“I feel like . . . because there are so [few] Black people on campus . . . I’ve noticed that other races get more, like, special attention in class,” Destiny said. “Like, if they’re struggling or like, if they want to see the teacher after class, I noticed that the teacher will be more willing to help them after class.”
“What do they say to the Black girls?” I asked.
“Usually they’ll say something like, ‘Well, you can stop by for ten or fifteen minutes, but you know, I’m not going to wait after school for an hour or something.’ You know, and it’s like . . . shoot . . . they just did that for the Asian girl . . . There’s a lot of, like, Indian people there, and they’ll stay after school till like five [o’clock], doing extra work or working on an extra project that the teacher gave them to do, and then everybody else will be there for ten or fifteen minutes just to talk. And I tried to talk to my geometry teacher after school and she really rushed me . . . and she didn’t even have anywhere to go. She just wanted to rush me to hurry up and get me out of the classroom. And I was like, ‘Well, never mind, I’ll just see you in class.’”
I asked how that made her feel.
“I don’t know . . . I didn’t like that. I should be able to go to you for help if you’re a good teacher.”
To be ignored is traumatic. Without speaking to this teacher, I do not know whether or not it was her intention to rush Destiny from her classroom. However, for Destiny, this signaled that she does not have the same opportunities as other students in her class—at least not at that school. At sixteen, she was already taking advanced placement courses and had expressed an interest in robotics, engineering, and art. She was an articulate communicator and mentioned that she had been taking trigonometry—before she found herself in juvenile hall, for what was (at the time of our discussion) the fifth time in six months. Once she was labeled as a “juvenile delinquent,” the quality and rigor of her education greatly declined, a function of the curriculum and instruction offered at the facility where she was confined. I asked if the teachers in her juvenile detention school responded to her differently, knowing that her learning skills were more developed than those of the other girls in her classes.
“Yeah, they know,” she said.
“Have you ever received any different assignments?” I asked.
“I’ll finish my work before everyone else because I know what I’m doing. [Then the teacher] gives me something completely different to work on—like a poster to put up in her class. Like, it gives me something to do in class, but it’s not furthering anything.”
It was busy work. And Destiny knew it.
“I really don’t like being in school [in juvenile hall]. I don’t like the teacher-student relationships,” Destiny offered. “[One of the] teachers . . . she’s like, really stubborn and so it’s hard . . . Sometimes I’ll ask a question . . . if I have a question, she’s like, ‘You already know that, you’re just trying to get attention.’ And I’m like, ‘No, I’m really asking.’ I’ve gotten kicked out of class like three times for that . . . and she’s like, ‘You’re being really annoying.’”
“For asking a question?” I clarified.
“Yeah, and I’m like . . .” Destiny shook her head slowly back and forth.
You’re being really annoying. Calling a student “annoying” for asking questions is not only a demonstration of lowered expectations, it is also not effective in fostering student achievement. Later, I spoke with this teacher about her philosophy of discipline, specifically asking how she understood and managed classroom disruptions in the controlled environment of juvenile hall.
“Well, I have to say that [the teachers] enjoy a really good relationship with our particular sets of [institutional] staff—and we’ve worked on that and tried to cultivate that, so that I think its kind of a seamless experience in terms of what the girls understand as expectations for behavior in the classroom, as well as on the unit,” she said. “We have established a positive reward system with our students for not only academic behavior but [also] personal behavior in the classroom, and as a result, the [institutional] staff has created an offset of that. Kids are motivated, not just because of our reward system, but because of their reward system. That’s number one. Number two, I’ve made my expectations—and I think [the other teachers] have made their expectations—really clear, not only to the kids but to the staff. And our staff agrees with that, and so they support us, wholeheartedly . . . And we have high standards in our classroom—there’s not a lot of acting out. And if there is acting out, it is dealt with immediately.”
“Who typically takes responsibility for dealing with the girls who act out?” I asked.
“In the classroom? It’s me. On the other hand, I can make recommendations as to whether a student needs to be kept in the room or lose privileges on the unit . . . or whatever. And I even have a system—there are small infractions, where there’s no loss of privileges, [and] there’s not-so-small infractions, where they’re gonna get a little bit of a write-up to go into the file.”
“So what would you consider a small infraction and a not-so-small infraction?” I asked.
“A small infraction is like talking when they’re not supposed to be talking or taking other people off task . . . the slip of [a] curse word when they know better. A not-so-small infraction is when a kid deliberately is being disruptive . . . continually being disruptive, being oppositional, you cannot be in my classroom and intentionally take up air and space. You can be bewildered; I get that. But you can’t sit there and decide that you’re not going to do something. You have to be participatory even on the most fundamental level. So if I have a child who is in some kind of anguish, I don’t expect them to do their work. If they’re in a surly mood and they’ve been so for a week, they’re not going to be tolerated, actually, for very long. And I will tell them, and warn them, and then if they start escalating, or trying to take other people off work or being totally disrespectful, then I’ll do a write-up for the file. And then if they really get bad . . . I’ve had two girls at the same time who were violent and throwing things around and destroying property . . . that’s when I get the school suspension in place. They’re taken out of the classroom for a couple of days, and they’re either isolated [here] or sent down to another unit for isolation for a couple of days until they’re ready to conform.”
