Racial Retrenchment, Restorative Justice, and the Parental Rights Movement

• In Event: Building and Dreaming Intersectional Approaches to Restorative Justice: A Multi-Dimensional Examination

Abstract

Objectives
The purpose of this paper is to present a contemporary socio-legal analysis of potential challenges to implementation of critical and emancipatory frameworks of RJ given the diverse forms of anti-democratic politics escalating in the United States under the banner of “parental rights.” While the direct and indirect effects of retrenchment and contestation in public education—particularly for educational approaches directly or adjacently related to race, identity, inclusion and equity (Crenshaw, 2021)—have been well attended to, the impact on school-based RJ has escaped interrogation by scholars and is noticeably absent from public education discourse. This has created a critical gap not only for research, but policy and practice. As such, this paper seeks to complement any and all efforts that aim to build new critical frameworks for RJ in schools. Specifically, it asks a critical, yet unnamed, question relevant to the fields of education and RJ: what is the future of school-based RJ inside the expansion of the politics of the right? To respond to this inquiry, the paper is structured in two parts.
Theoretical Framework
This paper employs empirical critical race theory or e-CRT (Obasogie; 2013; Paul-Emile, 2015) to provide a descriptive socio-legal account of the influence of “parental rights” and conservative politics on school-based RJ. As a methodology grounded in synthesis, I utilize it in the following manner. First, I present CRT as a conceptual and theoretical framework. Second, I apply it to coded rhetoric from parental rights movement actors to illustrate how the rhetoric reinforces race-making processes that rely on subordination and punitive social control school mechanisms. In addition to evidencing a broader context of exclusion promoted by parental rights actors and the inherent risks for school-based restorative justice in such a political and legal environment, I present data, beginning in 2020, which shows direct attacks on school-based RJ. Third, I cross analyze this rhetoric with emerging evidence of school policy amendments removing restorative justice from school codes of conduct and handbooks.
Methods and Data Sources
This paper employs empirical critical race theory or e-CRT (Obasogie; 2013; Paul-Emile, 2015) to provide a descriptive socio-legal account of the influence of “parental rights” and conservative politics on school-based RJ. Data sources for this paper include proposed, passed and pending state education legislation from 2020 – 2023 and text collected from archived materials of Moms 4 Liberty.
Results
Data analysis reveals: (1) internalization of the normative position of “parental rights” activism and (2) emergence of a cascade effect in public education law and policy with direct negative effects on school-based RJ.
Significance
There is presently no scholarly work that provides a socio-legal analysis of the influence of the contemporary “parental rights” movement on school-based RJ. This work complements any and all efforts that aim to build new critical frameworks for RJ in schools and is resonant across jurisdictions.

Author

• Thalia González, University of California - San Francisco