Pushout

by Monique W. Morris

  “So, you had to wear uniforms?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Paris confirmed. Ninety-five percent of the public schools in New Orleans require students to wear uniforms—the highest percentage in the nation.21 “And the boys and the girls had different uniforms . . . like the girls had to have plaid skirts . . . I never did understand why they didn’t make plaid for boys. I would love to see some plaid for boys, because I know a few boys that may like to wear plaid. All the boys had a basic Dickies or basic cotton shirt with the school logo. . . . But I would push the school, as far as dress code. Like, if they say your skirt ain’t supposed to be past three inches above the knee, I may push it to four inches above the knee. I would try it, just because I knew I was different. I knew that I was going to cause controversy anyway. They were never happy with me.

  “With me [gender] transitioning from middle school to high school, I had an assistant principal who hated my guts. She hated my guts. She didn’t really like LGBT individuals, particularly gay young men, and that’s what I identified as [in middle school] . . . before knowing myself further. I thought I was happy because I was leaving middle school, but this [administrator] followed me. She went from being our middle school’s assistant principal to being our high school’s principal, and she thought that she was going to be able to wear it out . . . but she didn’t know that I had a supportive mother who fought my battles, who stood behind me. She didn’t know I had that type of support in my family. So we had to go to the school board. . . . [They could not] deny [me my] education because of [my] sexual orientation. [They] can’t do that. . . .

  “Once that [principal] heard that she could not do anything, that the power she thought she had was crushed, her dreams, her hopes, her aspirations were gone . . . at that very moment, I got up and I swung my hair, and I said, ‘Thank you.’ I didn’t have any problems [after that].”

  I applaud Paris. She was determined to complete her education, and she did. But for other Black girls, the marginalization that occurs from being sexualized (or reduced to their sexuality)—in and out of school—may be too intense to handle, especially without adequate support.

  From the pullout of girls who are being trafficked to the oppressive school dress codes that irrationally institutionalize adult panic over the morals of girls both cis- and transgender, we see how Black girls continue to live with the burden of under-protection, where a girl’s virtue certainly is “not an ornament and a necessity.”

  4

  LEARNING ON LOCKDOWN

  I got a pain in my stomach . . .’cause my baby is comin’ (oo-ahh)

  I got a pain in my side . . .’cause my baby is alive (oo-ahh)

  I got a pain in my back . . .’cause my baby is Black (oo-ahh)

  I got a pain in my head . . .’cause my baby is dead (oo-ahh)

  Individual desks were arranged in forward-facing rows toward a whiteboard at the front of the class. On the institutional walls were vocabulary words and images of prominent African Americans. Computers, all of them older models, lined the back wall of the classroom. Near the exit was a chair for the uniformed institutional staff member who accompanied the girls to and from their units, and who watched over them during class to help maintain order. Steel doors had already been slammed shut and locked behind me, restricting access between the corridor and the classrooms. On each side of the narrow hallway was a row of classrooms, but in only two of them were classes in session at any given time. The remainder were dark and seemingly not put to any use, though decorated with desk chairs and large blackboards. Displays of student work filled in the wall space not taken by inspirational drawings and photographs of Black leaders.

  I asked sixteen-year-old Portia and thirteen-year-old Mia what they thought of their education in detention.

  “I can’t learn here,” Mia said, letting out a heavy sigh.

  “Depressing,” said Portia.

  Twenty-one.

  That’s the percentage of juvenile court detention cases that involve girls nationwide. This number, low when compared to the 79 percent of cases involving boys, is often used as an excuse to ignore or dismiss the experiences of girls in this system.1 More often than not conversations about incarceration leave girls out, or add them as an afterthought lest someone take offense to the lack of gender inclusiveness. It’s true—the majority of all juvenile cases involving secure detention, or other forms of incarceration, are brought against boys and men. However, the plight of girls in confinement is more severe than any single number suggests.

  In fact, while the rate of arrest and detention has declined overall for boys, rates have increased for girls.2 Between 1996 and 2011, the proportion of girls arrested declined by 42 percent, compared to a 57 percent decline among boys.3 Girls (37 percent) are more likely than boys (25 percent) to be detained for status offenses and technical violations rather than for crimes that actually present a danger to public safety.4 Girls (21 percent) are also more likely than boys (12 percent) to be detained for sexual assault (cases that may include commercially sexually exploited children) and public disorder cases, including those that may include public drunkenness or scuffles.5 These statistics amount to a situation where girls who do not present an immediate and significant threat (because of having committed violent offenses like homicide, robbery, or false imprisonment) are being held in confinement, despite research that shows the negative impact of detention on educational achievement.6

  More than 70 percent of girls in juvenile detention facilities have a history of trauma, and at least 60 percent have experienced rape or the threat of rape—a number that reflects reported incidents and is likely an underestimation.7 Other studies show that up to 90 percent of girls in detention have experienced some form of sexual, emotional, or physical abuse.8 We cannot ignore the very real impact of trauma.