While she had developed her own rubric for mediating the behavior of troubled girls, her interpretation of what was acceptable was largely absent a rigorous analysis of how she came to determine whether someone was “intentionally taking up air and space” (e.g., sitting quietly and not participating in class) or why she had a adopted a punishment-or-reward system that presented young women in this classroom with a narrow set of options regarding their supposed rehabilitation. I noticed the specific emphasis this teacher placed on the issue of tolerance—primarily the behavior that she would not tolerate. She was not the only one reflecting on this concept.
“It’s really weird,” Destiny continued. “I don’t have a lot of tolerance [in my juvenile detention classroom] because it’s like I’m not learning anything in the class and when I am trying to ask a question, I’m being ‘annoying’ and ‘trying to get attention,’ and . . . I don’t know, I don’t like that.”
Who would?
“I feel like it’s just the relationship between the teacher and the student,” Destiny said. “Because, like, the teachers [in detention] know that we’re just going to be here temporarily, so I feel like they don’t make sure that we’re really learning. Like me, personally, [I’m not] really learning anything, and so I think, like, people aren’t going to take school seriously here if we’re not getting paid attention to, like our learning.”
It seemed to me that Destiny and her teacher were affected by the “hype” of inferior ability, which facilitated a learning environment marred by low expectations.
Jazzy, a sixteen-year-old girl whom I met in the psychiatric “special needs” unit o
f a juvenile detention center, had a critique of her primary school’s dress code, but her assessment of the policy was cloaked in rhetoric—the kind that reflected negative perceptions and judgments of the norms in her community, rather than a simple critique of the policy itself.
“I think the Black girls, they just dress more ratchet,” she said. “Not trying to say it like that, but they be dressing in all those wild colors and just trying to be seen. I’m a more conservative girl, like I don’t gotta wear all that to be cute, but they don’t care what they got on. They just want to be [in] ghetto fashion, and that affects them. . . . But they grew up with that mentality, so it’s like, we don’t know what make them think like that.”
Internalized racial oppression is “the process by which Black people internalize and accept, not always consciously, the dominant White culture’s oppressive actions and beliefs toward Black people (e.g., negative stereotypes, discrimination, hatred, falsification of historical facts, racist doctrines, White supremacists ideology), while at the same time rejecting the African worldview and cultural motifs.”50 For Black women and girls, internalized racial oppression is also gendered.
Black women and girls, especially those in fragile circumstances, absorb widely accepted distortions of Black American feminine identity (that they are less intelligent, hypersexual, loud, sassy, “ghetto,” or domestic), and it undermines their healthy development and performance in school.51 In combination with oppressive patriarchal ideologies, internalized gendered racial oppression acknowledges that Black women and girls may appropriate behaviors and ideologies that reflect self-loathing or degradation, reinforcing the very notions of Black feminine inferiority that deny their full humanity.52 Black girls are quickly cast as undisciplined deviants who reflect the most negative stereotypes of Black femininity. The punitive and marginalizing responses from teachers and others with Black girls under their charge go unchallenged as justified or even necessary. The ways that internal and external oppression play out in intimate spaces—in families, friendships, and relationships—is a book unto itself. This book focuses primarily on how learning institutions and the people working in them don’t recognize this dynamic, how this results from a widespread lack of awareness, and how all of us might reimagine and construct different paths for Black girls by listening to them and learning from their experiences.
For Jazzy, while school was “easy,” she carried a belief that her teachers did not have a vested interest in her success. This made her feel that she needed to pursue other options. She described her “normal school” as a rowdy place where children regularly fought, teachers were distracted, and she and her friends were tempted to do harmful things to themselves and to others for money.
That year, the school Jazzy had attended before being sent to the juvenile detention center had a student population that was 29 percent African American, 55 percent Latino, 8 percent Asian, and less than 2 percent White. The school’s physical condition, according to its School Accountability Report Card, was “poor,” with gas leaks and mechanical and sewer conditions that required repair. More than 85 percent of the students in this school were classified as socioeconomically disadvantaged. Only 62 percent of Black students in the senior class completed their high school graduation requirements. The school’s suspension rate was more than twice that of the district, and its expulsion rate was three times higher than that of the district or the state.
“I don’t know, all my friends . . . we’re all addicted to fighting,” she said. “We got to rob somebody so we can have money in our pockets, ’cause it’s not a lot of opportunities out there for us. Like, we could get jobs at [the youth outreach programs] and stuff, but it’s only going to last so long, and it takes so long to get that job. What we going to do in the meantime?”
