Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools

For Black girls, to be "ghetto" represents a certain resilience to how poverty has shaped racial and gender oppression. To be "loud" it to demand to be heard. To have an "attitude" is to reject a doctrine of invisibility and maltreatment. To be flamboyant--or "fabulous"--is to revise the idea that socioeconomic isolation is equated with not having access to materially desirable things. To be a ghetto Black girl, then, is to reinvent what it means to be Black, poor, and female.

Without intentional efforts to combat old ways and norms, ... institutions ... reproduce dominant social ideas, hierarchies, and systems of oppression.

Black girls are likened more to adults than to children and are treated as if they are willfully engaging in behaviors typically expected of Black women—sexual involvement, parenting or primary caregiving, workforce participation, and other adult behaviors and responsibilities. This compression is both a reflection of deeply entrenched biases that have stripped Black girls of their childhood freedoms and a function of an opportunity-starved social landscape that makes Black girlhood interchangeable with Black womanhood. It gives credence to a widely held perception and a message that there is little difference between the two.

Girls like Mia and Shanice draw important connections between their desire to learn and their inability to do so in chaotic learning environments. Across the country, Black girls have repeatedly described “rowdy” classroom environments that prevent them from being able to focus on learning. They also described how the chaotic learning environment has, in some cases, led to their avoidance of school or to reduced engagement in school. In other situations, girls described contentious and negative interactions between teachers and students as the norm. In today’s climate of zero tolerance, where there are few alternatives to punishing problematic student behavior, the prevailing school discipline strategy, with its heavy reliance on exclusionary practices—dismissal, suspension, or expulsion—becomes a predictable, cyclical, and ghettoizing response.

A recent report, “The Sexual Abuse to Prison Pipeline,” highlighted the way in which girls, particularly girls of color, are criminalized as a result of their sexual and physical abuse. ...quite often ignored is how sexual violence can also become a pathway to confinement.

I'm learning [that] love and school are the only things you get for free when you're young, and I took it for granted.

Not every investment requires money. As the girls in this book have shown, they want to know that people care about them and their well-being. They want to be seen and acknowledged for who they are and what they can contribute to the learning environment. Our collective community can respond to their needs by being there for them. But many schools around the country have also established girls’ groups as a way to provide encouragement for girls simply by convening them in regular conversation and sisterhood check-ins. These are good ways to facilitate conversation and to launch the next level of investment—one that does require financial resources. Join efforts to raise awareness about the conditions of Black girls in the racial justice movement.

Zero-tolerance discipline policies, specifically the controversial category of willful defiance, have become a routine way by which to punish and marginalize Black girls in learning spaces when they directly confront adults or indirectly complicate the teacher’s ability to manage the classroom—not necessarily actions that pose a threat to the physical safety of anyone on campus.

The struggle is real. Yet when girls strike back against this fatigue, society casts them as deviant—as disruptive to the order of a (supposedly race- and gender-neutral) social structure without consideration of what might be fueling their agitation.

...sexually exploited Black girls are not choosing to participate in the sex trade; they are in the traumatic throes of a "domino effect" of choices made for them. "Did they choose to grow up in poverty? ... Did they choose sexual abuse? Did they choose to get raped, some of them before they could walk? Did they choose to grow up in a world where women and girls are not safe?...As women and girls become more sexualized in the world, the more they are seen as property.

Defining freedom cannot amount to simply substituting it with inclusion. Countering the criminalization of Black girls requires fundamentally altering the relationship between Black girls and the institutions of power that have worked to reinforce their subjugation. History has taught us that civil rights are but one component of a larger movement for this type of social transformation. Civil rights may be at the core of equal justice movements, and they may elevate an equity agenda that protects our children from racial and gender discrimination, but they do not have the capacity to fully redistribute power and eradicate racial inequity. There is only one practice that can do that. Love.

The lingering barriers to a quality education and the transgenerational trauma associated with internalized ideas about performance in school have yet to be exhaustively measured.

The greater a school’s proportion of students of color, the higher the likelihood that punitive exclusionary discipline will be used in response to student behaviors deemed disruptive and problematic.

When we prioritize discipline over learning in our educational institutions, we engage in a reactive politics that maintains a status quo of inequality.

relationships,” Destiny offered. “[One of the] teachers . . . she’s like, really stubborn and so it’s hard . . . Sometimes I’ll ask a question . . . if I have a question, she’s like, ‘You already know that, you’re just trying to get attention.’ And I’m like, ‘No, I’m really asking.’ I’ve gotten kicked out of class like three times for that . . . and she’s like, ‘You’re being really annoying.

Focusing on criminalization, rather than just incarceration, would enable greater understanding of how institutions impact girls and facilitate important shifts in our thinking and decision-making processes. We could see women and girls in their shared spaces with men and boys, and develop strategies that are responsive to the conditions that threaten the futures of female and male children. Being more inclusive would save us from a lot of head-scratching about why it is so hard to break harmful cycles, the negative patterns in student outcomes, and contact with the criminal legal system. Our nationwide culture of surveillance and criminalization is much more pervasive and life-threatening than even the largest prison. Its reach into our schools and our classrooms has reinforced latent ideas of Black inferiority and cast our girls as angry little women who are too self-absorbed and consumed by themselves and their faults to participate in school communities. We know it’s more complicated than that. A