McArthur, S. A. (2018). Institutional violence: The assault on Black girls in schools. Journal of Language and Literacy Education. (original) (raw)
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While most research examining school discipline policies have focused on the experiences of boys of color, this article explores the relationship between violence and school discipline as they shape the lives of girls of color and their disciplinary records. Using in-depth interviews, this article re-narrates the experiences of Black and non-Black girls of color who have discipline records to explore their experiences. The author found that in addition to being subject to multiple, intersecting forms of violence outside of school, girls of color -particularly Black girls -are also subject to schools as sites of control that elicit their anger and resistance. This author contends that faculty should establish new ways of understanding Black and non-Black girls of color by accounting for the ways that intersectional violence shapes the girls' lives and supports their 'anger' , agency and resistance to violence.
Race Ethnicity and Education, 2016
While most research examining school discipline policies have focused on the experiences of boys of color, this article explores the relationship between violence and school discipline as they shape the lives of girls of color and their disciplinary records. Using in-depth interviews, this article re-narrates the experiences of Black and non-Black girls of color who have discipline records to explore their experiences. The author found that in addition to being subject to multiple, intersecting forms of violence outside of school, girls of color-particularly Black girls-are also subject to schools as sites of control that elicit their anger and resistance. This author contends that faculty should establish new ways of understanding Black and non-Black girls of color by accounting for the ways that intersectional violence shapes the girls' lives and supports their 'anger' , agency and resistance to violence.
Feminist Teacher, 2018
In March 2015, the State University of New York Press published the fourth edition of _This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color_, one of the most cited books in feminist theorizing that arguably turned the tide into what we today call intersectional feminism. Fall 2015 was the first school semester where the book was back in press again, and so it took a prominent, foundational role in my courses for both content and philosophical disposition. In those classes where I actually assigned the text, I was curious to see how students would respond to this canonical book that had never been assigned in my own college coursework, though a large part of that work centered on WGS. Here I was, at this auspicious occasion, teaching as a Black-FeministCompositionist within university knowledge systems that have denied the intellectual presence of the life-sustaining women thinkers/activists for my life as both teacher and student. From the vantage point of race-radical black feminist teaching that honors legacies like _This Bridge_, two goals for my teaching seemed obvious: 1) the need to vigilantly recognize and critique the modes of racial violence that structure learning today and 2) the need to pedagogically intervene in the neoliberalist logics that govern the way language and writing are treated as white discursive processes. As a compositionist- rhetorician, my pedagogical theories focus sharply on language and writing, the place and space where we most often impose the most violence and social control in higher education. As a black feminist, however, my politicization of language and writing under the institutional domain of white (university) supremacy takes on significant new identities and passions. Inspired by one particular student’s text, experiences, and particular reactions of college literacy/learning in my first semester using the latest edition of _This Bridge Called My Back_, I interrogate colonial and imperial ideologies (Paperson 2010) shaping schooling/literacy for racially/economically subjugated youth of color and the ways race-radical black feminist thought offers an alternative praxis for teaching and learning.
INSTITUTIONAL ACADEMIC VIOLENCE: Racial and Gendered Microaggressions in Higher Education
This essay is based on two of twenty-one testimonios of women who self-identified as low-income or working class Chicana 1 or Native American 2 who are pursuing doctorate degrees in the humanities, social sciences, forestry, and education. To better understand women's racial and gendered educational experiences as "U.S. Women of Color, " 3 I critically examine articulation of their experiences navigating through institutional violence via racial and gendered microaggressions in higher education and within everyday racism, white privilege, and complex power relations.
Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education
The enactment of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in 2015 by President Barack Obama increased accountability requirements and was designed to reduce achievement and opportunity gaps, and racial disproportionality in school discipline. Despite the implementation of ESSA, Black girls still continue to experience hypercriminalization and policing, and when disaggregated by race and gender, they still receive the highest rates of disciplinary punishments in school and out of school. In this article, we discuss how Black girls in the Pk–12 public school system are invalidated and ignored in educational policy discourse and in school reform. In our discussion, we argue that ESSA tends to focus on identity categories (such as race, gender, class, and linguistics), and not on the intersectionality thereof, or how race does not operate as a silo (race, gender, social class, and other parts of our identity are layered and form a mosaic). We draw from literature on Black girls, zero toler...
