Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools

by Monique W. Morris

Maya Angelou was guided out of silence by the loving hand of an educator. Her teacher did not practice zero tolerance or call a school resource officer to apprehend young Marguerite or slam her to the ground. She saw the fragility of a child—a girl who harmful forces were trying to break—and knew she needed to be drawn gently back into the world.

Black girls living with the realities Dr. Angelou faced while growing up tend to be removed, suspended, or expelled from school for being disruptive or defiant. Even kindergarten girls are handcuffed and arrested for throwing tantrums.

Instead of providing meaningful support for Black girls and women that is rooted in love, we misunderstand and ignore their suffering, and we push them out of sight.

Black girls are also directly impacted by criminalizing policies and practices that render them vulnerable to abuse, exploitation, dehumanization, and, under the worst circumstances, death.

Black girls are 16 percent of the female student population, but nearly one-third of all girls referred to law enforcement and more than one-third of all female school-based arrests.6

The ways in which Black girls’ educational experiences would be constructed according to a hierarchy that favors White middle-class norms has been floating under the national radar for six decades. As Patricia Hill-Collins wrote, “All women engage an ideology that deems middle-class, heterosexual, White femininity as normative. In this context, Black femininity as a subordinated gender identity becomes constructed not just in relation to White women, but also in relation to multiple others, namely, all men, sexual outlaws (prostitutes and lesbians), unmarried women, and girls.”24

The central argument of this book is that too many Black girls are being criminalized (and physically and mentally harmed) by beliefs, policies, and actions that degrade and marginalize both their learning and their humanity, leading to conditions that push them out of schools and render them vulnerable to even more harm.

We can counter the criminalization of Black girls in schools by first understanding what their criminalization looks like, and then by building a common language and framework for making sure that struggling Black girls are not left behind. We can all get behind a fair and effective education strategy that provides a quality education for every young person.

Being abused and/or neglected as a child increases the risk of arrest among children by 59 percent and among adults by 28 percent.

The question of survival among Black girls has always been about whether they are seen, and if so, how they are seen, particularly in economically and socially isolated spaces. Are they “background noise” in a larger view of urban life that prioritizes men and boys? Are they disruptive forces in the exploitation of Black communities? Are they loyal “ride-or-die chicks” who sacrifice their own safety and well-being in the name of love? Are they willing participants in their own oppression? Are they making a way out of no way at all? Are they good girls? Are they bad girls? These are not yes-or-no questions. The answers are anything but simple, and too often no one stops to ponder whether the questions themselves create or even worsen the very problems they seek to illuminate.

For Black girls, to be “ghetto” represents a certain resilience to how poverty has shaped racial and gender oppression. To be “loud” is a demand to be heard. To have an “attitude” is to reject a doctrine of invisibility and mistreatment. 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.

for example, Claudette Colvin. Nine months before Rosa Parks made a similar decision that would launch the Montgomery bus boycott, fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin protested the segregation of Montgomery buses by refusing to give up her seat to a White passenger. But most people do not know her name. Why is that? Well, she didn’t fit the profile of a “perfect” protestor.

If the curriculum being taught does not even consider the unique needs and experiences of Black girls seeking to climb out of poverty and the ghetto, as is most often the case, do they really have equal access to education?

In upholding compulsory education, we trust, or at least hope, that schools are teaching our children basic reading, writing, and mathematical skills as well as the critical thinking and social skills that are needed for socioeconomic advancement—their own and that of their communities. But if ghetto spaces are, by definition, inferior in quality and rife with socioeconomic and political oppression, what it means to operate schools in these spaces takes on new meaning and challenges our widely accepted assumptions and presumptions about schooling.

“I noticed that girls who get caught up in prostitution, they feel like working is more important than anything else,” Destiny said. “So, like, the girls that I know who are prostitutes, I hardly ever see them because they are, like, working all the time . . . It’s better to go to school and get a career, but it’s like, if you can get money, like right then and there, then why would I want to go to school for however many years?”

Performance on national standardized tests also reveals racial disparities among girls.41 These controversial, single measures of knowledge may deter Black girls from continuing on with their education or lead them to internalize that they are not worthy of completing school.

As children or as adults, Black girls are treated as if they are supposed to “know better,” or at least “act like” they know. The assignment of more adultlike characteristics to the expressions of young Black girls is a form of age compression.

If Black girls do manage to locate their dream and partner it with an opportunity, the lack of Black female role models in certain professions and the active way in which Black girls are discouraged from pursuing certain professions (e.g., those in the STEM fields) make visioning their futures difficult.

