"I'm the One Who Loses": Narratives From Black Girls on School Discipline

• In Event: 67.067 - MTCC Roundtable Session 31
  In Roundtable Session: 67.067-13 - "Because They Said So...": Challenging Singular Narratives by Centering Truths From Black Youth in Context

Abstract

In American public schools, Black girls are six times more likely than their white female peers to be suspended or expelled even though they are not more likely to engage in misbehavior (Crenshaw, Ocen, & Nanda, 2015). Researchers posit that the disproportionality results from white teachers’ limited knowledge of Black femininity which leads them to assess Black girls’ behaviors more negatively (Morris & Perry, 2017). Although this literature implies that teachers’ narratives do not reflect precise evaluations of Black girls’ behavior, the tendency remains to utilize them as the primary authority in discussions about the widening discipline gap amongst Black and white girls and its consequences. Notably, while Black girls are the main characters in the “stories” that discipline referrals aim to tell, there is a dearth of studies that use their subjective experiences to frame how we understand the excessive rates of discipline to which they are subjected. This marginalization of Black girls’ insights about their own disciplinary interactions has prevented scholars from fully interrogating and dismantling the pejorative narratives about their identities and commitments that disproportionate discipline referrals engender. Thus, in this paper I use Black girls’ personal accounts of their experiences with school discipline to interrogate the narratives teachers espouse. By placing them side by side, I surface alternative representations of the “truth” that are only visible when Black girls’ meaning-making is positioned at the center of the conversation.
Given the complexity of understanding how Black girls make sense of school discipline practices, this study employed Black feminist standpoint theory as a critical lens. I understand racial and gender marginalization to be inseparable and endemic to US institutions, and honored Black girls’ ability to be experts of their experiences. The data for this study was drawn from a 2-year ethnographic investigation of Black girls in a single urban high school, James High. Data was collected through 600+ hours of participant observation in a Restorative Justice Center. When analyzing the data, I relied on the principles of grounded theory and generated themes using inductive coding and thematic organization. For the purposes of this paper, I draw upon the narratives of five girls with the highest frequency of visitation to the Center.
Analysis revealed that narratives from teachers regarding Black girls’ misbehavior failed to consider their role in instigating the situations that occurred. While the teachers advanced notions that Black girls were disrespectful and insubordinate by nature, the girls’ narratives revealed that their behaviors were a direct response to unacknowledged teacher initiated disrespect. Ultimately, James High’s failure to legitimize Black girls’ accounts of their disciplinary experiences hindered their ability to actualize the primary aim of a restorative justice disciplinary model--the recognition of student humanity. This analysis calls for researchers to nuance the conversation about inequity in school discipline practices and policies in regards to Black girls by using their voices to surface new understandings, perspectives, and possibilities for change.

Author

• Alaina Neal-Jackson, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor