Pushout

by Monique W. Morris

  In my conversations with girls and young women across the country, it became clear Black girls interpreted their attitude not as a stagnant expression of anger and dissatisfaction. Rather, it lived along a continuum of responses to disrespectful or degrading triggers in their lives—many of which were present in their learning environments. From the hundreds of scenarios that were collected as part of this exploration, specific themes emerged about what was triggering an “attitude” among Black girls. Most common was the notion that an “attitude” was provoked by incidents of disrespect. In other words, these girls saw the “attitude” as a response to suggestions (overt or implicit) that their identity was an inferior one. This was shared with me in different cities, by very different young women between the ages of fifteen and twenty-three, but the theme was consistent.

  “She’s Slow. What’s Wrong with Her?”

  For Shai in Chicago, it was the suggestion that she was not smart.

  “[My school is] predominantly White,” she said. “Okay, I’m terrible in math. So when little Suzie gets the question wrong, it’s like, “Aww . . . you got the question wrong.” It’s funny. When I get a question wrong, it’s like, “Oh, she’s slow. What’s wrong with her?” I get so angry, number one, because I already told them I’m bad at math. Number two, because I’m not slow. Like, don’t call me slow at all. I take my education seriously. Do not call me slow. That’s why I’m at school, to learn. . . . That triggers it. It does not only make me want to fight them, it makes me want to . . . it makes me want to ask them, why would they say something like that? The fact that I’m the only Black kid in the school, it’s like, ‘Oh, are we back in the 1950s now?’”

  Shai’s identity as “the only Black kid in the school” produced a degree of anxiety that she would be received as embodying a lower status than her White counterparts. To her, being called “slow” was a euphemism for “inferior.” Her admitted insecurity about not being good at math could be a true admission of weakness or a reflection of dominant social ideas (which she might have internalized over time) that generally position girls, especially Black girls, as not being good at math. Still, Shai’s negative reaction is more than just a response to the teasing of her peers. It is also in response to the absence of teasing when her White counterpart gets the problem wrong. Suzie is allowed to make mistakes without being labeled as “slow,” but Shai is not. It is the unfairness that triggers Shai, not just her personal frustration about the difficulty of math.

  “She Tried to Put Me in the Corner . . . I’m Just Outspoken”

  For Malaika in the Bay Area, it was the suggestion that she should be quiet in the face of perceived injustice.

  “I always get suspended . . . [ever since] the first grade,” she said. “I told my teacher, ‘Don’t yell at me,’ but she kept talking. I was like, ‘Can you call my mom? You’re yelling at me and I don’t want you yelling at me.’ . . . After they got off the phone with my mom, I still had an attitude. She [tried] to put me out of the class, so I got mad.

  “I just kept talking,” Malaika continued. “Told her to shut up . . . and then she [tried] to put me in the corner. I’m not going in nobody corner. . . . She tried to put me in the corner. I’m not going in no corner! [Then my mom came up to the school] and had a talk with the teacher. . . . I ended up in the principal’s office, doing my work for three days. . . . I just got a smart mouth. I don’t be meaning for it to come out like that, but if there’s something on my mind and my heart, I just say it. Even if it don’t got nothing to do with me, if one student’s getting treated unfair from the next student, I’ma raise my hand and put my input in. You know, like, ‘Why’d you do that?’ They’ll be like, ‘You is not the teacher, why are you talking?’ . . .

  “I’m just outspoken. . . . They’re always telling us to voice our opinions, but then when we voice our opinion, we’re going to get in trouble. So that’s irritating. And I think they’re just mad ’cause I’m telling the truth, you know?”