  In the late 1990s, Isis Sapp Grant, herself a former gang member in New York, launched the Blossom Program for Girls at the Youth Empowerment Mission. Through this program, she worked with girls who were gang-involved or in contact with the criminal legal system for other reasons. Blossom, now a program primarily serving New York schools, facilitated the recovery process for more than two thousand young people and their families. Most of these girls came to the program in search of a way to rehabilitate from an addiction to violence. However, Isis discovered that many of these girls and young women were actually responding to much more.

  Juanita came to the Blossom Program through her school after she was expelled for fighting every day. She had been fighting to protect herself from other girls who would jump her for flirting with their boyfriends or being perceived as disrespectful to them in some way. When Isis met her, Juanita was considered very promiscuous. Juanita, who was living with a foster family, would get into trouble for having sex in the bathroom at school or even engaging in sexual acts in the hallways. She claimed to be a gang member, and though there was some question about her actual affiliation, she suffered from compounding conditions that fueled violent behaviors that ultimately brought her into contact with the criminal legal system. One day she was arrested for stabbing another girl who went to her school, which landed her in confinement. While in juvenile hall, officials discovered that her mother suffered from addiction and had abandoned her at birth. At the time, her foster mother of nine years was refusing to take her back into her home.

  To Isis, Juanita looked like many of the girls she had worked with who were a part of both the social welfare and juvenile justice systems, dual-jurisdiction children who have multiple institutional “parents.” She was unusually thin for her age, afflicted with a severe case of acne, and lacking the ability to focus on a single issue or task. Isis remembers how frequently her eyes would jet from one direction to another—and on top of all that, her hair was falling out, which kept her agitation near a boil. Isis remembers “a lot of attitude and a lot of cursing.”

  As a part of the Blossom Program, girls and their family members met for joint counseling, but the tension
s between Juanita and her foster mother were too chaotic to manage in a typical therapeutic space. Before they could reach any common understandings, Isis remembers, Juanita couldn’t keep still—she kept moving around the office until her foster mother threatened to beat her. Finally Blossom staff intervened, and a social worker was able to stabilize the situation by ordering a series of evaluations that resulted in Juanita being clinically diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Her foster mother and the Blossom team also discovered that Juanita had been previously diagnosed and prescribed medication, which she was not taking. Staff diligently worked with Juanita and finally persuaded her to take her medicine. Within a week, everyone began to notice a difference in Juanita’s behavior. She could sit still, she started showing up at school, and Blossom was able to assign a mentor to work with Juanita and help her establish better intimate relationship practices. It seemed that all was on the mend.

  Then an incident occurred between Juanita and her foster mother at home. Her foster mother was a woman with a kind heart—she was caring for at least two other foster children while Juanita was there—but she ruled with an iron fist. She was operating a day care center for babies, and given the demands on her schedule and her life, she lacked the capacity to adequately respond to Juanita’s needs. And the fact that she would threaten physical violence as a way to curb Juanita’s lapses in judgment only made Juanita act more belligerent. After a while, mounting stressors impacted Juanita’s reliability in the Blossom Program.

  Isis noticed that she hadn’t seen Juanita in a few weeks. When the young woman did finally appear, Isis reached out to her.

  “Juanita, I haven’t seen you in a while. Come here and talk to me,” she said.

  Juanita walked into Isis’s office to talk to her, but Isis could tell that something wasn’t right. Juanita was rambling and shifting from side to side.

  “Are you taking your medicine?” Isis interrupted.

  “I don’t want to take it!” Juanita insisted. “It makes me slow down. I’m not going to go back home if she’s going to make me take it.”

  Isis later discovered that not only was Juanita rejecting her medication as an act of rebellion against her foster mother, but she was also being teased by other students in her school for being on psychotropic medication. As long as students were calling her “crazy,” she didn’t want to take the medicine. Blossom counselors and mentors were ultimately able to convince Juanita that if she wanted to experience a life where she was not on probation or under other forms of surveillance from the criminal legal system, she would need to make different decisions—and they were committed to seeing her through it. Her mentor, Davina, made it a personal goal to help Juanita make new meaning of her life. They became so close that Juanita spent most afternoons after school working for Davina; if she was having trouble at home, she could find refuge at Davina’s house. Though trauma and mental illness propelled Juanita toward contact with the criminal legal system, these conditions have not dealt a fatal blow to her future. It took Blossom four years to stabilize Juanita through medicine, counseling, education, employment, and intense mentorship. But they did it.

  Black Girls in Trouble with the Law: A Historical Perspective

  Black girls in trouble with the law have a long history of being assigned to institutions that fail to adequately respond to their marginalization from school. The institution of slavery constructed a social and penal environment that reinforced the idea of Black female inferiority, and this setting primarily allowed for the development of a girl’s domestic skills rather than the development of her intellect. This focus has maintained its imprint on the quality of education that girls receive in confinement—girls who are disproportionately Black.

  In the past, correctional facilities, training schools, and residential houses of refuge were designed to “correct” the behaviors of “bad” Black girls in ways that failed to prioritize education as a rehabilitative practice. In general, these institutions demonstrated a lack of concern for the ways in which race and gender informed Black girls’ unique vulnerabilities to involvement with the criminal legal system. Schools designed to address the needs of “wayward girls”—those considered “uncontrollable” by their parents or “in danger of being morally depraved”—responded to the sexual histories of girls without consideration of the ways in which their status as Black females rendered them particularly vulnerable to poverty, violence, sexual exploitation, and/or early sexual activity.

