Police in the Classroom: How the Discourse of Safety Reinforces White Supremacy

• In Event: 21.061 - MTCC Roundtable Session Five
  In Roundtable Session: 21.061-4 - Beyond Permit Patty and Barbecue Becky: Racial Hierarchy and Spatial Justice in Education

Abstract

For a liberatory education, youth must prepare to become critical citizens in a deliberative democracy (Fishkin, 1991; Freire, 1970; McLaren, 2007). Unfortunately, access to a liberatory education is often limited to wealthy White youth at high performing schools (Malin, 2011; Youniss, 2011). In these spaces of privilege, youth learn to be critical citizens, and question systems, structures and relations of power that do not serve their interests (DeJaeghere, 2009; Freire, 1970; Torney-Purta, Barber & Wilkenfeld, 2007; Youniss, 2011). Working class youth, immigrants, and ethnic minorities are often socialized into becoming "good" citizens (Youniss, 2011; see also Johnson & Morris, 2010) in educational contexts that emphasize rule adherence and conformity (Johnson & Morris, 2010). From a curriculum that is assimilationist and Eurocentric (Bondy, 2015; Jounell & Castro, 2011), they learn that a “good” citizen unquestioningly accepts governmental rules and authority (Massialas, 1970, p.33; DeJaeghere, 2009), even when they conflict with their own needs. Because racial, and class hierarchies of citizenship are produced, reproduced, and learned in educational spaces, an examination of the spatialization of difference is necessary.
This paper provides a critical race spatial analysis (CRSA) (Vélez and Solórzano, 2017) of student socialization into “good” citizenship in a rural California civics classroom at Californiatown High School (CHS). CRSA is “an explanatory framework and methodological approach that accounts for the role of race, racism and white supremacy in examining geographic and social spaces and that works toward identifying and challenging racism and white supremacy within these spaces” (Vélez and Solórzano, 2017, p. 20). As an explanatory framework, CRSA examines how social hierarchy is produced and reproduced through spatial arrangements (Lefebvre, 1991; Low, 2009, 2014; Soja, 1985, 2009, 2010) in schooling. In this paper, CRSA is used to examine the socialization of Latino youth into “good” citizens in a civics classroom.
Written as a case study, this paper draws on one week of interview and observational data from a three year ethnographic study at CHS. CRSA and Critical Discourse Analysis were used to analyze field notes from observations of a white school resource officer (SRO), as well as transcripts from an interview with a White civics teacher and the SRO about the nature of his visit to the civics classroom. A grounded theory of the production of socio-spatial relations when a teacher invites the school’s White school resource officer (SRO) to her predominantly Latino civics classroom was generated. The data show that the curricular space that the state intended for critical inquiry (See California’s Social Studies Framework) became a site where Latino youth were rendered docile bodies (Foucalt, 1975) as they sat “polite and respectful” listening to the SRO’s “obviously one-sided presentation” (Interview: 1/19/17). Student questions about aggressive policing were dismissed as the SRO invoked the protective discourse of officer safety, the logics of police violence and advocated for “a well-armed police force” (Interview: 1/19/17). A discussion about liberatory civics curriculum and pedagogy considers the preparation of working class Latino youth for critical citizenship.

Author

• Mariama Gray, California State University - East Bay