U.S. Education Reform and the Maintenance of White Supremacy through Structural Violence 2015
U.S public schools are more segregated today than they have been since before the desegregation efforts that followed the 1954 Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education, (Kozol, 2005, Mullins, 2013; Rothstein, 2013; Strauss, 2014; UCLA, 2014). Coinciding with this segregation are vast racial inequities and stratification, which are being intensified through the policies known as corporate education reform. In this article, we share the voices and stories of scholars and education activists who have documented the racism and segregation of U.S. public schooling over the rise of corporate education reform. We start with the current state of our segregated schools, what Jonathan Kozol refers to as “apartheid education” (Kozol, 2005). We then take a step back and look at the historical and ideological context of U.S. schooling under industrial capitalism, white supremacy and neoliberalism, all creating the perfect storm for the punitive and dehumanizing conditions within 21st century public education. We will then explore the formula of corporate education reform through an examination of specific instruments used to enact these policies: school choice and charters, high-stakes testing, and the disciplining and criminalizing of black and brown bodies. We also examine the delivery of these policies via the discourse used to justify them and the intentions behind them. Finally, we call the question of whether public schools are our best hope for achieving social and economic equity and how those working in this struggle might keep that vision in mind.
Teachers College Record, 2020
Context: Girls of Color are overrepresented in school disciplinary actions based on subjectively judged, minor infractions. Studies have consistently shown that this exclusionary discipline has long-lasting impact on Girls of Color and their educational outcomes, including increased risk for pushout and involvement in the criminal legal system. Focus of Study: We sought to uncover the processes that animate the statistics of overrepresentation of Girls of Color in disciplinary actions. Said differently, we sought to understand where, how, and why Girls of Color were being disciplined in schools. Using a Disability Critical Race Theory (DisCrit) lens and centering the voices of Girls' of Color, this empirical study was guided by the question, What mechanisms propel and dispel disciplinary inequities for Girls of Color? Research Design: The qualitative research took place in a suburban school district in the Midwestern United States marked by increasing racial, cultural, and linguistic diversity. This was part of a larger two-year study that Conclusions/Recommendations: Our analysis revealed the ways in which discipline disparities were animated by inequitable academic and behavioral responses of teachers to classroom interactions, which we name debilitating practices. Further, Girls of Color embodied repositioning as ways of maintaining their integrity and individuality when experiencing academic and behavioral injustices. We conclude with major implications for school personnel: (a) academically, educators must reflect on how ability is distributed and withheld in the classroom along racialized and gendered lines, and (b) behaviorally, positive behavior supports should be imagined and implemented through a race and gender conscious lens. Though we focus on classroom interactions, we also understand that public schools, schools of education, and society all have a role to play in dismantling the school-prison nexus. However, classroom interactions continue to be identified as the source of disciplinary disparities in both quantitative and qualitative studies. Consequently, teachers have an opportunity to change their classroom practices to academically and behaviorally support Girls of Color.
Unaccounted Foundations: Black Girls, Anti-Black Racism, and Punishment in Schools
For nearly three decades, racial formations theory has influenced ideas, discourses and political projects surrounding race and racism in the United States. The theory holds that although race is a permanent feature in the US, the formation, order, and set of meanings inscribed onto racialized subjects are contingent upon historical and political contexts. This framework conceals anti-black racism as an enduring social order that affects policies, policy outcomes and organizes the relationship between non-black and black bodies. One exemplary social institution through which this can be seen is the public education system and its culture of discipline and punishment in the US. Current interrogations of school disciplinary landscapes have focused in on disparities in discipline policies as they affect working-class/working-poor boys of color. While it is useful to examine the uneven rates of suspensions, expulsions, and arrests, focusing on these disciplinary discrepancies misses everyday occurrences of punishment that young black girls experience. This qualitative paper examines school discipline policies and informal punitive practices including the implications that these mechanisms have on the physical and emotional worlds of black girls. The study finds that black girls are rendered structurally vulnerable to discipline and punishment at the hands of adults and peers in ways that exceed or contend with the logics espoused through racial formations theory. Placing black girls at the center of analysis compels us to examine the anti-black logic of discipline and punishment in schools and at large.