Heaven was nervous about her prospects of being able to get back on track—especially since she felt that she was primarily on her own. She seemed to fancy herself a good person. For the most part, she claimed, she tried to do the right thing. At age fourteen, she ran away from home and went to live with her sixteen-year-old boyfriend. She was even a good girlfriend to him, especially when he made the decision to get his life back in order and take advantage of programs that were designed to help young men reintegrate into school.
“I always wanted a relationship. . . . Even when I was fourteen, I wanted a relationship. . . . But it took a toll on me in another way. It made me feel like a grown woman, because I was staying with him and I was taking care of a man, so it was like, I was doing everything my mom did for her boo, for my boo. And so . . . now I wasn’t going to school. But I made sure he went to school and he got his high school diploma. . . . You know, I was never really worried about myself. I was always the kind of person who cared about others more than me.”
“Why did you sacrifice your own education so he could go to school?” I asked.
“Honestly, I don’t know . . . because it wasn’t smart. But I know I didn’t want him to be like the rest of these boys standing out here on the street . . . and it was so crazy because we started off going to school together. And when he went on the run . . . he used to come to juvie . . . and when he went on the run and cut off his ankle [bracelet], I went with him because I knew that he wasn’t going to come to school, and since I wanted a serious relationship, I knew that relationship wouldn’t continue unless I was with him all the time, you know. I was one of those . . . I was very insecure. And so I wanted to be with him all the time, and he wanted the same thing. And so if he went to school . . . say if he went to school and I was doing something, he would always want to come and meet me, or I would want to come and meet him . . . while we were in school. So when he went to juvie, I was in school but I was stressin’.”
“About what he was doing?” I asked, still processing the fact that she was willing to sacrifice her own education to make sure that her boyfriend had his.
“Yeah. How was he, and things of that nature. But then when he went to a group home and he wasn’t able to go places or do nothing, he utilized all of these programs, these youth programs and school, and so every program, every time he went to school, who was there? Me. And so, instead of me being at my school, I was up at his school bringing him something to eat, giving his security guard sandwiches . . . so he’d be able to leave.”
Heaven started laughing, as if she could hardly believe her own naiveté. She shook her head slowly.
Then I asked, “Did anybody ever ask you, ‘What are you doing here? You’re here for his program’ . . . did anyone ever turn to you and ask for your story?”
I wanted to believe that the adults running a program for young men might have seen this young woman who was clearly standing by her boyfriend in all respects, yet still experiencing many of the same conditions for which he was getting help.
Her commitment to her boyfriend could be understood as powerful love. If only she had been able to focus some of that love on herself.
Heaven paused for a moment and then shook her head. “They always liked that I was on his team, that I was motivating him to do better. He didn’t have nobody else pushing him to do right . . . and I knew that if I wasn’t there, he wasn’t going to stay that whole time, ’cause he was going to come looking for me somewhere. So I tried to make sure that he stayed on that program. So it messed up my program. It’s bad and good at the same time. But it’s bad for me. I don’t regret doing that, to be so honest, because he wouldn’t be the person he is now. I’m mad at myself that I couldn’t juggle both, but I don’t regret it.”
I’m mad at myself that I couldn’t juggle both. Black girls internalize very early on the idea that their well-being comes secondary to others’. Our policies, our public rhetoric about healing, even our protests all make the pain of Black females an afterthought to the pain of Black males. Heaven blamed herself for not being able to be with him all day and manage her own daily obligations. She blamed herself for essentially not being able to be in two places at once. The idea that Black girls have to hold the pain of Black boys, even at their own expense, is a form of internalized sexism. But when it’s couched as a matter of being a “ride or die” girlfriend, many girls never see that by accepting these conditions, they become complicit in their own oppression. For girls like Heaven, getting an education is not only a rehabilitative act; it’s an act of social justice.
Education, particularly formal education, is a primary avenue for accessing greater opportunity. Those who are pushed to the margins are often rendered too powerless to manage a clear vision of what a truly inclusive learning environment even looks like, let alone how they might participate in ways that support their well-being as learners, as Black girls, and as negotiators of their own destiny.
Over the years I’ve come to see how the expressive nature of Black girls has been both a blessing and a curse. Educational policies and practices that politicize dress or hair, that undermine or forgo learning in favor of hyperpunitive disciplinary actions, or that implicitly grant Black girls permission to fail all penalize characteristics and modes of being that could instead be built on and shaped into healthy tools for success.