  Malaika’s narrative reflects the complicated nature of speaking one’s truth as a Black girl in the United States. The messages that she received regarding her duty to speak up and the reactions to her resistance to an oppressive silence or humiliation were confusing. They would be for any of us! As with Shai, the absence of fairness underscores Malaika’s desire to speak up, but it was her resistance to being marginalized, to being physically placed in the corner, that set her off. Malaika was aware of how being placed in a corner is both a punishment for individual behavior and also a warning to other children about what might happen to them if they engage in similar behavior. Malaika was fundamentally trying not to become the symbol of “bad behavior”—particularly since she felt that she was speaking her truth. It is the idea that her truth has no place in the classroom that triggers Malaika.

  “The Moment You Call Me a Bitch, I Will Lose It”

  For Dee in Chicago, it was being teased about her physical disability, laughed at, or called a “bitch.”

  “There are several things that trigger me,” she said. “If I get something wrong in class and people laugh at me or ask me if I’m dumb or say, ‘Oh, you have a disability so you’re not supposed to be in this class, you’re not smart . . . blah blah blah,’ well, the next day I might get something right. You might see me get an A or a B on a test and now you want to talk to me to ask me to help you. No, I’m not helping you. . . .

  “Another thing is if someone calls me a ‘bitch’ instead of Dee. You either call me Dee or by my nickname, or you don’t call me anything. Because the moment you call me a ‘bitch,’ seriously or prank, I will lose it. I will get very quiet at first and then I can feel my face turning red, like seriously turning red. My eyes will get bigger and I’ll have tightness in my arms and both of my legs and then I’ll start yelling. I’ll scream [and] do anything. People will say, ‘Oh, she’s crazy, so get away from her.’ It’s like, ‘Okay, you can call me crazy, but don’t mess with me. Don’t trigger me because I will curse back at you even though it’s immature and inappropriate. I’ll just keep going and going. I’ll never shut up. That’s just how I am.’”

  Dee was aware of her vulnerability and the stigma that followed her as a Black female student with a physical disability. Her trigger was ridicule—whether it was being laughed at, called by something other than her name, or regarded as less intelligent than her peers. No child wants to be teased in this way. Her hostile reaction to the teasing from her peers is a predictable reaction from someone who may have been conditioned to make it clear that she will command respect. It’s the assault on her dignity, the disrespect, that triggers Dee.

  “I Got a Smart Mouth”

  For Stacy in the Bay Area, it was the suggestion that she was weak.

  “I’m a fighter,” she said. “When I was in elementary, this girl said I couldn’t play double-dutch with her. So I got mad at her and I pulled her rope, like if I can’t jump here, nobody else going to jump here. So, so, um . . . she started chasing me. I’m thinking she playing with me. Then I said, ‘Hold on, let me stop,’ ’cause I’m not scared of her. So I stopped. She [was] tryin’ to, like, run up on me, feel me? I just took off on her. Afterward, ’cause her hair was ugly, I just pulled her hair . . . and all of her hair came out. Like, all of it. But, I didn’t really do it that hard. I mean, all her hair came out. I was, like, in the third grade or the fourth—and everybody was like, ‘You going to have to go to the office. You ’bout to get in trouble.’ I [was] like, ‘I don’t care.’

  “But they should have let me come back to school, ’cause I was hecka young. Why would they expel me? And then I got expelled out of [another] middle school ’cause . . . like I’m a problem child, so every school I go to, I have problems. . . . Also, see, I know how to dress hecka good. . . . Like, I have fresh shoes on. And then, like some drunk, they’ll step on my shoes or whatever. I get hecka mad, like . . . and they don’t be sayin’ excuse me. Like somebody bump me. That’s hecka rude. I’ll be hecka mad,
like, ‘You ain’t going to say excuse me?’ So then I’m like, ‘You can say excuse yourself’ . . .’cause I got a smart mouth. So I’m like, ‘You can say excuse yourself,’ but if they [don’t] want to say it, I just take off on them ’cause I’m hecka mad.”

