“You’re Too Sensitive”: Whiteness, Ableism, and Carceral Logic as School Violence

• In Event: Imprisoning Disability: (Re)Conceptualizing the Role of Disability in the Criminalization of Youth of Color

Abstract

Objectives/purposes: This study makes visible the systemic ways that white supremacy, ableism and carceral logic operate through taken-for-granted discursive patterns when school officials respond to instances of discursive violence.

We center the story of 10-year-old Isabelle “Izzy” Tichenor story as a “telling case” (Mitchell, 1984). In September of 2021 Izzy started fifth grade at Foxboro Elementary School within the Davis School District in Utah where she was bullied by her fifth-grade classmates for being Black and autistic. Izzy’s parents reported the bullying to the school district, building administrators and teacher, but was allowed to continue. Also in September 2021, unbeknownst to Izzy and her family, the Department of Justice (DOJ) reported that it “uncovered systemic failures in the district’s handling of complaints of racial student-on-student and staff-on-student harassment” (DoJ/DSD, p. 3). On October 21, 2021, Davis School District reached a settlement with the Department of Justice. Less than 3 weeks later, on November 6, 2021, Izzy tragically took her own life.

Theoretical framework: Our work is informed by Disability Critical Race Theory (DisCrit) (Annamma et al 2013) and linguistic anthropology (Hill, 2008; Matsuda et al 2018). A DisCrit lens makes visible the historical trajectory of school exclu­sion wherein racialized and/or dis/abled students in the United States have been excluded, marginalized, incarcerated, and ver­bally or physically assaulted in predominantly white schools. Research in linguistic anthropology has focused attention on how normalized patterns of language use work to maintain white suprem­acy and white innocence.

Methods: Drawing on public records including legal documents, media reports, and social commentaries as linguistic data, we began by identifying the narratives and themes within each document. Next, we conducted a fine-grained critical discourse analysis (Fairclough and Wodak, 1997) on the previously identified thematic segments of each document. We looked intertextually across the documents to identify patterns relative to participant role and social and cultural positioning. This work is drawn from a larger study, and the final layer of analysis included a cross-case examination of the discursive patterns employed by teachers and administrators in response to different instances of assaultive speech across schools.

Data Sources: Our data include public records related to this case including legal documents (case filings, court transcripts, and reports from the Department of Justice), media reports (print and televised), and social commentaries.

Results: Our analysis illustrates how white supremacist, ableist discourses excuse, replicate and at times even support bullying, discursive violence, and dehumanization of children and youth positioned at the intersections of race and dis/ability identifications in school.

Scholarly significance of the study: While much attention has been paid to the prevalence and detrimental impacts of school bullying among students, this work offers a reconceptualization wherein we understand the role(s) of school and school personnel in animating and perpetrating discursive violence toward racialized and dis/abled youth.

Authors

• Kathleen M. Collins, Pennsylvania State University

• Manuel Ostos, Pennsylvania State University