Confronting Our Complicity: Reckoning With Black Students' Experiences of Violence at School

• In Event: Youth and Student Voices From the Margins: Advocacy, Access, and Aspirations in the Education System

Abstract

This paper is both an indictment and an invitation to educators, practitioners, and researchers to weigh and consider the violence inherent in the US Education system, reckon with our complicity, wittingly and unwittingly, and resolve to pivot. Buttressed by Critical Race Theory and Black Feminist Thought, this qualitative action research study sought out current high school students and recent high school graduates who identified as Black to collect and amplify their stories about the impact of race on their experiences at school. Made to confront the myriad ways they inflict harm upon Black students, how might educators move differently if they knew that their actions and inaction were essentially “spirit murder” (Williams, 1987)?

Author

• Tynisha N. Worthy, Youth at the Center