Pushout Read online

  According to Nikki Jones,

  [“good girls”] do not look or act like men or boys. Good girls do not run wild in the streets; instead, they spend the majority of their time in controlled settings: family, school, home, or church. Good girls are appropriately deferential to the men in their lives. Good girls are not sexually promiscuous, nor are they anything other than heterosexual. Good girls grow up to be ladies and once they have achieved this special-status position, they become committed to putting the needs of their family first.4

  Good Black girls are supposed to be all of these things, even while the males around them are not held to the same standard. When Black girls rebel against these expectations, they risk being labeled a “bad” girl, a “ghetto” girl, or, in more recent vernacular, “ratchet.”

  Bad Black girls are those who are eager for sexual exploits—with men or women. They may curse, drink, smoke, fight, steal, and/or lie. All of these characteristics built the mythical “bad” Black woman who, according to Fannie Barrier Williams in 1904, made the Black woman “the only woman in America for whom virtue was not an ornament and a necessity.”5 Black girls who have challenged authority or attempted to negotiate poverty and racial isolation by participating in underground economies have been sent away to group homes, training schools, detention centers, and other institutions that attempt to transform “bad girls” into “good girls.”

  Who these girls are and why it is so hard for them to simply survive are questions tied to the larger forces that create and sustain the politics of survival in America, particularly those prevalent in high-poverty areas. These are questions that beg an examination of the laws, practices, and consciousness that facilitate our understanding of who struggles and how that struggle manifests. Being “sick and tired of being sick and tired”—words made famous by civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer—is a concept that is immediately understood by Black women.

  Twenty-five percent of Black women live in poverty.6 The unemployment rate for Black women age twenty and over at the end of 2014 was 8.2 percent, compared to 4.4 percent for White women and 5 percent for all women.7 In 2012, Black women earned 89 percent of what Black men earn, and only 64 percent of what White men earn.8 Black women are also disproportionately employed in low-wage occupations—jobs that pay them less than $21,412 per year. And while they do not constitute the majority of women on public assistance, Black women are disproportionately represented among those who receive what are collectively known as welfare benefits (e.g., SNAP or food stamps, Section 8 housing vouchers, etc.). Black women are about three times more likely to be imprisoned than White women, and one in nineteen Black women will be incarcerated at some point in her lifetime.9

  These are struggles that many Black women have felt since their girlhood. Forty percent of Black children live in poverty, compared with 23 percent of all children nationwide.10 For Black girls under the age of eighteen, the poverty rate is 35 percent.11 Black girls drop out of school at a rate of 7 percent, compared to 3.8 percent of White girls.12 At 18.9 percent, Black girls have the highest case rate of “person offenses” (e.g., assault, robbery, etc.).13 And they have a higher rate (21.4 percent) of being assigned to residential placement than Latinas (8.3 percent) and White girls (6.8 percent) combined.14

  Sometimes their struggles are matters of life and death. Homicide is the second-leading cause of death for Black girls and women ages fifteen to twenty-four.15 The rate of domestic or intimate partner violence is highest among Black women and girls ages twelve and older (7.8 percent), compared to their White (6.2 percent), Latina (4.1 percent), and other (3.8 percent) counterparts.16 The struggle is real. Yet when girls strike back against this fatigue, society casts them as deviant—as disruptive to the order of a (supposedly race- and gender-neutral) social structure without consideration of what might be fueling their agitation.

  These circumstances did not emerge through osmosis. The contemporary social conditions that Black girls experience are an extension of long-standing, judgmental popular perceptions about Black girl responses to injustice. Take, for example, Claudette Colvin. Nine months before Rosa Parks made a similar decision that would launch the Montgomery bus boycott, fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin protested the segregation of Montgomery buses by refusing to give up her seat to a White passenger. But most people do not know her name. Why is that? Well, she didn’t fit the profile of a “perfect” protestor. Though Colvin was a member of the Youth Council of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), she was so incensed by the demand to give up her seat that she shouted. She resisted with her body. And she was arrested.

  In the days and weeks that followed, she was viewed as belligerent and “unreliable.”17 Then it was discovered that she was pregnant and soon to become an unwed teen mother. Colvin was cast as a troublemaker and pushed out of one of the country’s most vivid civil rights memories, as well as public and private discourses on the role of poor Black girls in the shaping of American democracy.18

  Colvin herself has also acknowledged the role of colorism—a socially constructed hierarchy where lighter-skinned people are perceived as more socially acceptable than darker-skinned people—in shaping the negative reaction to her as a spokesperson for integration. Colvin’s skin was dark and did not “fit the profile” of a middle-class woman who might be viewed as more strategically appealing to the civil rights movement.19

  This is a scenario all too familiar to many brown-skinned girls who respond to injustice the way that Colvin did—by daring to get loud, daring to challenge their place.

  Black and . . . Female and . . .

