Pipelines Paved by Bullies: Black Queer Youth and Zero-ish Tolerance Policies

• In Event: Disrupting the Mythology of Bias-Based Bullying: Queer Kids and Social Violence

Abstract

Carter G. Woodson once wrote that there would “be no lynching if it did not start in the schoolroom” (Woodson, 1933, p. 3). What Woodson describes in his work is the idea that any one act of violence is never singular. It is always already nested and layered with past and present iterations of violence, forming what I have called “assemblages of violence” that informs current and future acts of aggression (Author, 2021). While there are many inroads to discuss violent assemblages that are consistently at play and in motion across schools and communities, this paper will focus on the experiences of queer youth of color at Excellence Academy , an urban school located on the East Coast of the United States. The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between bullying and zero tolerance policies as they emerged from students’ narratives about their daily lives in school. It is key to pause and define bullying because this paper makes explicit some of the many ways that zero tolerance policies and bullying practices simultaneously functioned in school, negatively impacting students by funneling them toward school-to prison (Christle, Jolvitte & Nelson, 2005) and school-to-coffin (Author, 2016) pipelines. What is argued here is a greater attention to adults’ contributions in and to violence. This is important because, while the literature on bullying and related data tends to focus on peer-to-peer interactions in schools, this work thinks about bullying as it is present both through peer interactions and teacher-to student intra-actions (Barad, 2007). As student narratives in this paper show, it is significant to note how zero tolerance polices become a place where educators’ implicit and explicit bias are expressed as they unequally enforce zero tolerance policies.

Findings from this sonic ethnographic study express two facets of bullying. First, participants described peer bullying that was defined through physical and emotional violence. Second, participants described experiencing bullying from educators and administrators through acts of emotional violence and the use of school policies to further harm queer youth of color. What students’ narratives contribute to broader literatures on bullying and zero tolerance policies is an attention to the violence they received from adults in the school. This underscores the need for faculty, staff, and administration to think critically about school policies and practices that un-intentionally contribute to the school-to-prison and school-to-coffin pipelines for LGBTQIA+ youth, Black and brown youth, and, specific to this study, students whose ways of being, knowing, and doing reside at the intersections of marginalized identities. In sum, it asks that every stakeholder in schools carefully consider—to return to Woodson—what one learns, what voices are absent, and the broader pedagogical contexts of learning from classrooms to corridors.

Author

• Boni Wozolek, Pennsylvania State University - Abington