  Since the eighteenth century, girls who were in trouble with the law, even as part of the enslaved population, were confined in semi-penal institutions: asylums, jails, reformatories, and other homes. Between 1825 and 1828, the United States opened its first juvenile reformatories in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, for the purpose of providing “food, shelter and education to the homeless and destitute youth and to remove juvenile offenders from the prison company of adult convicts.”9 Children in these facilities participated in activities that were deemed appropriate for their moral rehabilitation at the time, meaning many children were assigned domestic chores, and some even attended school four hours each day.10 However, because Black children, including Black girls, were not deemed suitable for such facilities, their alternative reality often involved mob lynchings or placement into punitive adult correctional facilities. It was not until 1835, following an intense, racially charged debate between reformists and racial justice advocates about the rehabilitative promise of troubled Black youth, that the New York House of Refuge, in Hudson, became the first juvenile reformatory to accept Black children. However, in these early days, the blueprint for “reform,” as reflected in the practice of reformatories across the nation, included plans to prepare Black girls for lives as “cooks, maids, and seamstresses,” and to provide them with religious (Christian) instruction, which was believed to support their moral development.11

  At this time, the confinement of Black girls was in response to their being labeled prostitutes, drunks, mentally ill, and criminals of other sorts deemed socially unacceptable (particularly for girls).12 Little has changed over a hundred years later. Girls dismissed as “delinquents” struggled to be included in discourses on correctional education and its role in returning them to their home communities and rebuilding their lives. Black girls were denied opportunity or granted only a limited form of access to private institutions that were designed to “reform” children. But once Black girls were accepted into these institutions, access to services remained unequal. Black girls tended to stay in juvenile justice facilities longer, and experience fewer positive outcomes, than their White counterparts.13 This is a trend that was exacerbated by formal segregation throughout the Jim Crow era. Classrooms in correctional facilities mirrored the intense segregation of school classrooms in surrounding communities—a trend that continues to this day.

  For Black girls who were placed into public reformatories, the rehabilitative emphasis was not on making them more productive students, but rather on forming them into better servants for social elites. This was largely in response to the prevailing early twentieth-century practice of institutionalizing Black girls for their perceived sexual deviance (not for any threat they posed to public safety).14 According to Mary White Ovington, a sociologist and co-founder of the NAACP, “the depravity among [Black] girls and improper guardianship” compose “the race’s most serious defects,” which suggested not only that Black mothers were to blame for the perceived sexual deviance of Black girls but that the courts were the only institution that could correct these offenses.15 Ovington and other scholars who produced work that informed the direction of juvenile justice and public discourses on race, gender, and justice characterized the sexual activity of Black girls as a reflection of promiscuity that was “inevitable” given that Black women are “slow to recognize the sanctity of home and the importance of feminine virtue.”16 As Khalil Muhammad notes in The Condemnation of Blackness, “Black women’s perceived moral shortcomings or racial ‘defects’ disquali
fied them from the protective status of the law . . . the problem was ‘located in Black women themselves.’”17 Never mind that many Black women, including educators and political activists such as Fannie Barrier Williams, Nannie Helen Burroughs, and Mary McLeod Bethune, were calling for an elevation of Black girls’ dignity not through the policing of their sexuality (and incarceration) but rather through the implementation of equal rights and economic or educational opportunity. To say these women were facing an uphill battle understates the case.

  In scholarly circles, Black girls who were in trouble with the law were depicted as being a part of the “submerged tenth,” a term coined by W.E.B. Du Bois to refer to those in the “criminal classes,” including prostitutes and “loafers.”18 They were also regarded as “incorrigible” and “neurotic,” suggesting that their form of criminality or delinquency was innate and not something that could be critically examined and corrected in the context of their environment.19 As a result, these Black girls were often disregarded as throwaway children, described by Geoff Ward as children who “experienced prolonged stays in confinement, compared with those of white youths, and [whose] prospects remained constrained by limits on educational and labor market opportunity.”20 As such, apprenticeship programs and other opportunities to improve life outcomes through education and work were not as available to Black children as they were to White children.

  Several decades later, in the early 1930s, following the end of the Progressive Era, juvenile reformatories or locked “training” institutions had been established across the country, many of them now housing Black girls. In 1933, there were 1,803 Black girls whose delinquency cases were disposed in sixty-seven courts and eight Black girls whose cases were “handled by federal authorities.”21 However, these girls were still expected to rehabilitate in separate and inferior environments that failed to support their educational development. For example, in 1936, at the New York Training School for Girls in Hudson, New York, Black girls—who were 19 percent of the girls in the facility at the time—were segregated from White female residents and forced to reside in two of the most “crowded and dilapidated of the reformatory’s ‘cottages’”22 Jazz legend Ella Fitzgerald was once assigned to this facility for being an “ungovernable” teen.23 Here she was quarantined, tortured, and excluded from participating in the choir, as it was reserved for White girls only.24