  In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), W.E.B. Du Bois articulated the presence of a “double consciousness” among Black Americans—a “twoness” that he described as “an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings.”20 For Black women, their unreconciled strivings and stirred consciousness are also informed by their other identities, including gender, sexuality, and class, among others. In fact, most people walk through life consciously unaware of their multiple identities (no one is just Black, just a woman, just a parent, just a student, etc.). The interdigitation of sex and race create barriers to continued economic and intellectual advancement for Black girls and young women under eighteen years old. In modern ghettos, Black girls are routinely expected to seamlessly reconcile their status as Black and female and poor, a status that has left them with a mark of double jeopardy that fuels intense discrimination and personal vulnerability.

  Still, despite the intersection between these identities that shapes how people see themselves as much as how others see them, Black women and girls are often challenged to pick an allegiance. Many Black girls—whether in California, Georgia, or New York—pretend that they can isolate and prioritize their “competing” identities. “I’m Black first, female second,” I’ve heard many times over the years.

  Indeed, a failure to acknowledge one’s whole self silences a more sophisticated analysis about how race, gender, class, sexual identity, ability, and other identities interact. Acknowledging the complexity of social identity has been termed “intersectionality,” a concept coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw.21 Her scholarship advances the work of Anna Julia Cooper, Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, and other Black feminist scholars who argued that there is no hierarchy of oppressions.22 Each identity intersects with the other to generate a more complex worldview than the one that would exist if any of us were ever truly able to walk through life with a singular identity. Oppressed identities further complicate this experience. This assertion—that no single form of oppression is more important or dominant than another—is key to understanding and combating the harmful and dehumanizing experiences faced by all manner of human beings, including all too many Black girls. Actively engaging this framework in daily life creates places to expose, confront, and address questions of privilege. In this practice and in those open places, freedom lives.

  But the process of
getting free is not easy. It demands a close look at the current public construct of Black femininity and how that translates—or doesn’t—into opportunity for Black girls and women. Feminist scholar bell hooks writes and talks of an “oppositional gaze,” a way to examine the presentations of Black feminine identities and confront the paralyzing stereotypes that undermine the well-being of Black women and girls.23 She’s one of many critical minds whose work offers guidance for confronting such images, interrogating them, dismantling them, and rebuilding new images in a more perfect and complex representation of Black female identity. Yet one-dimensional stereotypes, images, and debilitating narratives persist, creating a pressing need to explore why the struggle for survival is a universally accepted rite of passage for Black girls. Most importantly, individuals, communities, and all sorts of institutions have an obligation to understand why the pushout of Black girls—the collection of policies, practices, and consciousness that fosters their invisibility, marginalizes their pain and opportunities, and facilitates their criminalization—goes unchallenged.

  Culture, Conforming, and Context

  The drive to cast contemporary America as a “colorblind” society impairs our ability to recognize two important phenomena: the persistence of segregation and how it shapes the identities of Black girls, and the impacts of systems that reproduce and reinforce unequal access to educational opportunity. No institution is immune to these forces. But our schools are the places where most of our young people spend their days; they are places that have just as much (arguably more) influence as any other social factor on how children understand themselves personally and in relation to the world around them. Schools are, not surprisingly, one of the largest influences on the life trajectory of Black girls.24

  As institutions with a mission to educate children, public schools are overtly shaping the minds of future leaders, architects of opportunity, and civilians of all types. Explicitly, schools teach curricula that are meant to provide children with the skills to be functional in contemporary society. Educational leaders who ostensibly have an expertise in child cognition, learning, and/or the relevant subject matter (algebra, American history, etc.) design these curricula. High-quality instruction is also an important component of student learning. While the exact definition of high quality is the subject of many heated debates, Stanford professor Linda Darling-Hammond offers a well-rounded description. She contends that quality teaching includes engaging students in active learning, creating intellectually ambitious tasks, using multiple teaching modalities, assessing student learning and adapting to the learning needs of the students, creating supports, providing clear standards, reflection, and opportunities for revision, and developing a collaborative classroom in which all students have membership.25 This collaborative atmosphere is strengthened by a strong student-teacher relationship.

  Jan Hughes and Oi-man Kwok have noted that “African American children are less conforming and more active than are Caucasian children” when they first begin school and that this may inform teachers’ interactions with Black students, which may be “characterized by more criticism and less support.”26 Gloria Ladson-Billings described this culturally competent educational practice as “the ability of students to grow in understanding and respect for their culture of origin. Rather than experiencing the alienating effects of education where school-based learning detaches students from their home culture, cultural competence is a way for students to be bicultural and facile in the ability to move between school and home cultures.”27 There are in fact culturally relevant curricula, gender-responsive curricula, and trauma-sensitive practices being used in schools across the nation, but not uniformly or prevalently.

