Pushout

by Monique W. Morris

  “It’s forced at our school, too,” said Nala. “Because after you get off suspension, you got to have a meeting with the person you got into it with and their parents . . . and if your parents don’t go, you still got to go. . . . I was talking about this with my dean . . . and he wants us to keep meeting and stuff and start doing volunteer work at places, like working together and stuff with the person I got into it with, just to be around each other, find out more stuff about each other and stuff.”

  This practice of ongoing communication is closer to the intent and practice of relationship building. I never met with the dean of Nala’s school, but it sounded like he was on to something positive.

  “I think also,” Leila said, “they should change the curriculum a little bit and put in Afrocentric studies because a lot of people have a lot of self-esteem issues and don’t even realize that’s why you getting so mad [because] she’s staring at you like that . . . if you’re more confident, then you’ve got more hope.”

  Leila was on to something too. In the practice of repairing relationships between Black girls and schools, sometimes attention must also be paid to the curriculum. Low self-esteem and a failure to know themselves and their cultural contributions are important to this discussion about interventions, largely because they engage the student’s learning about herself. Knowledge moves from being about others to being about self—which is the foundation for self-appreciation and love. This ancient wisdom anchors on the concept of “know thyself”—not “know others” or “know the dominant culture.” When young people’s cultural identity is actively integrated into their standard, skills-based learning, they do better. They are more responsive to the material, perform better on benchmark measures of learning, and are less inclined to feel alienated and threatened by peer or teacher conflict.

  “Or lashing back because they think that’s the norm,” Leila added. “That’s not how a lot of us actually handle situations, but if you feel like, ‘Black people [fight] . . . this is me, this is who I am,’ then you’re taking on that. They say Black people [are] loud. . . . If I think that’s a characteristic of Black [people], then I’m not finna be ashamed of being aggressive, because I’m me. But if we go through our history, even our current events—I don’t like going too far back in history because we have strong Black leaders right now—we have good role models that we could look at. All we got to do is look at grown folks and see how they handle situations. A lot of youth get mad, and they don’t know how to channel that anger. They’re taking gym [class] out of [schools] now. They don’t have sports, activities. Do something where you can get that anger out.”

  Black girls are less likely than White girls of similar ages to participate in athletic activities.50 They’re searching for ways to release stress and develop strong interpersonal communications skills, but they are underrepresented in school-based activities that provide an opportunity for them to do that. In district schools nationwide, Black girls are seeking to be woven into the social and academic fabric of their learning environments. They want to learn and know that school is a necessary tool for their overall development. They also know that there are limited opportunities for their full immersion in their learning when they are attending classrooms that emphasize test taking over learning, that silence their ideas and interrogation of the content they are being taught, and that emphasize behavior and dress over engagement with the material.

  Successful educators and students alike recognize that at the heart of their positive outcome strategy is a commitment to nurturing the relationships between everyone who is involved in the learning process. When the communication is transparent, the learning can flow. When the expectations are co-constructed and clear, there are no surprises. When the well-being of the student is centered, she is not criminalized or marginalized for making mistakes. Instead, she is engaged as a developing human being—a learning person—and responded to first with love, and then with the intention to support and repair the harm that has been caused. As the girls’ narratives suggest, we must begin by getting the girls themselves to understand the value of these conversations. When girls feel these discussions are a “waste of time,” they have already assigned themselves to failure and may reject the appreciative approach—which enables them to embrace a worldview of possibility—when participating in restorative practices.

  Yejide Ankobia, a restorative justice professional and advocate whose work in the Bay Area has included girls on school campuses and in the criminal legal system, has seen this shift in worldview, though she acknowledges that building these relationships are sometimes a challenge.

  “Black girls have felt that they were the least listened to . . . that they were treated worse and responded to least at the high school,” Yejide said. “They came into that space and were getting into trouble because of potential fights. . . . Although they don’t always like the [restorative] process, they can’t resist the process because the outcomes are better in terms of quashing stuff or keeping the peace.”

  As a former adjunct administrator at a high school, Yejide was able to work directly with Black girls who were struggling to expand their conflict resolution skills to include restorative approaches. In her conversations with these young women, she discovered that at the center of this work was a commitment to “be there” for the young women in ways that adult women may not have consistently “been there” in the past.

  “Walking the balance between dean of students and holding the restorative justice process was a challenge. I was always the person that was called in to work with them,” Yejide said. “My intention was to be in good relationship with every kid. It started with showing respect. I was always the person they knew would say hello, recognize them by name if I knew them and ask them why they weren’t in class . . . I was the one who would say, ‘I care about you and want to know how you’re doing, but I also want to know why you’re not where you’re supposed to be.’”

  Ultimately, Yejide described how she “showed up” for the young women, who would sometimes disperse when they saw her coming. Still, she knew they were aware that her love for them was genuine.

