Why black girls are targeted for punishment at school and how to change that Monique W. Morris
When I was in the sixth grade,
I got into a fight at school.
It wasn’t the first time
I’d been in a fight,
but it was the first time
one happened at school.
It was with a boy who was
about a foot taller than me,
who was physically stronger than me
and who’d been taunting me for weeks.
One day in PE, he stepped on my shoe
and refused to apologize.
So, filled with anger, I grabbed him
and I threw him to the ground.
I’d had some previous judo training.
(Laughter)
Our fight lasted less than two minutes,
but it was a perfect
reflection of the hurricane
that was building inside of me
as a young survivor of sexual assault
and as a girl who was grappling
with abandonment
and exposure to violence
in other spaces in my life.
I was fighting him,
but I was also fighting the men
and boys that had assaulted my body
and the culture that told me
I had to be silent about it.
A teacher broke up the fight
and my principal called me in her office.
But she didn’t say,
“Monique, what’s wrong with you?”
She gave me a moment to collect my breath
and asked, “What happened?”
The educators working with me
led with empathy.
They knew me.
They knew I loved to read,
they knew I loved to draw,
they knew I adored Prince.
And they used that information
to help me understand
why my actions, and those
of my classmate, were disruptive
to the learning community
they were leading.
They didn’t place me on suspension;
they didn’t call the police.
My fight didn’t keep me
from going to school the next day.
It didn’t keep me from graduating;
it didn’t keep me from teaching.
But unfortunately, that’s not a story
that’s shared by many black girls
in the US and around the world today.
We’re living through a crisis
in which black girls
are being disproportionately pushed
away from schools —
not because of an imminent threat
they pose to the safety of a school,
but because they’re often
experiencing schools
as locations for punishment
and marginalization.
That’s something that I hear
from black girls around the country.
But it’s not insurmountable.
We can shift this narrative.
Let’s start with some data.
According to a National Black Women’s
Justice Institute analysis
of civil rights data
collected by the US
Department of Education,
black girls are the only group of girls
who are overrepresented
along the entire continuum
of discipline in schools.
That doesn’t mean that other girls aren’t
experiencing exclusionary discipline
and it doesn’t mean that other girls
aren’t overrepresented
at other parts along that continuum.
But black girls
are the only group of girls
who are overrepresented all along the way.
Black girls are seven times more likely
than their white counterparts
to experience one or more
out-of-school suspensions
and they’re nearly three times more likely
than their white and Latinx counterparts
to be referred to the juvenile court.
A recent study by the Georgetown
Center on Poverty and Inequality
partially explained
why this disparity is taking place
when they confirmed
that black girls experience
a specific type of age compression,
where they’re seen as more adult-like
than their white peers.
Among other things, the study found
that people perceive black girls
to need less nurturing,
less protection, to know more about sex
and to be more independent
than their white peers.
The study also found
that the perception disparity begins
when girls are as young as five years old.
And that this perception
and the disparity increases over time
and peaks when girls are
between the ages of 10 and 14.
This is not without consequence.
Believing that a girl is older than she is
can lead to harsher treatment,
immediate censure when she makes a mistake
and victim blaming when she’s harmed.
It can also lead a girl to think
that something is wrong with her,
rather than the conditions
in which she finds herself.
Black girls are routinely seen
as too loud, too aggressive,
too angry, too visible.
Qualities that are often measured
in relation to nonblack girls
and which don’t take into consideration
what’s going on in this girl’s life
or her cultural norms.
And it’s not just in the US.
In South Africa,
black girls at the Pretoria
Girls High School
were discouraged from attending school
with their hair in its natural state,
without chemical processing.
What did those girls do?
They protested.
And it was a beautiful thing to see
the global community for the most part
wrap its arms around girls
as they stood in their truths.
But there were those
who saw them as disruptive,
largely because they dared
to ask the question,
“Where can we be black
if we can’t be black in Africa?”
(Laughter)
(Applause)
It’s a good question.
Around the world,
black girls are grappling
with this question.
And around the world,
black girls are struggling to be seen,
working to be free
and fighting to be included
in the landscape of promise
that a safe space to learn provides.
In the US, little girls,
just past their toddler years,
are being arrested in classrooms
for having a tantrum.
Middle school girls are being
turned away from school
because of the way
they wear their hair naturally
or because of the way
the clothes fit their bodies.
High school girls
are experiencing violence
at the hands of police
officers in schools.
Where can black girls be black
without reprimand or punishment?
And it’s not just these incidents.
In my work as a researcher and educator,
I’ve had an opportunity
to work with girls like Stacy,
a girl who I profile in my book “Pushout,”
who struggles with
her participation in violence.
