if they were going to be broken by everyone around her.
“Say it’s a whole classroom,” she continued. “Say 75 percent of the classroom’s loud, they just talking and on their phones and stuff like that, but the other 25 percent, they quiet, they just sittin’ there like, you know, they not doing nothing. They just sittin’ there quiet . . . Like, they ain’t going to get a higher grade just ’cause they sittin’ there quiet, you k
now?”
Girls like Mia and Shanice draw important connections between their desire to learn and their inability to do so in chaotic learning environments. Across the country, Black girls have repeatedly described “rowdy” classroom environments that prevent them from being able to focus on learning. They also described how the chaotic learning environment has, in some cases, led to their avoidance of school or to reduced engagement in school. In other situations, girls described contentious and negative interactions between teachers and students as the norm. In today’s climate of zero tolerance, where there are few alternatives to punishing problematic student behavior, the prevailing school discipline strategy, with its heavy reliance on exclusionary practices—dismissal, suspension, or expulsion—becomes a predictable, cyclical, and ghettoizing response.
Believing the Hype
The extent to which family traditions and values mirror school expectations is important to the relationship between schools and families, as well as to the external motivation of the student.47 However, Black students’ academic performance is more directly linked to their relationships with teachers, which may be problematic given that Black children are often labeled as “less conforming and more active” than their white counterparts, resulting in interactions with teachers that are “characterized by more criticism and less support.”48 A Seattle study found that even a Black student who “tries to please her teacher, tries to get good grades, and is willing to put up with things she doesn’t like about school may not be rewarded (in terms of higher GPA) in the same way her [European American] classmate would be rewarded.”49 Personal attitudes and biases still inform how a student-teacher relationship develops.
In a conversation with Destiny, who attended a high-achieving large public school in a Bay Area suburb, she shared that in her experience race influences the way teachers respond to students and their learning needs. Her school had a small Black student population, and an even smaller representation among the advanced courses that she was taking.