Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools

by Monique W. Morris

The drive to cast contemporary America as a “colorblind” society impairs our ability to recognize two important phenomena: the persistence of segregation and how it shapes the identities of Black girls, and the impacts of systems that reproduce and reinforce unequal access to educational opportunity.

If schools are teaching curricula that have erased the presence of Black females from the heroic narrative of American exceptionalism (save for a few references during Black History Month in February), are they not implicitly constructing a narrative of exclusion? In a world of normalized exclusion, how and where, then, do Black girls situate themselves as Americans and as global citizens?