  Stacy took pride in her fighting ability. A competitive spirit, she enjoyed a challenge, but she—like so many other girls—was conflating her fear of being perceived as weak or a “punk” with her identity as a “problem child.” That any child would refer to him- or herself as a problem is heartbreaking. Our most basic hope for children should be that they see themselves as sacred and loved, not problematic. She drew her “respect” from outward manifestations of prestige—looking “cute” or fighting—but she was also responding to her fear of not being seen or highly regarded in some way. Stacy framed her behavior as a tendency to get in trouble, but I see her trigger as anything (or anyone) that might interfere with her own visibility politics. Stacy was triggered by a fear of being ignored.

  “I Had to Defend Myself”

  For Paris in New Orleans, it was the assault on her human dignity.

  “I didn’t have physical altercations up until probably my freshman year in high school,” she said. “That’s when I learned that the playground was a lot different and I was dealing with people with different mentalities and stuff. I never did mostly have a problem, but my thing was different because I transitioned through school. So I started my transition at sixteen, and I went all the way through graduation year still transitioning . . . but of course, further along my transition than I was at sixteen. So it was a lot different because once you became a junior and a senior—of course I was at the school all four years, so a lot of people had got to know who I was . . . so it wasn’t nothing new to those particular students. But I did always have problems with the freshmen that were coming into the school because now they’re new to the school, they’re new to me as well, and now when I assume that everyone had gotten used to Paris, here come these new individuals that are just coming out of middle school, fresh out of middle school, and don’t know how high school operates and stuff like that. So I had to punch a few people down within school. I always had to make an example out of one or two people. Eventually, the rest of the freshman class realized, ‘Well, maybe Paris is not the one to play with’ . . .

  “It was mostly because, again, mostly feeling like I had to defend myself,” Paris continued. “Because my mama always told me, like, people do to you what you allow them to do to you. So maybe I mix-messaged what my mama was telling me, but you know . . . well, then I’m not going to allow them to do anything. That’s the mentality I grew up [with]. Don’t get me wrong, my mama is very wise. She taught me a lot, but me as Paris, I took the message a little too far. I put my own little twist on it. . . . I just thought I had to fight. My mama gave me the freedom to go and fight and that’s what I did. My mama gave me a green light, like, ‘You better fight . . . don’t you let nobody do this or that to you.’ So I kinda, like, waited . . . I wasn’t the type to go start mess, even though my mama gave the permission that it was okay to fight. I never did went looking for it, but God, did it come knocking at my front door!”

  The permission to fight—granted by both Paris and her mother—was a matter of personal safety. It’s important to note that Paris was responding to bullying. That her physical safety was in danger is a statement both about the prevailing culture of oppression around her gender identity and about the absence of protection in schools for students who are transitioning their gender during these adolescent years. Paris was triggered by her inability to discover and live in her own body without judgment.

  Disciplining Appearance

  In September 2013, seven-year-old Tiana Parker was sent home from school in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for wearing dreadlocks. Her small charter school had a dress code, which stated, “Hairstyles such as dreadlocks, afros, mohawks, and other faddish hairstyles are unacceptable.”68 A few months later that year, twelve-year-old Vanessa VanDyke in Orlando, Florida, faced expulsion from her parochial school for wearing her hair in a large Afro.69 Together, these cases raised a collective eyebrow among girls whose hair is no stranger to being the object of discussion, regulation, and, too often, ridicule. While neither of these girls was ultimately expelled for her hairstyle, because of decisions made either by the parents or by the school, these cases elevated the importance of protecting Black girls from policies that threaten to undermine their ability to learn in good schools simply because of who they are—not for something they have done.

  The politicization (and vilification) of thick, curly, and kinky hair is an old one. Characterizations of kinky hair as unmanageable, wild, and ultimately “bad hair” are all signals (spoken and unspoken) that Black girls are inferior and unkempt when left in their natural state. Dress codes in the United States are arbitrary, and in general they are sexist and reinforce the practice of slut shaming. They can also reinforce internalized oppression about the quality of natural hairstyles on people of African descent. While personal taste may lead many of us away from wearing leggings or dreadlocks at school, any school policy that is designed to keep girls from being “too distracting” for boys or presenting in ways that are deemed too ethnic is at minimum sexist and inappropriate.

