Most parents, regardless of racial or ethnic affiliation or economic status, want their children to succeed in school. Black parents have expectations for their children’s academic achievement that are similar to those of White parents.58 Structural inequalities (underfunded schools, fewer resources to support positive educational outcomes, less access to quality early education), past negative school experiences, and their children’s current experiences may negatively impact their confidence in their child’s ability to be a high performer.59 Black parents who actively talk about school at home may have children who perform better in schools, as opposed to those who just engage directly in the school or simply place a high value on academic achievement, but parental involvement by itself is not a predictor of positive student outcomes.60 While it has been found that Black parents who are more involved in their children’s education have children who perform better in school, Black student achievement is largely a function of the expectations and interactions they share with teachers.61
This had not yet been explored with Mia. Her family prioritized respect over most other things, which led to performances of power that got her into trouble.
“My family is a certain way,” Mia shared. “They always be like, if some girl call me a bitch, I have to beat her ass, or else they’re going to beat my ass. But then, if I skip school, I’ma get my ass beat. So I’m like, okay, I got to go to school, but if somebody call me something, like a bitch or something, then I got to beat they ass too.”
This was Mia struggling to make sense of her family’s confounding expectations for her as a student—and as a girl. To be called a “bitch” was an insult because its roots are derogatory. There are certainly better ways to handle the situation than to fight, but I could understand why she was expected to stand up for herself. In her own way, she was asserting her humanity. Mia couldn’t understand why teachers were so unforgiving, but she later admitted that these kinds of power struggles had become so commonplace that some of the students felt that they had to assert their own independence everywhere they went, even if it broke the rules, to prove that they could actually hold some aspect of power—some amount of control—in school.
Mia continued, “But sometimes I feel like we giving ourselves a bad rep. Like everybody say that White people think that Black girls is ratchet. You know, stuff like that . . . but most of the time, we are doing things that [put] us in that category. You know what I’m sayin’?”
Mia described behavior in the classroom, such as playing music in class and cursing at the teacher, that would be unacceptable to me and to most educators. But I could not help reflecting upon her words: “We are doing things that [put] us in that category [ratchet].” Her willingness to embrace personal accountability (“we give ourselves a bad rep”) can be read as an asset, but I considered the other factors that lead teenagers to push limits. Mia’s understanding didn’t consider the way in which Black girls’ actions are particularly subject to scrutiny and public judgment. When Mia said, “Everybody say that White people think that Black girls is ratchet,” she was accepting society’s marginalization of Black girls as valid—but she was obviously conflicted about it. Her conflict seemed nestled in the idea that she and her peers had to accept as truth this automatic characterization of them as “ratchet”—that they had to behave in ways that provided evidence for this claim just because “everybody” said or believed it was true.
Absent a lens that factors in the forces constructing and reinforcing a “ratchet” identity, the adults charged to care for and educate Black girls may only see them as “self-harmers” who bring drama upon themselves.62 And as a function of their own internalized, gendered racial oppressions, Black girls who are rarely offered any alternative conception may also believe this of themselves.
Permission to Fail
The ghetto’s impact on the student identity of Black girls also plays out in the classroom as neglect, or what Gloria Ladson-Billings has referred to as granting Black children “permission to fail.”63 In writing about Shannon, a young Black girl in the first grade, Ladson-Billings reflected on seeing Shannon routinely and intentionally refuse to complete a writing assignment.
“I ain’t writin’ nuttin’!” Shannon had declared, to which her teacher responded, “That’s okay. Maybe you’ll feel like writing tomorrow.”
But it was not okay. To this point, Ladson-Billings wrote, “Although most students were encouraged to write each day, Shannon was regularly permitted to fail. Her refusal to write was not just stubbornness but a ploy to cover up her inability to read, or more specifically, her lack of phonetic awareness.”64
Black girls in classrooms across the country have been granted permission to fail by the implicit biases of teachers that lower expectations for them. I doubt this teacher intended to lower her expectations for Shannon or treat her differently than her peers. It is safe to assume that this teacher likely believed that she was responding to Shannon with patience and respect. Indeed, teachers, like the one leading Shannon’s class, are likely committed to supporting the education of all of their students, but their unconscious associations between Black girls and underperformance might lead them to assume that these girls are not capable of performing. This is speculative; there is a dearth of research that actually explores the implicit bias and attributional stereotyping affecting Black girls in schools. Still, it is important to remember that implicit bias is often inconsistent with a person’s stated values, so a teacher may believe that he or she treats all students the same even while aspects of their engagement are reflecting latent biases. The belief that it was “okay” for Shannon not to participate in the activities was facially just a decision to allow her to engage when she was “ready.” However, the determination of her readiness was a function of how the educator read her behavior and interpreted her attitude toward learning. Once again, the external is compounded by reflex: internalized, gendered racial oppressions give Black girls permission to lower expectations for themselves.
Today, Black girls across the country are struggling to make meaning of their status as Black, female, and disproportionately represented in high-poverty, low-performing schools. They use terms like “ghetto” or “ratchet” to describe their condition and are actively engaged in the creation of counternarratives that allow them to move through life with dignity—but it’s not easy.
Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron note in Reproduction in Society, Education and Culture, “Every power which manages to impose meanings and to impose them as legitimate by concealing the power relations which are the basis of its force, adds its own specifically symbolic force to those power relations.”65 Schools serve a greater social function than simply developing the rote skills of children and adolescents. As Black girls become adolescents, the influence of schools is critical to their socialization. This is especially important given that schools often serve as surrogates for influences that might otherwise be lacking in the lives of economically and socially marginalized children. Coupled with increasingly rampant suspensions and expulsions and a minimal emphasis (in both curriculum and school climate) on cultural competency, trauma sensitivity, or gender responsiveness, too many of our schools—both those in the community and those operating in penal environments—marginalize Black girls, especially if their curiosity and critical thinking are misconstrued as a challenge to authority.
Asking the Tough Questions
By the time I met fifteen-year-old Faith in a juvenile detention school classroom, I was already aware of how educational and juvenile justice systems routinely fail our girls (a subject explored further in Chapter 4). We were talking about the types of programs that she would like to see implemented in her community when she slumped in her chair and let her fingers trace the perimeter of the desk. Then she asked me an important question.
“You know how they say this is a man’s world?” she asked.
I nodded and replied, “Yep.”
“I don’t like that,�
�� she said, staring into my eyes.
“Neither do I,” I said softly.
We shared a nervous laugh, but then I asked, “I know why it bothers me,” I said. “But why does it bother you?”
“Because I feel like . . . it shouldn’t be just one person’s world. Like, what you mean, it’s a man’s world? Like, what does a strong girl get out of that? Like, how is this a man’s world? I just don’t get it. I feel like it should be equal, and I don’t feel like that’s equal. I feel like boys . . . men got more rights than girls, and that shouldn’t be right.”
In Faith’s eyes—and her words—was a rejection of patriarchy and the idea that she was inferior just because she had been born a Black girl. All around her were signs that she was supposed to adhere to an imposed hierarchy reinforcing that she was less important than adults, less important than boys, less important than kids who came from families with money, and—because of her sexual identity, which she described as gay—less important than heterosexual girls. Faith was fighting not just for her right to voice her opinions but also to be seen and respected. All while being a Black girl and a ward of the court.
As we talked, I noticed the posters in the classroom. My eyes roved over the letters and posters above the whiteboard until they settled on one in particular, a photograph of President Obama and his family. In that picture, the Obamas look “official”—clustered together, well dressed, and smiling directly into the camera. There they were, a Black family of the highest privilege. Most Black Americans looked upon that photo with great pride, particularly in 2012, when Obama was beginning his second term as president. But at that moment, all I could see was their juxtaposition to Faith and other girls like her who had suffered from a lifetime of neglect and harm—so much so that they had learned to do harmful things to other people. The Obamas’ smiles felt inappropriate in an institution that provided so little response to girls with such significant needs. In that juvenile hall, the image and the privilege it represented felt unreal, out of touch, and unfair.
For Faith, whose prominent tattoos displayed a nickname given to her by a deceased loved one, prospects for employment would be complicated and radically different than the young women who smiled down at her from the photograph hanging in that detention center classroom. Even their manifestation of “family” was different from the reality for the girl sitting with me and describing her experience of being expelled from eighth grade for trying to create a family by “making a gang.”
Faith vehemently opposed being treated like she was an inferior human being, and she rejected structures that supported this treatment as legitimate. In her, I recognized a spark that could initiate a vision for making conditions equitable for girls, but it was hidden behind a lot of pain.
I asked her what she felt would improve her experiences in juvenile hall. “They should make this a learning environment to make you understand that [juvenile hall] ain’t the place. And I feel like, they say they making this seem like it ain’t the place by making it harder. That just make it hard. It don’t make it that I don’t want to come back here, ’cause half the time, people still come back. . . . I just feel like, you should make it helpful. . . . They don’t make it helpful by making it hard on people, ’cause you got it hard out [in the community], too.”
Faith felt that the institutions with which she was most familiar—schools, juvenile detention centers, group homes, and social service agencies—were, individually and collectively, intentionally disruptive to her ability to establish self-worth and to her ability to challenge those whose actions she felt were oppressive.
“If it’s a student and teacher, the student’s automatically in trouble, ’cause it’s the teacher. Like jail, if it’s an argument with me and staff, I feel like, I’m going to lose, period. ’Cause I damn near don’t have rights no more ’cause I’m in jail. So I feel like, in school, if you get in an argument with a teacher, you damn near lost, ’cause that’s her job. You know? I see if the teacher was like beating on you or being like racist or something like that, or homophobic or something like that. But most of the time, over an argument, you out. It’s his class. Like, get out! They won automatic. Like I feel like they go off the teacher first, before they go off the child. ’Cause, like, you a child! I don’t give a damn about being no child. You still not going to talk to me that way. I feel like, I don’t go off ’cause you an adult. I’m a child? I shut up? No. I feel like, I’m human, you human, so I talk just like you talk. If you disrespectful, I’m going to be disrespectful too. . . .
