The war on black girls: How US schools are criminalising African American students
A black American girl. Black girls recount stories of being criminalised for falling asleep, protesting against mistreatment, asking questions, wearing natural black hair, and adorning revealing clothing and engaging in unruly.
What you need to know:
- The stereotypical labels possessed by black girls are actually an aggrieved protest against oppression.
- Being 'loud' is a demand to be heard, to have an 'attitude' is to reject a doctrine of invisibility and mistreatment.
Black girls account for 16 per cent of the female student population in the United States but distinctly consists of a third of all girls referred to law enforcement and more than a third of all female school-based arrests.
Since 1992, girls' share of delinquency cases resulting in police detention has accelerated, often for charges as simple as peer assault and status offences. Exclusionary discipline, including expulsions and suspensions, has also gathered momentum and is presently the most egregious and predominantly utilised measures of dealing with infringements by black girls. Forty-eight per cent of black girls who are expelled have no access to educational services as a result of expulsions.
Addressing these problematic occurrences has proved strenuous in the current socio-political climate, which embraces punitive responses to expressions of dissent. For decades, there have been increases in police surveillance of black families’ homes, communities and schools.
The result has been an increasing number of girls in contact with the juvenile and criminal justice systems. In May 2013, Ashlynn Avery, a 16-year-old diabetic girl in Alabama, fell asleep while reading during her in-school suspension. The suspension supervisor threw a book at her and ordered her to leave the classroom. As she left, a police officer slammed her face into a file cabinet and arrested her.
Kiera Wilmot, 16, was charged with a felony in April 2013, when a science experiment went wrong, leaving her subject to mandatory suspension and arrest following an explosion in the school. In 2008, Marché Taylor was arrested in Texas after she resisted being barred from prom for wearing a dress considered too revealing. In 2007, Pleajhia Mervin was assaulted by a California school security officer after she dropped a piece of cake on the cafeteria floor.
Some of the most egregious applications of punitive school discipline have also criminalised black girls as young as six years, who have been arrested for throwing tantrums in classrooms, yelling and screaming at teachers, and being disruptive to the learning environment.
Six-year-old Salecia Johnson was arrested in Georgia in 2012 for having an outburst in her classroom. In 2011, seven-year-old Michelle Mitchell was arrested after she got into a fight on an Ohio school bus and six-year-old Desre’e Watson was handcuffed and arrested in a Florida school in 2007 for responding angrily in her kindergarten class.
Those cases were, however, never pieced and knitted together to present a comprehensive national portrait of how school responses to black girls push them out of schools and often render them vulnerable to further victimisation, psychological trauma and delinquency.
These incidents are not isolated. Almost every black girl from the East Coast to the West Coast has a profoundly astonishing and disturbing testimonial of being criminalised and disenfranchised and pushed out of schools.
Black girls often narrate stories of being criminalised for falling asleep, protesting against mistreatment, asking questions, wearing natural black hair, adorning revealing clothing and engaging in unruly, although not criminal or delinquent misconduct.
Pushout: Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools, by researcher Dr Monique W. Morris, interrogates the policies, practices, conditions and prevailing consciousness that infiltrate the judicial system. The book provides a broader understanding of how the police have instilled a cycle of violence against black girls, who are already grappling with facets of racial disparity.
The cover of researcher Dr Monique W. Morris's book, Pushout: Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools.
Dr Monique's educational manual illuminates how law enforcement doesn't possess the in-depth education and professional credentials to handle child and adolescent development. They lack the appropriate awareness and training to respond to behaviours that were previously managed by skilled teachers, counsellors, principals and other professionals. They also don't understand the basis of American constitutional democracy and have refused to be drawn into discussions of the concession of eliminating the oppression of black girls.
While there are statistics that paint a troubling picture, the harm done by this shift has been quantified to have an excess amount of cognitive decline and subliminal effects. Black girls are being criminalised in schools and relegated to servitude and poverty by places that should make them thrive. They account for 48 per cent of preschool-age children who have experienced more than one out-of-school suspension. Between 2002 and 2006, per-district suspension rates of black girls increased by 5.3 per cent compared to a 1.7 per cent increase for black boys.
Thirty-five per cent of black girls under the age of 18 live in abject poverty and drop out of school at a rate of 7.0 per cent, compared to 3.8 per cent for white girls, due largely to the pushout discrimination and arrests.
The struggle black girls face is glaringly vivid. Yet when girls rise up to minimise oppressive fatigue, society casts them as deviant and disruptive, without considering gender and racial repression that fuels their agitation. This has ignited a fuse among black girls. The stereotypical labels possessed by black girls are actually an aggrieved protest against oppression.
Being 'loud' is a demand to be heard, to have an 'attitude' is to reject a doctrine of invisibility and mistreatment. To be flamboyant and 'fabulous' is to revise the idea that socioeconomic isolation is equated with not having access to materially desirable things. The castigating label of 'ghetto' is a subconscious antic of defiance towards how poverty has shaped racial and gender regression.
These survival characteristics are degraded and punished rather than recognised as tools of resilience. Under these circumstances, black girls fighting for their humanity end up being pushed out of schools, jobs, homes, houses of worship, and other places where they feel whole.
Born into a cultural legacy of slavery, which consisted of dehumanisation and extreme sexual victimisation, black girls, and by extension black women, have interpreted defiance as something that is not inherently negative. They bear the mark of subjugation and relative insignificance, due to historical injustices in an educational culture that is insistent on dishonouring critical thinking and leadership skills that they possess, and instead casts them as social outsiders rather than intellectual respondents to concrete oppression.
The writer is a novelist, Big Brother Africa 2 Kenyan representative and founder of Jeff's Fitness Centre (@jeffbigbrother).