  Though often used to further objectify Black girls or police their sexuality, which I discuss in Chapter 3, school dress codes have also become tools for disciplining Black girls. Rules about how they wear their hair and clothes become grounds for punishment, rather than tools to establish a uniform student presentation. Young women in New Orleans attested to this.

  “I was in the eleventh [grade],” said Gina. “They made you leave school because you didn’t have on the right shoes, you didn’t have on a belt . . . for real, you’re going to stop my education because I don’t have this stuff?”

  “Tattoos,” Nicole, who was also educated in New Orleans schools, chimed in.

  “Because it’s a distraction,” Gina said, mimicking the voice of an adult. “It’s a distraction.”

  I asked the group to describe what they had observed as schools’ responses when girls arrived in clothes that did not adhere to the dress code.

  “They turn you around,” Gina said.

  “It’s like no other way you can get in class,” Nicole agreed.

  Dress codes do more than slut-shame Black girls. They marginalize and criminalize them. They cast them as deviant and reinforce social ideas about Black girls’ identity in a way that can be very destructive. Getting turned away from school for not wearing the “proper” clothing—however that is defined—feels unconscionable in a society that, at least on the surface, declares that education is a priority. This practice is primarily about maintaining a social order that renders girls subject to the approving or disapproving gaze of adults. It is grounded in respectability politics that have very little to do with education and more to do with socialization. So when Black girls respond to this treatment with cries of discrimination, it’s important to see them as disruptors of oppression, not as defiant, willfully or otherwise.

  The culture of zero tolerance has seeped into nearly every corner of school discipline, creating rigid, unforgiving policies aimed at a demographic—kids—whose existence is defined by growth, development, and change. Recall that Black girls were not at the center of the debate on public safety when zero-tolerance policies were being passed, so little thought went into how these new policies might uniquely affect them. Black girls’ “attitudes” and “defiant” behaviors were often in response to feeling disrespected—by institutions that constructed conditions that facilitate failure (e.g., increased surveillance, no recess, and punitive discipline policies) and by individuals who triggered them with words and/or actions.

  While observing at Small Alternative High in California, I watched teachers skillfully engage girls who might have otherwise been dismissed as “throwing shade” or as having an “attitude problem” under other circumstances
.

  In one instance, a girl let out a few sighs and then settled her head comfortably into her folded arms on the table, resting there for approximately five minutes. Finally a teacher walked past her and asked what was wrong. She lifted her head and shared details about being “tired and hungry.” The exchange between the student and her teacher was neither contentious nor judgmental.

  The teacher, a Black woman, simply stated that the young woman’s expressed fatigue was “all in [her] mind,” to which the student replied, “Really? I thought it was my body.”

  I watched as the teacher pursed her lips, put a hand on her hip, and stared at the girl. In return, the girl raised her eyebrows and shrugged. On the surface, it appeared to be an “attitude” for an “attitude”—but it was more than the stereotypical, negative perceptions associated with the expressions of Black girls and women. This was a slightly comical exchange of information, and from what I observed, it was based on a preestablished relationship in which the student trusted this teacher. A less attuned, empathic teacher could have easily caused the interaction to devolve into conflict and perhaps result in dismissal from the classroom. Yet the exchange, while playful, resulted in the young woman getting a snack, voicing her frustrations about being required to focus on her work, and then returning to her desk. No harm, no foul.

  Across the country, Black girls have shared narratives that reflect their own understanding of the rules that push them from school and the behaviors that have rendered them increasingly vulnerable to the expanded use of exclusionary discipline. The examples in this chapter also show how Black girls often interpret responses to their perceived attitude and have normalized a disregard of Black femininity. The experiences related in this chapter have mostly focused on attitudes and violent behaviors as expressions of how girls adapt to this disregard. Just as common, perhaps even more so, is adapting to a disregard associated with the sexual and gender expression of Black girls.