Pushout (24 page)

Understand and Examine the Impact of Dress Codes

Dress code policies must be revised and new ways of regulating student behavior developed that do not unfairly target Black girls or facilitate their objectification. Dress code policies are designed to encourage respectful student presentation, but as the narratives
in this book demonstrate, many Black girls perceive these codes to affect them differently because of subjective enforcement and/or assumptions made about their sexuality. First, schools should examine the purpose and impact of their dress codes and remove all references to hairstyles that are historically associated primarily with Black cultural traditions (e.g., dreadlocks, braids, Afros, etc.). Second, schools should seek to remedy the differential application of dress code violations by developing an objective decision-making tool that provides administrators and staff with a rubric by which to gauge the acceptability of student dress. This tool or body should be co-created with a representative group of students and then communicated via peer-led processes that facilitate student buy-in and acceptance of school norms. Champions of these policies and practices should not only be adults. Likewise, students should also help design remedies to dress code violations that do not include suspension or being sent home.

Engage in Practices That Facilitate Healing Opportunities for Black Girls

To lead on campus is too often an elusive experience for Black girls. Our schools should provide ongoing examples and models of leadership. We should promote their engagement in school-based sporting and club opportunities, both to encourage their positive connection to school and to hone skills associated with the cultural norms of speaking out and asking questions in a healing and holistic way.

In my work with girls, sacred inquiry
*
*
provided a framework
for learning through discussion, experience, representation, understanding, action, and engagement.
⁴
This foundation is capable of advancing us beyond a punishment lens to one that embraces transformation, shifting the emphasis to healing those relationships that have been harmed, along with the anger or frustration that may have led to the harmful action in the first place. A trauma-informed practice understands that for a person who has experienced a severe or extremely harmful event or series of events, there are certain behaviors, words, and conditions that trigger in her or him a negative reaction—reactions that are often responses to past abuse and/or neglect.
⁵
Developing a traumainformed learning environment provides considerations for these triggers and offers protections for girls, and those who work with them, against further harm. In such environments, there is an emphasis on physical and emotional safety. For example, inappropriate touching is not just disallowed as a rule; there is also constant education of students, faculty, and staff about how to develop healthy intimate relationships that do not include unsolicited comments and touching.

Emotional safety is supported in learning spaces by emphasizing a respect for the diversity of thought and the rigor that comes from positive, appreciative reasoning and engagement with material. Ultimately the vandalism of school property or a school-based altercation must be seen as an opportunity to understand and respond to the conditions that underlie this plea for help, rather than just an act worthy of suspension or expulsion. Treating a girl's ideas or “smart mouth” as violent when they are reflective of her critical thinking is outside the parameters of being trauma-informed. It is worth noting that community-based organizations are increasingly embracing a healing-informed approach that positively flips the trauma frame, focusing on the journey
toward
healing rather than on past experiences of trauma.

Have “The Talk” with Girls, Not Just Boys

“The talk” with Black girls and young women is also a discussion about racism in America, and as with boys, it should include tips for how to be safe in the presence of law enforcement and include clear instructions about how to behave when they are suspected of wrongdoing in the presence of someone with a gun, stun gun, or other weapon. But “the talk” also requires a candid discussion about sexism and patriarchy in our society, along with the justice movements that work to combat these forces. Our girls need to know how to identify sexism in all its forms, how to understand the ways in which it intersects with racism to create problematic narratives about the femininity of Black girls, and how their own education and self-determination can change these narratives and the devastating effects of biased policies and practices associated with education, justice, and the economy.

Most importantly, we must all recognize that a racial justice practice without a gender-inclusive thrust is nothing more than a moot exercise. Only when we develop a national, fully funded investment in
all
of our young people will we finally breathe life into Maya Angelou's simple phrase: “Equality, and I will be free.”
⁶

From Punishment to Transformation

For many of these girls, my interactions with them were the first time that an adult had asked them about their future goals and their experiences with schools. Most of the girls in this discussion did not know how they learn best, and were deeply disturbed by the extent to which they were being labeled and tracked as behavioral concerns. They were also aware of others' projections onto them that were leading them to a place of alienation.

By asking why it is so difficult for Black girls to “simply survive,” Nikki Jones reminds us that there are structures, social conditions, and individual acts that prevent our girls from fully participating in this nation's promise of opportunity.
⁷
Ultimately,
the failure to include Black girls fully in the articulation of American democracy has relegated them to the margins of society. Though many have achieved remarkable heights and their presence may be found on the front lines of activism and protest, their presence at the center of decisions about policy and practice is at best limited and underdeveloped.

This book's exploration into the criminalization of Black girls in schools provides an opportunity to center Black girls in our discussions about zero tolerance, school discipline, dress codes, child victimization, and the impact of increasing surveillance in our nation's public schools. The hyperpunitive climate of many educational environments, particularly those that have adopted zero-tolerance policies, is antithetical to the cultural norms associated with Black feminine expression (e.g., the use of verbal and nonverbal cues to process information, or the practice of speaking up in the face of adversity).
⁸
Black girls desire a safe space in which to learn, where they can earn credits toward graduation, where they can heal from harm and develop skills to support healthy relationships, where there is a reduced emphasis on discipline, and where positive student-teacher relationships are reinforced through dialogue and engagement by individuals with whom they can share historical and cultural experiences.