“I’m human. Just a human being, like this whole world . . . and then, I feel like, when you question somebody, it’s wrong ’cause [they’re] an adult. I feel like, why I can’t ask a question? ’cause you an adult? What do ‘adult’ mean? Like, that don’t mean nothing to me. That’s just a word to me. That don’t mean nothing to me . . . I’m supposed to shut up and not ask questions? I can ask questions if I want to. That’s why I got a mouth. My auntie and my godmama said, if you don’t get it, or you don’t understand, you ask a question. And that’s what I do, I ask the question. And I always do that. I always question. And then sometimes, teachers get mad off of that. Questioning them about why they doing this in they classroom or why they doing that . . . I don’t understand how you get frustrated off of a question if I’m not being disrespectful . . . why you get mad?”
Faith’s curiosity was infectious. Why do adults get mad when strong girls ask questions?
“They say I’m disrespectful. That’s my label, disrespectful, ’cause I always got something to say. . . . [They keep] telling me, ‘Sometimes you got to bite your tongue.’ . . . I don’t know how to do that, though.”
2
A BLUES FOR BLACK GIRLS WHEN THE “ATTITUDE” IS ENUF
Little Sally Walker, sitting in a saucer.
Rise, Sally, Rise! Wipe your weeping eyes,
Put your hands on your hips, and let your backbone slip . . .
In 2007, six-year-old Desre’e Watson was placed in handcuffs by the Avon Park Police Department for having a bad tantrum in her Florida classroom. According to the police, Desre’e was kicking and scratching, which presented a threat to the safety of others in the school, specifically her classmates and her teacher. According to police chief Frank Mercurio, “When there is an outburst of violence, we have a duty to protect and make that school a safe environment for the students, staff and faculty. That’s why, at this point, the person was arrested regardless what [sic] the age.”1
When Desre’e was arrested, she became a symbol of all that was wrong with zero-tolerance policies in the United States. Despite her petite, six-year-old frame, Desre’e was perceived as a threat to public safety. Many were outraged, but most seemed to dismiss it as an isolated incident. Then other incidents began to reach the media.
In 2012, six-year-old Salecia Johnson was arrested in Georgia for throwing books, toys, and wall hangings, amounting to a “tantrum” that was again determined by the school authorities to be an incident worthy of police intervention.2 Not only was Salecia handcuffed during this “horrifying” incident, she was actually hauled to the police station, an experience that left the kindergartner—according to her mother, Constance Ruff—waking at night screaming, “They’re coming to get me!”3 This episode was followed by one in 2013 involving eight-year-old Jmiyha Rickman, an autistic child who suffered from depression and separation anxiety.4 Her hands, feet, and waist were restrained when she was arrested in her Illinois elementary school after throwing a “bad tantrum” and allegedly trying to hit a school resource officer.5 Following her removal from campus, Jmiyha—despite her special needs—was held in the police car for almost two hours. And there were others—most of which did not make the nightly news.
Today, Black children are 18 percent of preschool enrollment, but 42 percent of preschool-age children who have had one out-of-school suspension, and 48 percent of preschool-age children who have experienced more than one out-of-school suspension.6 Betwee
n 2002 and 2006, per-district suspension rates of Black girls increased by 5.3 percent compared to a 1.7 percent increase for Black boys.7 Among the nation’s ten highest-suspending school districts, Black girls with one or more disability experienced the highest suspension rate of all girls.8
The experiences of Desre’e, Salecia, and Jmiyha represent the worst and most egregious applications of punitive school disciplinary practices. However, from coast to coast, Black girls tell stories of being pushed out of school and criminalized for falling asleep, standing up for themselves, asking questions, wearing natural hair, wearing revealing clothing, and in some cases engaging in unruly (although not criminal or delinquent) acts in school—mostly because what constitutes a threat to safety is dangerously subjective when Black children are involved.
What’s happening is about more than whether or not girls are sitting in the back of a police car because of a tantrum. This chapter explores the discipline disparities that affect Black girls, and the gaps that are generally fueled by three core issues: the perceived “bad attitude” of Black girls, zero-tolerance policies and other highly punitive school practices relying on instruments of surveillance that conflate student conflict with criminal activity, and the criminalization of Black girls’ appearance, absent any actions or behaviors that threaten the safety of students or teachers on campus.
“They’re Not Docile”
I once asked a classroom of college students how they would describe the Black girl “attitude.”
“Neck rolling,” one student yelled out.
“Eye-rolling, finger snapping,” said another student.
“Just ghetto,” said another.
It’s infamous, that attitude. Even as you read this—no matter your race, background, or ethnicity—your mind is likely floating toward an image of a brown-skinned young woman with her arms folded, lips pursed, and head poised to swivel as she gives a thorough “eye-reading” and then settles into either an eye roll or a teeth-sucking dismissal. Or maybe you imagined her head tilted, her eyebrows raised, and her hands on her hips (one or two, depending on the circumstance). Or possibly you envisioned her face with a scowl, her lips slightly turned up to show just a few teeth.
Pushout Page 6