  “It’s about always showing up and wanting to make sure they were okay, but then holding them accountable,” she said. “Even though they sometimes didn’t want that, I realized that [the ones that scatter] are the ones that would come by my office and just start talking. Part of what breaks through is when you show them that you care by approaching them with a certain amount of respect. When I was growing up, it wasn’t on my radar, but for kids, that’s at the top of their list—not yelling, not calling them out of their names, not using profane language with them. I believe they appreciated that . . . I cared. I wasn’t faking it. I didn’t have any ulterior motives for being there. They knew I wanted to be there and that I cared. They would trust that I was going to be fair, that I was going to listen.”

  Our girls ultimately want to be engaged as human beings, and to transcend being referred to with terms such as “female,” “THOT,” or other dehumanizing labels that girls may see as stripping them of their humanity. Girls in Chicago explained how these labels impact their ability to develop personal value and relationships—something that restorative approaches might be able to improve.

  “Some people don’t even label women or girls as ‘women’ or ‘girls.’ Everybody is a ‘female,’” Deena explained. “Everybody is a ‘female,’ no matter how old you are. You’re just a ‘female.’ So, it’s like, okay, you’re not giving us our entitlements. You’re not recognizing us for who we are. . . . Now, you have to have a job, be in school, and have a lot of stuff going for yourself just to be recognized as a good girl, or what they call ‘approachable,’ ‘wifey material,’ and stuff like that. Otherwise, you ain’t really nothing.

  “To me it’s like, they’re degrading us,” she continued. “We’re not looked upon as the young women that we are, which is something. . . . They want to be called men all of the time, but when you want
to say, ‘I’m a lady, I’m a young woman,’ [they are saying,] ‘No, you’re just a female.’ So basically you’re just a piece of meat.”

  Deena, who was born and raised in Chicago, was processing many of the same issues that Faith and Heaven were wrestling with in the Bay Area. Feeling excluded from discourses and programs that were designed to address the needs of young people, Deena was struggling to see an environment that would be conducive to the implementation of programs and strategies to support young women.

  “I think they pay more attention to the males, especially Black men and boys, because a lot of them don’t finish high school or don’t go on to college, but I feel as though we get left out the loop on a lot of things. Like, [there were] so many scholarships, but [they were] for men. It was like, why aren’t there any women scholarships? You know, why can’t women be included? They were like, ‘Because you know, men aren’t doing that well.’ Well, girls can get pregnant, so you know . . .”

  Deena’s statement reflected her understanding that boys are not the only ones who face potential interruptions in their schooling. While only 11 percent of girls in the United States will give birth before they turn twenty years old, Deena’s recognition of the hardships that accompany being a teenage mother and student was an important proxy for the myriad interruptions that can negatively, and uniquely, impact girls.51

  “Have you had conversations with people about those kinds of expectations?” I asked. I recognized her highlighting of the conditions that uniquely affect girls’ ability to finish school—pregnancy being just one of many. Restorative approaches in schools might not directly facilitate these new opportunities, but they might provide girls with a venue to express their concerns about these identity and communications issues, and build relationships to address their concerns. I wondered if she had ever had open conversations with people about this, or whether she was keeping these thoughts to herself.

  Deena shook her head and said, “We don’t have that many good role models.” In her experience, teachers told students that they “weren’t good for nothing but laying on your back. . . . [They say], ‘You’re not going to make it through life out here being fast with these little boys.’ It was always something bad with regards to a female. You’re labeled as a ‘ho,’ a ‘THOT’ . . . you ain’t even got to be one, they’re going to call you that regardless. So you ain’t good for nothing but laying down.”

  “Even if you’re smart,” Deena continued, “they be like, ‘What does that mean? If you’re so smart, give me some money.’ . . . That was in elementary school.”

  And so we were back to Black girls in elementary school feeling that if they were smart, they had to prove it by “making money”—a terrible by-product of age compression. I thought about Danisha in the Bay Area, who had learned to sell “fruit cocktail” by the fifth grade, and all of the other young women who have been pushed into the streets or conditioned to see their struggle to survive as less important than the well-being of others around them. Our girls are being taught some harmful lessons in their formative years. It’s time to change that.