A Seattle study found that even a Black student who “tries to please her teacher, tries to get good grades, and is willing to put up with things she doesn’t like about school may not be rewarded (in terms of higher GPA) in the same way her [European American] classmate would be rewarded.”49 Personal attitudes and biases still inform how a student-teacher relationship develops.

It seemed to me that Destiny and her teacher were affected by the “hype” of inferior ability, which facilitated a learning environment marred by low expectations.

Internalized racial oppression is “the process by which Black people internalize and accept, not always consciously, the dominant White culture’s oppressive actions and beliefs toward Black people (e.g., negative stereotypes, discrimination, hatred, falsification of historical facts, racist doctrines, White supremacists ideology), while at the same time rejecting the African worldview and cultural motifs.”50 For Black women and girls, internalized racial oppression is also gendered.

Black girls in classrooms across the country have been granted permission to fail by the implicit biases of teachers that lower expectations for them.

We were talking about the types of programs that she would like to see implemented in her community when she slumped in her chair and let her fingers trace the perimeter of the desk. Then she asked me an important question. “You know how they say this is a man’s world?” she asked. I nodded and replied, “Yep.” “I don’t like that,” she said, staring into my eyes. “Neither do I,” I said softly. We shared a nervous laugh, but then I asked, “I know why it bothers me,” I said. “But why does it bother you?” “Because I feel like . . . it shouldn’t be just one person’s world. Like, what you mean, it’s a man’s world? Like, what does a strong girl get out of that? Like, how is this a man’s world? I just don’t get it. I feel like it should be equal, and I don’t feel like that’s equal. I feel like boys . . . men got more rights than girls, and that shouldn’t be right.”

I asked her what she felt would improve her experiences in juvenile hall. “They should make this a learning environment to make you understand that [juvenile hall] ain’t the place. And I feel like, they say they making this seem like it ain’t the place by making it harder. That just make it hard. It don’t make it that I don’t want to come back here, ’cause half the time, people still come back. . . . I just feel like, you should make it helpful. . . . They don’t make it helpful by making it hard on people, ’cause you got it hard out [in the community], too.”

In this case, the young woman was removed from the classroom, but should her learning really be interrupted because of her sarcasm? Because of her “attitude”? Because she is not docile?

Two teachers instantly responded to her. One quickly apologized for mispronouncing her name, explaining that her family was from a town in the South with a similarly spelled name, and that her inclination was to pronounce the name as it is pronounced in her hometown. “I’m sorry,” she said after completing her explanation. Meanwhile, the other teacher repeated, “It’s okay . . . we’re all human.” The girl’s shoulders began to relax until she finally lowered her arms, nodded, and continued to work toward getting acclimated to her new learning environment. In this instance, teachers demonstrated compassion and effective communication, and were able to defuse a situation that could have become hostile.

studies show that Black student performance and motivation are often a function of the students’ social relatedness with teachers, especially in the early grades.11 So when teachers feel physically threatened by a six-year-old or when “bad tantrums” are cause for handcuffs, there is a larger problem.

According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program, White males between the ages of thirteen and eighteen are the most likely to initiate a school-based shooting.48 However, schools in which the student population is largely composed of youth of color have the highest degree of implementing metal detectors, security officers, SROs, and other police forces.49

“For no crime type was an increase in the presence of police significantly related to decreased crime rates. The preponderance of evidence suggests that, to the contrary, more crimes involving weapons possession and drugs are recorded in schools that add police officers than in similar schools that do not.

Schools are supposed to be safe havens for our children and a place where their intellectualism grows and their skill sets—academic, emotional, and social—sharpen.

What happens when our schools remove these important opportunities for learning and recreational play and instead focus primarily on discipline?

Malaika was fundamentally trying not to become the symbol of “bad behavior”—particularly since she felt that she was speaking her truth. It is the idea that her truth has no place in the classroom that triggers Malaika.

Children from middle-class or higher-income families often take for granted the social and material investments (manicures, new shoes, new clothes, extracurricular activities) that reflect the inherent commercialism of a capitalist society. These are influences that reach all children.

Wearing short shorts on a hot day almost got Deja sent home. The fear, as suggested by the principal’s comment, was that Deja’s shorts might elicit inappropriate touching and behavior among the boys. Instead of focusing on developing a climate in which boys are taught not to touch girls’ bodies, girls are sent home to change their clothes.

Jazz legend Ella Fitzgerald was once assigned to this facility for being an “ungovernable” teen.23 Here she was quarantined, tortured, and excluded from participating in the choir, as it was reserved for White girls only.

In 1910, Black girls were four times more likely to be incarcerated than foreignborn White girls, and five times more likely than native-born White girls.25 Black girls were also more likely than White girls to be found delinquent for person, property, and status offenses—a trend that was particularly prevalent in the southern states.