To date, the conditions of Black females in the United States have been obscured by a racial justice agenda that persistently prioritizes males. The sometimes similar but frequently not so similar ways that Black girls are locked out of society become lost. The domestic gender justice agenda has also obscured experiences of struggling Black girls by steering the focus toward colorblind efforts that organize, invest, and develop strategies that purportedly support all women and girls—as if all girls are uniformly impacted by sexism, racism, and the consequences of patriarchy. The rather naive logic here parallels the cries that emerged shortly after “Black Lives Matter” unified millions in the wake of protests against routine police misconduct toward Black people: almost predictably, some people, including many well-intentioned ones, switched to the refrain “All Lives Matter.” The problem, of course, is not that all lives don’t matter. Of course they do. But substituting “All” for “Black” obscures the specific resistance to the anti-Black racism and bias that are frequently at the root of police violence, use of excessive force, harassment, and other injustices. So yes, all girls experience injustice, and all of it matters. Boys, specifically boys of color, are incarcerated at unjustifiable rates. And that matters too. But addressing any of these shouldn’t come at anyone else’s expense. Yet that’s what we’ve tacitly allowed to happen—and in some cases explicitly supported—when it comes to Black girls.
Still, amid these challenges, Black girls possess a resilience that points the way to how we can provide meaningful opportunities for their development. Heaven knew that her own learning suffered because of her decision to put her boyfriend’s well-being before her own. Without critical self-reflection—an engagement of her own thought process—she would not be able to see these actions as problematic. In her narrative is a cry for permission to center herself, and to know how and when to do it. Her education should facilitate and validate that process, not work against it, as is so frequently the case.
From the lessons, patterns, and insight gathered through speaking with Black girls from coast to coast, six themes emerged as crucial for cultivating quality learning environments for Black girls: (1) the protection of girls from violence and victimization in school; (2) proactive discussions in schools about healthy intimate relationships; (3) strong student-teacher relationships; (4) school-based wraparound services; (5) an increased focus on student learning coupled with a reduced emphasis on discipline and surveillance; and (6) consistent school credit recovery processes between alternative schools and traditional district or community schools.
At the root of these themes is the need to revisit “education as usual�
�� and relationships that are facilitated, nurtured, and/or damaged in educational institutions. Increasingly, school districts across the nation are seeking alternatives to the alienating and punitive climate that informs negative interactions between schools and Black girls, as well as other girls of color. Many states have now acknowledged that the disparate use of exclusionary discipline among children of color is unconscionable and unsustainable if our nation is to truly implement an educational system that prioritizes teaching children over punishing them, and pushing them out of school.
Envisioning Schools Designed to Achieve Equity
Imagine a future for Black girls that is filled with dignity and where their learning spaces are places they are invited to critically engage, alongside educators, in the construction of their education and in the redemption of their lives. Imagine a Black female student identity that is not marred by stereotypes, but rather is buoyed by a collective vision of excellence that should always accompany the learning identities of our girls.
As we’ve seen, Black girls’ educational lives are dynamic and complex, and too often follow a school-to-confinement pathway. They are affected by school-based decisions and practices that reinforce negative stereotypes about Black femininity and facilitate pushout, and their vulnerabilities increase once their connection with school has been harmed or severed. But pathways to criminalization are clear, often eminently clearer than any other pathway. The failure to fully understand or make space for the wide-ranging gender identities that many of our girls embrace sets up a criminalizing pathway for girls. The absence of culturally competent and gender-responsive methods of teaching—approaches that respond to girls who stand at the crossroads of racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, and poverty—sets up a criminalizing pathway for girls. Blanket discrimination against detained or formerly incarcerated people, or those suspected of being involved with the criminal legal system in some way, sets up pathways that further criminalize girls who have made mistakes and want to recover from them. Alongside these criminalizing pathways, external forces—the kinds of influences educators and systems have little control over—all but ensure that Black girls with the deck stacked against them will indeed take these paths, ill-equipped as they are to see and create better ones.
The criminalization and social marginalization that have been described throughout this book go hand-in-hand with society’s expanding prison-industrial complex and the increased abandonment of a basic tenet associated with juvenile justice: redemption.1 It’s established and widely accepted that education is one of the greatest rehabilitative and protective factors against delinquency for girls.2 When we take education away from them, Black girls are exposed to more violence, and they are more likely to be victimized and exploited, to become incarcerated, and to experience a lack of opportunity overall. When we prioritize discipline over learning in our educational institutions, we engage in a reactive politics that maintains a status quo of inequality.
