The Construction of Racialized Disability in Virginia's Pupil Placement Decisions During Massive Resistance

• In Event: Exclusionary Practices and Reparative Pathways at the Intersection of Disability and Race

Abstract

Racial segregation under the auspices of disability has been legally justified through a reliance on oppressive assumptions of disabled people as biologically inferior (Cornett & Knackstedt, 2020; Erevelles, et. al., 2006) and maintained through the propertization of ability and whiteness in schools (Annamma, et. al., 2013; Kearl, 2019; Leonardo & Broderick, 2011). In their immediate resistance to the Brown decision and in the time since, white people have used disability to protect the boundaries with Blackness (Kearl, 2019), assigning property value to white-ability to exclude (Harris, 1993; Leonardo & Broderick, 2011) and positioning disability supports as a white good (Shallish, et. al., 2022). In this paper, I expose how discourses of (dis)ability used during pupil placement decisions in the years immediately following Brown reinforced anti-Black racism and functioned to maintain racial segregation in Virginia schools, while simultaneously affording increased educational resources for white students. Using a theoretical framework informed by critical whiteness studies and disability critical race studies (DisCrit), I focus on the historical relationship between Blackness, whiteness, and disability and expose Virginia’s investment in a project of racialized disablement that continues in present-day schools.

Using data collected from the archived records of Virginia’s Pupil Placement Board (746 boxes, 1957-1966), which include student applications, internal communications between Board members and school district leaders, constituent correspondence, and legal files, alongside articles from the Richmond Afro American (1954-1966), I expose how placement decisions made by school district officials and the Board contributed to the construction of disability as a mutable category with effects that vary widely along racial lines. Formed during a 1956 special session of the Virginia General Assembly and comprised of three gubernatorial appointees, Virginia’s Pupil Placement Board created criteria and made placement determinations for all students wishing to transfer schools following Brown (Ryan, 2005). Though they publicly maintained that none of their criteria were “concerned with race” (Bland, 1957), discourse analysis exposes the degree to which the Board concerned themselves with criteria related to ability as a stand-in for race, including the “scholastic aptitude and relative intelligence [or] ability of the pupil,” “disparity between the physical and mental ages of any pupil,” and “the psychological qualifications of [and a placements’] psychological effects on the pupil” (Virginia General Assembly, 1958). Such criteria was then distilled to “lack of academic qualifications,” which became the reason most frequently cited in the denial of Black families’ transfer requests. At the same time, white families relied on this language in their efforts to procure desired school placements for their children, seeking independent evaluations to support their descriptions of their childrens’ learning disabilities, psychological needs, and chronic illnesses as justification for school transfer requests that, more often than not, were approved by the Board.

This paper theorizes how the relationships between Blackness, whiteness, and disability that were solidified in pupil placement decisions during Massive Resistance not only upheld racial segregation in the years immediately following Brown but also contributed to a racialized ableism still enacting harmful effects on multiply-marginalized students today.

Author

• Jenna Gabriel, Virginia Commonwealth University