Today, Black school-age boys are expelled three times as often as white school-age boys. And black boys in the late nineties were part of the first major wave of the school-to-prison pipeline in which schools pursued zero-tolerance policies for fighting. This meant that Black youth were frequently suspended or expelled and sometimes arrested either for fighting or for truancy. Black male teenagers, boys who were not yet men, became bona fide enemies of the state, the primary targets in law enforcement’s war on drugs and crime.