Jazzy’s statement “it’s not a lot of opportunities for us” brings to life the experience behind the numbers. Nationwide, in 2013 the unemployment rate for Black youth was the highest of all groups, and it remained so through 2014.53 In California, Black youth had the lowest high school graduation rate (59 percent), which seemed to have an overall negative impact on their employment opportunities: The unemployment rate for Black Californians in 2014 was 14.6 percent, much higher than rates for White (8.3 percent) and Latino (9.9 percent) Californians.54 Notwithstanding her illegal grind for money, Jazzy wanted to lead a productive life, and she knew that education was an important element of that journey.
“I honestly can say that when I was on the run from the system, I really wanted to go to school,” she said.* “It was upsetting me that I couldn’t go to school ’cause I cut my [electronic ankle monitor] off.”
Being “on the run” is a reference to turning off her court-ordered electronic monitoring device.
Jazzy admitted that when she wasn’t in school, there were greater temptations that would occupy her time.
“All I did was go rob or fight somebody, and [it took] up so much time to do all that,” she said. “You gotta go meet up with the person you fighting, you gotta call your friends . . . that takes all day!”
Violence produces violence. If she was fighting, it was likely in response to not feeling safe herself.
So I asked her, “Did you feel safe in school?”
“Well, my [art] school was different,” she said in reference to a school she’d attended previously. “It wasn’t like all the other schools. Like, they wasn’t so much focused on disciplining you, because they wanted you to express your creativity, like, they wanted you to teach them the way that you wanted to learn . . . We used Khan Academy on our computers . . . we had those computers and stuff [and] it brought us up to the level we on . . . so the teacher knew what level we was on. The other school, they be cussing at the teacher, throwing stuff around in the class. Like, really, I was the only girl that was doing my work in class. Everybody else was arguing [and] about . . . to fight. I’m like, ‘Oh my God. I gotta be here?’”
“Like, in class?” I asked.
“In class, yeah,” she replied.
It’s not uncommon for educators, parents, and community stakeholders to argue that girls (of any racial or ethnic affiliation) who get into trouble in school and end up leaving “bring it on themselves.” For example, they may say that these girls are “unruly,” “talk back” to teachers and principals, fight each other, show up to school “half dressed,” and display an overall lack of self-respect or respect for others. These are the “bad girls.” “These girls are out of control,” adults say.
Control is an operative word that carries great meaning and consequences for the girls who are deemed to lack it. Girls who challenge authority are often told that they are “wild” or problematic—sometimes to the point that they will internalize these ideas and echo them as if they were born of their own consciousness. Like Jazzy, who struggled to “other” herself out of “ratchetness,” or Destiny, who tried to make sense of being called annoying for wanting to learn.
What does it mean to suggest that Black girls dress more “ratchet” or that they ascribe to an aesthetic that negatively impacts how they are received when they go to school? What is the mentality (e.g., taking on an oppositional gaze or posture) that makes being seen so important to them? Listening to Jazzy and Destiny with a deeper awareness of the historical and social factors at work, school leaders just might conclude that policies that fail to interrogate what is “disruptive” behavior in class, overtly marginalize so-called ghetto fashion, or mandate other punitive actions in response to Black girls’ expression of cultural norms are harmful. They might begin to ponder what would happen if parents and schools worked together to construct a set of norms that wouldn’t confuse or mislead girls, but would instead elevate everyone’s consciousness.
Mia explained that in her experience, sometimes schools don’t reach out to parents or address the learned behavior of students because they’re afraid to do so.
“A lot of times, the teachers are scared to send you to the principal
’s office,” she said. “It’s not like back in the day. [Kids will] throw a chair at you. They’ll come and punch you if they really feel like it. One girl spit on a lady ’cause she was like, ‘Go to the principal’s office’ and whoop-tee-whoop. She didn’t, like, spit in her face, but she spit on her. That’s just hella nasty, but . . . other times, they’ll be like, ‘Sit out until you’re calm, and then you can just come back in’ because they’re just too scared of you.”
“Why do you think the teachers are scared?” I asked her.
“Because sometimes . . . I mean, our parents is like us, you know? Our parents get down just like us. This is how we’re raised. So if we see them come after school, we could easily just beat her up. Somebody could just jump her, even shoot her if it got that serious, you know? Like anybody could see her in her car, see where she live, and follow her home. I mean, it ain’t that hard, you know?”
Again, Mia was harking back to a familiar concept. Children emulate the behavior of parents, who somewhere along the way made an observation that this behavior yields results, or at least the one they might be looking for at the moment: perceived respect that is in fact fear, whether provoked or latent. Black students’ academic achievement differs on the whole, a result of institutions and curricula that have historically reinforced unequal opportunity, racism, and oppression, as well as a result of peer pressure and other factors.55 Parental expectations regarding the academic successes of their children are also important to a student’s high performance.56 While there is little consensus on how to define or measure “parental involvement,” those who have researched the topic agree that parental impact can be felt in the school as well as at home.57
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