By
Sikivu Hutchinson
Whenever there’s a black girl on a school campus wielding
a dangerous weapon like a cell phone, white macho can always be counted on to come
to civilization’s rescue with the full force of fascist violence. These days, unarmed
black children rank higher than mass murderers with semi-automatic weapons as
public enemy number one on American school campuses. Shortly after the videotaped assault
of a cell phone wielding sixteen year-old Spring Valley High School student in Richland,
South Carolina by a white male school resource officer went viral, a New York Times letter writer naively
asked—“Why are children not treated like children when they do silly things?”
Why? Because black children have never been children
in the eyes of the police state and its proxy, American public education. Nor do they qualify as victims within the
lens of a corporate media regime hell bent on exploiting black pain, à
la news
outlets like CNN. Zealously milking the moment for maximum reality TV effect, CNN
correspondents played and replayed the brutal image; first, as the
silent backdrop to an interview with a Richland school board representative,
then as a frame-by-frame analysis to evaluate the girl’s “responsibility”. In their "analysis", the upraised arm of the girl being dragged
from her desk was transformed into a strike against the officer. Her flailing legs were parsed as a potential “assault”
on his person. Claiming “she had no respect for the school
or her teacher”, CNN commentator Harry Houck deemed the assault to be justified,
conjuring racist-sexist stereotypes of black girls as violent, lawless Jezebels.
As Color of Change activists have argued,
this shameless victim blaming is itself a form of emotional and psychological
trauma that would never be inflicted on a white girl.
The criminalization and policing of black girls on
school campuses has been well-documented by the U.S.
Department of Education and the African
American Policy Forum, headed by esteemed activist law professor Kimberlé
Crenshaw. Black girls are suspended
more than any other group besides black boys. They have higher suspension rates vis-à-vis
white girls than do black boys in comparison to white boys. One of the most
insidious aspects of race/gender disproportionality in school discipline is the
double standard of conduct—when black girls “act out”, talk back, wear
“inappropriate” clothing or use restricted personal items like cell phones in
classrooms they’re disciplined more harshly than whites who commit serious
offenses such as assault. The Indiana Education
Policy Center’s 2000 “Color of Discipline” report concluded that black students
were more likely to be referred out of class for lower level infractions such
as excessive noise, disrespect, loitering and “threat.” Hearkening back to its
Jim Crow legacy of anti-black terrorism, black children in the South are more
likely to receive corporal punishment than are students in other regions.
So while white children are given the social and
cultural space to “just be kids”—acting out, talking back, playing with gadgets
and clothing styles—black children must always toe the line of respectability
or risk detention, assault and/or death. And while white children of all class backgrounds have greater access to college preparation curricula and
college resources, many black students have greater “access” to school police
than a college counselor.
From high-achieving older students to the tiniest
students just starting out, black girls are criminalized at every step of their
school careers. In a widely publicized 2013 case, sixteen year-old chemistry student
Kiera
Wilmot was arrested, led away in handcuffs, and expelled from Bartow High School
in Florida for a science experiment gone awry. In 2012, the handcuffing
of black female preschoolers and kindergartners in Georgia elicited a
groundswell of activism around the egregious numbers of very young black
children who are suspended and expelled. Despite being
only 18% of the preschool population, black preschool students receive 48%
of school suspensions. By contrast, white students comprise 43% of all
preschoolers and 26% of those suspended.
Responding to these horrendous demographics, school-community activists
of color have pushed for restorative justice programs, fewer police, and less
paramilitary weaponry on campuses.
In Richland, black students are
59% of the student population and 77% of those suspended. The Richland Two Black Parents Association
has been working with the national Dignity
in Schools campaign to get the district to implement a culturally responsive
discipline code “that clearly spells
out that peaceful students will not be dealt with by law enforcement, but by
school officials.” Addressing the
epidemic of school push-out and prison pipelining that targets students of
color, Dignity in Schools has advocated for a human rights-based discipline model
which would replace school resource officers with community intervention workers
trained to do mentoring, conflict resolution and peace-building in heavily
criminalized schools. Changing the
paramilitary climate of schools of color would remove the real menace to the
mental health, wellbeing and academic success of African American youth who are
bearing the brunt of the U.S.’ mass incarceration cancer.
