Race Ethnicity and Education 'We still here': Black mothers' personal narratives of sense making and resisting antiblackness and the suspensions of their Black children (original) (raw)
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2022
Black student learners in Greater Toronto Area (GTA) schools face a host of barriers to fair and equitable education. Research has demonstrated that Black students have higher rates of suspension and expulsion (James and Turner 35-37), have lower expectations, face more severe punishment and are ultimately “pushed out” of schools (Dei et al. 10). Black mothers have long employed resistance strategies to combat such barriers, such as navigating race and racial microaggressions (Allen and WhiteSmith 412), racial and class socializing of their children (Turner 248), and developing an overall understanding of how race impacts their children’s education (Williams et al. 937). Much of the literature on Black mothers’ experiences and effective social and political mobilization comes from an American perspective, and thus further investigation of such action in the Canadian context is warranted. This article draws on findings from a doctoral dissertation project on Black mothering experiences in the kindergarten to grade 12 (K-12) education system. Thirty-three mothers, primarily from the Jane and Finch community in the GTA, participated in three focus groups and three one-on-one interviews. Using a Black feminist theoretical framework, this article focuses on three key study findings: the systemic racism faced by student learners, the intersectional systemic racism faced by Black mothers, and the resistance strategies employed by Black mothers. By analyzing the data emerging from this qualitative research, this article explores the resistance strategies of Black mothers, which open up new possibilities for Black educational futurity.
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.
“I Don’t Think They Like Us”: School Suspensions as Anti-Black Male Practice
Journal of African American Males in Education (JAAME), 2020
With the ongoing state-sponsored police murder of unarmed Black males serving as backdrop, this study challenges Black male criminalization in schools. This study is important because ongoing hypersurveillance of Black males in and outside of schools, bolstered by historic and contemporary stereotypes of Black men as criminals, ultimately provides the infrastructures for police brutality and punishment. The article thus makes the case that Black males are intentionally removed from schools and placed into the school-to-prison pipeline. As racialized policies, practices and procedures decrease educational opportunities and increase the probability of future incarceration, the findings inform the understanding of how discipline affects Black male students. Critical Race Theory (CRT) was used to frame a study of nine Black male high school students who have experienced out-of-school suspensions. Individual and focus group interviews were conducted, revealing racial disparities, teacher and administrator racism, and ongoing punishment beyond the initial suspension. These Black males ultimately suggest that drastic transformation is needed to shift from schools as a societal tool to criminalize Black youth and into processes that affirm and support Black survival.
Children and Youth Services Review, 2020
While studies confirm educators and administrators suspend Black students from school at disproportionate rates, few have explored Black students' and their parents' perceptions of school discipline. Using Critical Race Theory as a framework, I interview thirty Black students and thirty parents of Black students who received an out-of-school suspension from a primarily Black high school (PBHS) in southeast Michigan during the 2016-2017 academic year. My findings suggest Black students and their parents perceive out-of-school suspension as unfair because (a) school officials marginalize their voices throughout the disciplinary process, and (b) students feel school officials target them for out-of-school suspension based on their style of dress, hair, and music preference. My findings also show out-of-school suspension is associated with "Black educational flight," a process in which parents withdraw their children from PBHSs in response to excessive out-of-school suspension and enroll them in schools that are perceived to be less punitive.
2018
America have been embattled by a long history of disenfranchisement, unequal access to rights, and discrimination in employment, housing, and other areas (Baptiste, 2015; Moses, 1978; Stevenson, 1996). The American legacy of slavery evolved into a unique American system of oppression that continues to structure opportunity and assign value for interpersonal exchange based on someone's perceived race (Bonilla-Silva, 1997; Harrell, 2000; Jones, 2000). This system manifested itself in all areas of life but also took center stage in the educational arena. First through de jure segregation of schools and now through de facto segregation, African Americans or "involuntary minorities" (Ogbu, 1998) have long been restricted to attend schools that have significantly fewer resources and more limited learning opportunities than schools for Whites (Mahoney, 2013). Due to the legacy of slavery and vestiges of racism that persisted before and after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case, many African American parents have been dissatisfied with the still limited options of where to send their children to get educated (Pedroni, 2005). This dissatisfaction has stemmed largely from states' historically limited provision of educational options for Blacks through overtly racist practices such as segregation via Jim Crow laws or the covert racist practices of redlining, steering, and racial and land-use zoning (Mandell, 2008). In the landmark Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education of 1954, Oliver L. Brown and 13 parents, with the assistance of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), challenged the school district in Topeka, Kansas and contested the ! 1 options of segregated schools their children were mandated to attend based on the premise that the segregated schools were too far away. This case was an expression of African American parents' disaffection with the district, with segregation laws, and with the limited educational choices made available to their children. It also memorialized in the annals of case law two other glaring realities for Blacks: (a) Black parents in America send their children to schools while knowing that sending them there make their children vulnerable to inequities and (b) in some instances, the parents contest those racial inequities to see progress, even if it is incremental progress. However, the outcome of the case was unprecedented because it ruled in favor of the Black parents stating that segregating schools for Blacks was indeed unconstitutional. While the ruling could have been a harbinger of hope for Blacks in an era with pervasive racial segregation, 62 years after the court ruling of Brown v. Board of Education to integrate schools, intensive de facto school segregation persists, racial gaps in educational access and achievement remain, and racism in schools is pervasive. School segregation or re-segregation has reemerged as one of the most pressing issues in education today. Despite the promise of the ruling of Brown v. Board of Education, African Americans still experience some forms of structural exclusion. Black students are, on average, in schools that are 48% Black, whereas White students are, on average, in schools that are 9% Black (Kena, 2015). Although the struggle for integration was clear cut-the right to racially share public spaces, that is, using the same water fountain, sitting at the same lunch counter, or attending the same schools-new forms of segregation are evident such as Black students in schools that are segregated by race, income, and academic levels (Allen, 2015). Specifically, the plaintiffs of Brown v.
2018
This qualitative study examined African American mothers’ perceptions of their children’s schools (public, charter, and private) within the context of institutional, structural, and individual racism. Employing qualitative techniques, interviews and focus groups of middle to lower working class Black mothers were conducted to explore their lived experiences with individual, institutional, and structural racism within American schools. The goal of this study was to learn how these mothers make meaning of the educational institutions that serve their children, the racial barriers they encountered and the strategies of contestation they employed in order to address these perceived barriers. The results of the study show that participants with children across all school types affirmatively perceived forms of systematic racial barriers in their children’s schools that impeded their children’s social and academic progress. Overall, mothers felt there is a decline in education for Black st...
This study examines parental involvement practices, the cultural wealth, and school experiences of poor and working-class mothers of Black boys. Drawing upon data from an ethnographic study, we examine qualitative interviews with four Black mothers. Using critical race theory and cultural wealth frameworks, we explore the mothers' approaches to supporting their sons' education. We also describe how the mothers and their sons experienced exclusion from the school, and how this exclusion limited the mothers' involvement. We highlight their agency in making use of particular forms of cultural wealth in responding to the school's failure of their sons.
Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education
This chapter draws from empirical research on middle-class African American families to examine the ways middle-class African American parents and students make meaning of their experiences within public schools. In light of the current mainstream contention that the United States has entered a post-racial epoch with the election of the first African American president, this work posits that post-racial rhetoric obfuscates the continued racialized experiences of Black families regardless of class status. In particular, this work examines how middle-class African American families navigate conversations about race, agency, and structure as they relate to access and opportunities in education and society as a whole.