The Institutional Violence Against Black Girls in Schools

• In Event: Spirit Murdering: How Racism Kills the Soul

Abstract

There is a national problem of policing Black girls’ identities, literacies, and ways of being. Our schools fail to intervene within the barrage of attacks on the minds, bodies, and spirits of girls of color, specifically Black girls (McArthur, 2018). Not only are schools failing to intervene, most often the school administrators, teachers, and school boards are instituting problematic policies and practices. Schools are entrenched in inequity, racial and gender discrimination, and aggressive practices that can leave Black girls’ lives disavowed through the institution of schooling.

In 2013, Kiera Wilmot was a Florida high school student with good grades, no behavior record and who loved science. She conducted a science experiment, on the school grounds in front of her friends, mixing toilet bowl cleaner and aluminum foil in a water bottle which caused the lid to pop off the bottle and emit smoke. For this, she was arrested, charged with two felonies, expelled and sent to an alternative school. Ultimately, due to the backlash the school received, she was permitted to return to her high school and the felony charges were dropped (Brown, 2015). What may have this done for her love of science? How may have this affront to her inquiry and intelligence shaped her aspirations? In a 2015 case, Shakara, a Black high school girl, at Spring Valley High School in South Carolina was physically assaulted by the school’s resource officer. With claims that she had her cell phone present in class, a fellow classmate recorded the assault in which viewers can see Shakara being choked, pulled and slammed to the ground out of her desk, and then dragged on the floor by the resource officer (Craven, 2015). The officer was fired, but he will not face local or federal charges. Meanwhile, Shakara, and the student who filmed the attack, Niya Kenny, were arrested. While those charges were dropped, their arrest highlights that Black girls disproportionately experience bias in school discipline and school-related arrests, like the overreaction to Kiera Wilmot’s science experiment. In February of 2019, four Black, eighth grade girls were laughing in the cafeteria during lunch. A faculty member seeing this and deeming their joyous conversation as “hyper” and “giddy,” sent them to the vice principal’s office, where she and the school nurse strip searched these young women because they decided that their behavior must be due to them being on drugs (Gold, 2019).

For many children and youth, schools should be a safety net. However, there are intellectual, physical, and emotional assaults on Black girls within school spaces that are deplorable and unacceptable. What effect do these assaults have on their emotional and psychological wellbeing, to be in schools, that only do not center and honor their histories, identities and ways of being, are also dehumanizing? Through this presentation, the author will share the ways schools intellectually, physically and emotionally murder the spirits of Black girls and will challenge educators to become abolitionist teachers (Love, 2019).

Author

• Sherell A. McArthur, University of Georgia - Athens