Ideology and Discursive Connections: Police Shooting Unarmed Blacks and Punitive School Discipline

• In Event: "I Can't Breathe": Police Killings of Black Men and the Quest for Justice of Black Boys in School

Abstract

On April 16th 2019, 21 year old Paul Witherspoon III and 22 year old Stephanie Washington were shot by police in New Haven, Connecticut. The couple were unarmed and according to police the vehicle that they were driving in fit the description of a vehicle identified in an earlier robbery (Ortiz, 2019). It turned out that the couple were misidentified and had not done anything that warranted a police encounter. Police shootings of unarmed Black people have become increasingly more frequent causing significant alarm in Black communities across the US. This alarm becomes louder as significant patterns of police restraint in engaging with white people and in instances where white suspects are detained with their dignity and their lives.
The case in New Haven sparked days of unrest and protests as the particulars began to emerge. Two police officers from two separate jurisdictions were involved in the shooting; one of the officers was from the Yale University police department and the other officer was from the Hamden police department, a suburb of New Haven, and both police officers, like the victims, were Black.
This study is an analysis of dehumanizing discourses that have historically been used to frame Blacks in the US. These discursive frames are as old as the founding of the US itself, and are fundamental pillars and constructs of the US. For example, the enslaved Blacks in the US were afforded no rights and legally disallowed from any semblance of freedom and liberty. This legal mandate lasted over three centuries; and here is where many identify the origins of the modern fraternity of police: Slave catching patrols designed to capture and punish runaway slaves (Brucato, 2014; Williams, 2011, 2015). After the emancipation of the enslaved, reconstruction laws reproduced the conditions of slavery through peonage systems such as sharecropping along with 100 years of Jim Crow which the Supreme Court finally struck down in 1954.
This study analyzes how ideology produced and maintained the previous stated conditions; the structures, systems and manpower that maintained them show up in how students of color are treated in schools by those in educational leadership positions? Furthermore, in what ways can we understand the racialized components when the educational leaders are Black; how is it that Black leaders are able to inflict the same and even harsher penalties on Black students and how much of this historical ideology just outlined contributes to the phenomena of Black leaders replicating historical White supremacy tropes on Black students? This study will answer these questions by analyzing discourses that frame police shootings of unarmed black people and punitive discourses and praxis of Black leaders in schools by using Khalifa's (2015) Can Blacks be Racists?, which examines exclusionary practices of Black school principals. Khalifa’s (2015) study draws attention to the larger contexts of White supremacy and racism and examines how Black principals understand and negotiate their roles and their treatment of urban Black students, and, knowing or unknowingly, reproduce White supremacy on Black students in school.

Authors

• James Wright, San Diego State University

• Mary Hannah Yeboah, Wheaton College