She bypasses the neuroscientific
and structural analyses
that science has to offer
about how her adverse
childhood experiences inform
why she’s participating in violence
and goes straight to describing herself
as a “problem child,”
largely because that’s the language
that educators were using
as they routinely suspended her.
But here’s the thing.
Disconnection and the internalization
of harm grow stronger in isolation.
So when girls get in trouble,
we shouldn’t be pushing them away,
we should be bringing them in closer.
Education is a critical protective factor
against contact
with the criminal legal system.
So we should be building
out policies and practices
that keep girls connected
to their learning,
rather than pushing them away from it.
It’s one of the reasons I like to say
that education is freedom work.
When girls feel safe, they can learn.
When they don’t feel safe, they fight,
they protest, they argue,
they flee, they freeze.
The human brain is wired
to protect us when we feel a threat.
And so long as school feels like a threat,
or part of the tapestry of harm
in a girl’s life,
she’ll be inclined to resist.
But when schools become
locations for healing,
they can also become
locations for learning.
So what does this mean for a school
to become a location for healing?
Well, for one thing, it means
that we have to immediately discontinue
the policies and practices that target
black girls for their hairstyles or dress.
(Applause)
Let’s focus on how
and what a girl learns
rather than policing her body
in ways that facilitate rape culture
or punish children for the conditions
in which they were born.
This is where parents and the community
of concerned adults can enter this work.
Start a conversation with the school
and encourage them
to address their dress code
and other conduct-related policies
as a collaborative project,
with parents and students,
so as to intentionally avoid
bias and discrimination.
Keep in mind, though,
that some of the practices
that harm black girls most are unwritten.
So we have to continue to do the deep,
internal work to address the biases
that inform how, when and whether we see
black girls for who they actually are,
or what we’ve been told they are.
Volunteer at a school
and establish culturally competent
and gender responsive discussion groups
with black girls,
Latinas, indigenous girls
and other students who experience
marginalization in schools
to give them a safe space
to process their identities
and experiences in schools.
And if schools are to become
locations for healing,
we have to remove police officers
and increase the number
of counselors in schools.
(Applause)
Education is freedom work.
And whatever our point of entry is,
we all have to be freedom fighters.
The good news is that there are schools
that are actively working
to establish themselves
as locations for girls
to see themselves as sacred and loved.
The Columbus City Prep School for Girls
in Columbus, Ohio, is an example of this.
They became an example
the moment their principal declared
that they were no longer going to punish
girls for having “a bad attitude.”
In addition to building –
Essentially, what they did
is they built out a robust continuum
of alternatives to suspension,
expulsion and arrest.
In addition to establishing
a restorative justice program,
they improved their
student and teacher relationships
by ensuring that every girl
has at least one adult on campus
that she can go to
when she’s in a moment of crisis.
They built out spaces along the corridors
of the school and in classrooms
for girls to regroup,
if they need a minute to do so.
And they established an advisory program
that provides girls with an opportunity
to start every single day
with the promotion of self-worth,
communication skills and goal setting.
At this school,
they’re trying to respond
to a girl’s adverse childhood experiences
rather than ignore them.
They bring them in closer;
they don’t push them away.
And as a result, their truancy
and suspension rates have improved,
and girls are arriving at school
increasingly ready to learn
because they know the teachers
there care about them.
That matters.
Schools that integrate the arts
and sports into their curriculum
or that are building out
tranformative programming,
such as restorative justice,
mindfulness and meditation,
are providing an opportunity for girls
to repair their relationships with others,
but also with themselves.
Responding to the lived,
complex and historical trauma
that our students face
requires all of us who believe
in the promise of children and adolescents
to build relationships,
learning materials,
human and financial resources
and other tools
that provide children with an opportunity
to heal, so that they can learn.
Our schools should be places where
we respond to our most vulnerable girls
as essential to the creation
of a positive school culture.
Our ability to see her promise
should be at its sharpest
when she’s in the throws
of poverty and addiction;
when she’s reeling
from having been sex-trafficked
or survived other forms of violence;
when she’s at her loudest,
or her quietest.
We should be able
to support her intellectual
and social-emotional well-being
whether her shorts reach her knees
or stop mid-thigh or higher.
It might seem like a tall order in a world
so deeply entrenched
in the politics of fear
to radically imagine schools as locations
where girls can heal and thrive,
but we have to be bold enough
to set this as our intention.
If we commit to this notion
of education as freedom work,
we can shift educational conditions
so that no girl, even the most
vulnerable among us,
will get pushed out of school.
And that’s a win for all of us.
Thank you.
(Applause)