The Social Death of Student Status: Anti-Blackness, Student Status, and Equitable Education Systems

• In Event: Race, Gender, and Education

Abstract

In striving toward equitable education systems researchers, policymakers, and concerned citizens have often highlighted areas to address or reform: integration, achievement gaps, tracking/detracking, charter schools, chronic absenteeism, standards, accountability, class size, school choice, social and emotional learning, and restorative practices. While reforms in these areas may have been well intended, no one has fundamentally grappled with and examined how African American students makes sense of their student status. Using the city of Baltimore, Maryland, as a case study, this paper uncovers the social death of student status for African American youth—a death associated with America’s collective consciousness of Blackness as negative and dangerous. Anti-Blackness has led to the denying of humanness and studentness for African American students.

Author

• Richard Lofton, Johns Hopkins University