As parents, educators, and concerned community members, we must examine the ways in which our educational institutions are underserving our children—and pushing our girls out of school alongside our boys. Changing the conversation about school discipline is not about excusing abhorrent behavior. Implementing alternative reactions to negative student behavior and developing relationships that teach young people about who they are and how they should behave in a safe learning environment doesn’t conflict with developing personal responsibility. In fact, quite the opposite is true.
Rarely is there reflection upon the extent to which our reactions to girls’ behaviors are rooted in whether they are being “good girls” or whether they have actually presented a harm or threat to safety, personal or public. We must also consider how expressions of Black femininity (e.g., how girls talk, dress, or wear their hair) are pathologized by school rules. In our haste to teach children social rules, we sometimes fail to examine whether these rules are rooted in oppression—racial, patriarchal, or any other form. Ultimately such a failure undermines the full expression and learning of Black girls.
Black girls need teachers, administrators, and school policies that do not see their Black identity as inferior or something to fear. Their Black femininity must not be exploited, ignored, and punished. Their words need not be seen as problematic, and their questions need not be seen as inherently defiant.
School-based policies and practices that expose Black girls to the disproportionate application of discipline, that emphasize society’s dominant and negative constructs of Black femininity, or that seek to punish them for clothing and/or hairstyle choices must be eliminated and instead replaced by a pedagogy that embraces the healing and liberative power of talking.3 The intention should be to provide learning spaces for Black girls to thrive without feeling that they have to reject their own identity to do so.
When Nancy, a teacher from California, stated that in order to prevent school-to-confinement pathways she must “teach more than the curriculum,” she was putting forth a call for educators to see beyond the perceived attitude and the stereotypes that render too many of our girls invisible or unsuitable for the classroom. She was calling for a community response and an unapologetic rejection of the notion that our girls’ learning is in any way less important than anyone else’s.
There are no throwaway children. We can, and must, do better.
To eliminate the pushout and criminalization of our girls, the first step is for all those investing their time and energy in the fight for racial justice—advocates, scholars, organizers, and others—to stop measuring the impact of the criminal legal system simply by the numbers of people who are incarcerated. Incarceration is now framed as our generation’s greatest civil and human rights challenge. We argue (and among like minds generally agree) that prisons and other carceral institutions are overused. We see the buildings, razor wire, and armed guards and understand them as physical monuments to inequality and pain. Prisons are tangible. They also hold more males than females; thus a racial justice agenda framed by the lens of incarceration elevates male endangerment. It leaves little room to consider the ways that females are also subjected to institutionalized harm and a prevailing consciousness that favors punishment over rehabilitation.
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 Race-Conscious Gender Analysis
A race-conscious gender analysis may sound like an esoteric academic theory, but it’s not. In essence it is the process of acknowledging that Black women never stop being Black people, nor do they stop being women. Thus they are affected by the policies and practices that undermine their development and progress as both. Every intervention that schools, communities, and lawmakers design for our girls has to recognize that gender expression and identity—and sexual expression and identity—must figure prominently in order to support their well-being. During institutional slavery, Black women, like their male counterparts, picked cotton, constructed railroads, and were whipped, flogged, and mutilated under oppressive and dehumanizing conditions. These were deplorable conditions that affected men and women alike. However, the gen
dered way in which racism has played out in their lives also meant that they were routinely raped and forced to serve as wet nurses to the newborn children of slave owners. Racialized gender stereotypes about Black women and other women of color shape how they interact with the world today, and how the world perceives and interacts with them. We are at a moment in history that lends itself to informed community building. The failures of the past are haunting us, and truthfully, there are enough narratives and data to justify a new approach to curbing troublesome behavior in schools. Also, our dominant social narrative—informed by a growing critique of mass incarceration—presents us with an opportunity to do more than just let people out of prison. At this juncture, we can choose the road less traveled and revisit the criminalization that has fueled a culture of incarceration in all its forms. An agenda for Black female achievement does not undermine or preclude any agenda or narrative on Black male achievement. An initiative for Black women and girls is not an affront to the efforts for Black men and boys—so it’s time to bridge conversations.
Our girls, boys, and gender-nonconforming youth are sharing communities, institutions, homes, and lives with each other. Efforts to support women and girls of color are imperative to the successful navigation of any condition that places whole communities at risk. Programs to address family structures must not vilify single-female-headed households or assume that by supporting men and boys only, our schools and other institutions are meeting the needs of young women and girls. It’s time to stop ignoring the very real conditions that push girls and young women to the margins of society and render them vulnerable to exploitation, abuse, and debilitating legal issues.
Pushout Page 19