New Futures

Literature on the structure of dominance and the socially reproductive function of schools tells us that schools may reinforce and reproduce social hierarchies that undermine the development of people who occupy a lower societal status.
⁹
For the Black girls we've met on these pages, the majority of whom live in poverty and under the normalized surveillance of law enforcement in their communities and schools, these socially reproductive structures constitute educational experiences that guide them to, rather than direct them away from, destitution and escalating contact with the criminal legal system. Their vulnerability is compounded by
the individual biases that inform the ideological thrust of teachers and underscore their negative responses and low expectations for children who have been labeled as “delinquent.”
¹⁰

Our girls have ideas about how to change these conditions.

Sociologist William Corsaro introduced the notion of children's
interpretive reproduction
, the act of combining their peer culture with an adult-centric culture to generate new social constructs and norms, in order to explain how the social worlds of children evolve.
¹¹
Black girls will co-construct their learning environments whether or not we acknowledge that it is happening. They want to see themselves as fully integrated into the content being taught in schools, and they want to feel that their voices are not only heard but
respected
. These girls want to talk, and they need a learning culture that encourages them to talk as part of building community in the classroom or school.
¹²
They must be allowed to ask questions, to respectfully offer their opinion (even if it differs from the instructor's opinion), and to learn through an extended epistemology that honors their multiple ways of knowing and learning. Stripping Black girls of the ability to ask questions and process information through dialogue is culturally incompetent and antithetical to their development as critical thinkers. It reflects a reduced expectation for learning and generates feelings of hostility and alienation. That the majority of the girls in this discussion requested educational programming that was respectful, collaborative, and tied both to preparing for their futures and to building relationships signals their interest in a praxis anchored in the power of sharing one's story and perspective—a learning process that has the added benefit of being restorative.

Notwithstanding a history of negative experiences in school, girls can sometimes envision positive learning experiences—traditional and alternative—that bring them closer to their objectives, both academically and in terms of their options for the future. The girls I have spoken with identified specific elements that they considered to be important to the development of a culturally
competent and gender-responsive environment for them. Leading the list is the quality of their teacher. Black girls are most interested in being educated by qualified teachers who teach from a curriculum that acknowledges the role of women from similar conditions in shaping the nation's discourses on equal opportunity. They also want to be treated with dignity and to learn from a curriculum that provides opportunities to discuss and apply their learning to future career or academic goals.

Girls felt that caring and qualified teachers, along with other positive school leaders, should be a part of an effective and desirable learning environment. For example, Mia believed that educators could establish a better climate for learning by releasing some of their fear. “The teachers . . . I want them to stop being scared,” Mia said. “They just so scared. . . . Y'all so afraid to just send us out of class, y'all just letting us get away with hella shit. If y'all not going to send us out of class, y'all just letting us get away with anything.” It's telling that Mia has been socialized to see being pushed out as the only option for dealing with challenging classroom situations. What she is really asking for is an effective, supportive space to learn.

Our girls want structure, but not in a punitive, non-rehabilitative way. For Destiny, the reform she sought was to have someone, preferably a teacher that would monitor her progress in school. “I just need to be checked in on more often. Like that progress . . . [someone to ask], ‘How are you doing with school?' So, like, I can make sure I have my focus on school and not on what are my friends doing this weekend . . . I'd probably want it to be one of my teachers, so that it could be more, like, immediate. It'd be right there in the classroom instead of it being, like, a counselor and I can tell him one thing and then go to class or not go to class. Yeah . . .'cause I feel like if it was put more in my face, I'd be like, yeah, more focused.”

Others felt that classes, speakers, and volunteer opportunities that enhance their ability to advance their personal academic and
career goals would be an essential component of their quality educational experience.

For example, Faith said, “You know how they be having computer classes? They should have a class on jobs and stuff. Research on jobs, like what job you want to do. Like they should research it with you and help you, you know?”

Girls also suggested that the instructors for these courses should possess knowledge of “street” culture and be willing to share information about how to overcome the common obstacles (poverty, parental drug addiction, etc.) that they have found overwhelming in their own lives.

This was stated poignantly by Stacy, the self-described “problem child,” who felt that any intervention program needed to “have people that can relate to the young people . . . to help them talk about whatever they need to talk about,” adding that parental involvement was key.

This same notion was reinforced by Samantha, an eighteen-year-old emancipated foster child in Southern California who was homeless and in search of resources to help her complete high school.

“We need people who been there,” she said. “And I really hope [they] can do this, because I really need it.”

Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice.

—Martin Luther King Jr.

For love to implement “the demands of justice,” as Martin Luther King Jr. called them, we must shift our lens. We must consider what social innovations might arise when we come together and mobilize our collective wisdom, and thus begin to maximize the power of our input toward social change. Building an adaptive platform for innovation, one that allows us to rethink what we “know” and what we think works, will reduce the criminalization of our children in schools.