  For those girls whose educational continuum includes juvenile court or other alternative schools, the promise of restorative justice is relatively undocumented, and so ripe for exploration. However, in an exploratory study in the Midwest, researchers Gaarder and Hesselton found that conducting gender-responsive, restorative programming for girls in detention facilities was particularly challenging.52 This should not be surprising given the hyperpunitive nature of a juvenile detention center. When the norm is punitive, concepts of what it means to be “respectful” or “restorative” may be distorted. But learned negative behaviors can be replaced by positive ones. The study also discovered that restorative justice may facilitate “establishing a safe environment” for girls and contribute to the empowerment of young women.53 Girls who participate in circles may play a strong, participatory role in their own development, and that is important. They have also been shown to recidivate at lower rates than girls who do not experience restorative justice—largely because the focus is on healing the relationships rather than on punishment.54 Researchers found that girls were able to “gain a sense of control over their lives, contribute to their own rehabilitative process, and strengthen their family and community.”55

  Restorative approaches work best for girls when they are fully engaged in the process through understanding and investment.56 This investment among girls of color appears to increase when facilitators reflect a similar background or express empathy for their experiences.57 Circles require an investment of time and trust, which may be difficult to fully implement in carceral facilities, even in their educational spaces. That may be why the study found that restorative circles in a detention facility failed to build trust among young women, that participants lacked respect for the talking stick, and that they failed to pay attention to the need for building relationships among members of the circle.* Gaarder and Hesselton also found that to be responsive to system-involved girls, restorative processes must “address girls’ harmful action . . . in a way that encourages them to accept responsibility for making amends.”58 These researchers cautioned against referring to institution-based programs as “restorative” if they fail to meet the minimum requirements of actually “addressing harm, understanding responsibility, and [making] an effort to include victims.”59

  The talking stick is a communication tool designed to facilitate respect for the person speaking. It controls the environment such that only one person is able to speak at a time, while the others listen.

  While the undertheorization of gender-responsive, restorative practices in traditional and alternative learning environments has provided a limited scope by which to examine its promise, particularly for Black girls, an awareness of intersections between race, ethnicity, and class has been observed to improve group dynamics in circle sharing among African American girls. In this research, Black facilitators helped to create a safer space in which the young women were able and willing to share their experiences and generate an authentic healing of relationships. According to Gaarder and Hesselton, “The black facilitator lived in the same neighborhood as some of the girls, which seemed to make it easier for African American girls to share their stories in the circles.”60

  This is the connection that Yejide observed once she was able to establish a relationship with the young women that she has worked with in the past. “Teachers are human too and they need to process their stuff too. I think restorative justice and its utility made it so that I could build relationships and there was no one like me on campus. I looked like them and I was giving them something different,” Yejide said. “I wish that the world would acknowledge that women hold a lot. Black girls are our future women, and if we do not invest in them, our communities will never be healthy and strong. . . . When I look at these Black girls, I want them to know that they are that important, that powerful. Adults are not pouring that energy back into them; they are not appreciating how important Black girls are to this culture . . . When I look at our girls struggling to be who they are, struggling to fit into these false stereotypes, I just think that they know that these things are false, and yet they don’t always have the tools and support to see something else out there. We need to pour more money, more humanity, more passion, more spirituality into our Black girls. For me, the work is very personal in that way.” She is not alone.

  School-based interventions should prioritize engaging Black women in the development of specific conditions that provide Black girls with the opportunity to engage their healing with dignity—and remove themselves from an external gaze that has miscast them as attitude-bearing, “incorrigible” young women.

  Considerations

  While largely examined in the criminal justice context, critiques of restorative practices are largely informed by popular notions of crime, justice, and historic interpretations of how to address culpability in modern society.61 Within the school context, there
have been fewer debates about the usefulness of restorative justice.62 The primary debate with respect to its use centers on the philosophy of school leadership and whether there is a prevailing sentiment of punitive responses being more effective at curbing juvenile delinquency than conversational, restorative, or other alternative practices.

  It is also important to note that not all programs or strategies labeled as “restorative” are consistent with its alternative paradigm of justice. In some jurisdictions and school districts, restorative practices are little more than carefully implemented mediation programs that still adhere to a punitive construct wherein the primary objective is not to repair relationships but rather to satisfy the requirements of institutions tasked to maintain public safety. For example, some school districts have experimented with school-based youth courts, wherein discipline is handled through a mock court, in which students assume the roles traditionally held in the U.S. paradigm of justice, such as a judge, attorney, bailiff, and so on.63 While not characterized as authentically restorative, youth courts have functioned as an alternative to more punitive responses to negative student behaviors.

  The intentional use of restorative approaches to reduce contact with the justice system might also be viewed as inherently contradictory, since the primary purpose of restorative justice is to repair relationships, not necessarily to remove or deter children from contact with the juvenile justice system or formal disciplinary boards in school.64 However, it is worth noting that repairing relationships is considered an important protective factor against antisocial behaviors associated with youthful acts of aggression. There is also the question of how transferrable the findings from previous studies are to more urban and racially diverse areas in the United States.65 There are smaller studies that reveal the promise of restorative practices with youth of color.66 However, the absence of research and data on the outcomes associated with programs in these areas—and their impact on girls of color, specifically Black girls, who experience pushout more frequently than other girls—prevents a rigorous analysis of the successes and challenges associated with implementing restorative practices among girls.