"When You Send the Rain": Education and the Carceral Matrix Imaginary

• In Event: Examining the Mass Incarceration, Intersectionalities, and Carceral State of Special Education for Black Children

Abstract

This paper presents an autoethnography of a Black parent’s experience with the carceral state of special education. Black parents throughout the nation are refusing the disproportionality experienced by their children within schools. Examples of this can be found in the national campaigns organized by groups such as the Journey 4 Justice Alliance and Dignity in Schools who are fighting back against the ways in which racism manifest within schools by way of tracking, school privatization and closures, and push-out that leads to the school to prison nexus. Here in South Orange Maplewood New Jersey school district, the American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of New Jersey, and the Center for Civil Rights Remedies of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA” charged that “the school district’s tracking and discipline practices disproportionately confine students of color to lower-level classes and punish students of color and students with disabilities to a greater degree” (The Village Green of Maplewood and South Orange, 2014). As parents, and organizers continue to push back against anti-Blackness and other manifestations of racism within schools, many, myself included, have called for the increase in Black educators (Journey 4 Justice, 2017; Miller, 2018; Rizga, 2016; Wilson, 2017). Even in this call to diversify the profession, being Black is not merely enough to help disrupt the ways white supremacy infiltrates schools and all of society.

Black parents in the United States have always been the pioneers to building a world where our humanity is seen. My parents’ solution to saving my brother from special education was an individual solution to a much larger and systemic problem. Black families removing their children from the public schools and homeschooling them is an individual solution to a much more systemic problem. Just because they may be sheltered from it for the time they are being homeschooled, they will encounter it in other ways. However, I am most interested in answering, what can we do so that we all can get free? From state to state, districts and schools across our nation are compliant in a system that is tracking Black children into a design of school meant to either prepare them for a life of status quo, gatekeepers of the status quo, carcerality. My parents saved my brother but left behind a whole host of other Black children within our community. Their choice, as well as the choices of other parents like them, made it possible for why today, the district has not corrected any of its wrongs (Village Green, 2014; Village Green, 2018). On the other hand, there are other parents working more strategically and collectively to change the school system by organizing against the overrepresentation of Black students in special education, and the suspensions. This paper presents one parent's approach to dismantling the carceral state of special education for Black children.

Author

• Awo Okaikor M. Aryee-Price, Education for Liberation Network