  Few curricula taught in elementary and secondary schools were designed with Black girls in mind, especially those who are living in racially isolated, high-poverty areas. If the curriculum being taught does not even consider the unique needs and experiences of Black girls seeking to climb out of poverty and the ghetto, as is most often the case, do they really have equal access to education? If schools are teaching curricula that have erased the presence of Black females from the heroic narrative of American exceptionalism (save for a few references during Black History Month in February), are they not implicitly constructing a narrative of exclusion? In a world of normalized exclusion, how and where, then, do Black girls situate themselves as Americans and as global citizens?

  Caroline Hodges Persell described a “structure of dominance” as an institution in which societal biases are reinforced.28 Sadly, many schools are dominant structures, sustaining our society’s racial and gender hierarchy. Educational institutions that are not intentionally “learning organizations,” ones that evolve through a quest for knowledge and social change, end up playing a reproductive role.29 They churn out individuals who will adeptly maintain the status quo. In upholding compulsory education, we trust, or at least hope, that schools are teaching our children basic reading, writing, and mathematical skills as well as the critical thinking and social skills that are needed for socioeconomic advancement—their own and that of their communities. But if ghetto spaces are, by definition, inferior in quality and rife with socioeconomic and political oppression, what it means to operate schools in these spaces takes on new meaning and challenges our widely accepted assumptions and presumptions about schooling. The impact of a “ghetto school” on Black girls, their safety, and education in these spaces warrants interrogation.

  Bad Girls Do Cry

  Seventeen-year-old Portia grew up in the Bay Area foster care system. She was a larger girl in height and girth, and felt that her physical stature made her both a target and perpetrator of bullying. Though playful—I found her dancing in the classroom just before we sat down to talk—she felt that for most of her life, she’d been dodging the label of “bully.” Some of the earliest school memories she shared were of teachers accusing her of bullying smaller girls, but to her, she was always standing up for herself. Portia talked about an incident in eighth grade that changed her experiences with bullying.

  “I had on white shorts and a white shirt. We was at the park and it was muddy. We were playing by the creek, but I wouldn’t go near [the water], so I was standing at the edge. And the teacher came behind me and pushed me . . . and I was the only Black kid in that class. And she didn’t like me . . . She tried to make it seem like I tripped off the slope into the water and stuff.”

  “Why do you think she pushed you?” I asked.

  “’Cause I was Black,” Portia responded.

  Portia felt that her teacher had bullied her by forcing her into water that she didn’t want to go into, but at that point there was a power dynamic that prevented Portia from doing something about it. Instead of fighting back, Portia cried—but no one responded to those tears.

  “I got up and cried,” Portia said. “When I was younger, before I turned fourteen or thirteen, I never stood up for myself. But now . . . I cry to myself. Or sometimes I have breakdowns and stuff, but other than that, I stand up for myself.”

  At this time in her life, Portia identified as female, but the enforcement of a gender binary added to her alienation from the very programs meant to help her. She made it her practice to stand up for herself, but she was not interested in being paired with other women who might not understand her. One day, while we were talking about the school programs that she most connected with, she found an opportunity to challenge the idea that because she was a girl, she had to be paired with women educators and professionals.

  “I don’t never [seek to] have mom figures,” she said. “It’s always either a male teacher or something. I don’t know what it is . . . like ever since I was little, I always wanted to play with the boys. You know, stuff like that, but it’s not like being attracted to male teachers . . . But it’s always a male, never a female.” She had to choose where she was going to go, where she would fit. Portia always felt like she preferred going with the boys, but she wasn’t a “boy.” So her question to
me was, “What do I do if I am not responding to these female teachers that they keep putting me with?”

  Portia was not a “good” girl, nor was she a good “girl.” She did not fit neatly into the characteristics of what these girls do. She sagged her pants; she presented as masculine. As part of her “rehabilitation,” well-meaning probation officers had asked her to put on a dress for a formal program. All of the adults around were celebrating her, telling her how pretty she looked, but she didn’t want to wear the dress. She wasn’t necessarily interested in being whatever they meant by “pretty.” Inside, she was melting. She shared a picture of herself in the dress with a staff member in confidence, stating that she felt “terrible” and that she wanted to destroy the pictures because she felt ruined.

  Remember, there is no hierarchy of oppressions.

  What was intended to interrupt Portia’s contact with the criminal legal system—an approach supposedly shaped with her gender in mind—failed to consider the gender continuum that includes not only “girls” and “boys,” but also those who identify in between or outside of polarized notions of gender. Teachers, counselors, advocates, and many others often misunderstand or ignore this complexity, particularly among Black youth.

  Paris, who transitioned* in New Orleans during her high school years seemed to understand this completely.

  In this context, to “transition” refers to the process of changing one’s gender identity.

  “My transition wasn’t easy,” she said. “As far as physical altercations, yes, it was with the students, but mostly, my problems didn’t come from the students. It came from the staff and the faculty of the school. And it was ridiculous because . . . some of the teachers that were complaining, I didn’t have their class . . . at the end of the day, [they would say] I was a ‘distraction’ to the students. I was ‘disruptive’ because how could a student focus knowing there’s a person like [me] in the room?”