Deceptive Progress: The Kinship of Anti–Black Girl Violence, "Equity" Discourse, and School Discipline "Reform"

• In Event: Movement in Black Education Studies: Futures for the Field

Abstract

Scholars demand reform to zero tolerance and exclusionary school discipline policies and practices due to the current racial and gender disparities impacting Black girls (Crenshaw, Ocen, & Nanda, 2015; Morris, 2016; Wun, 2014). As a result, schools implement revamped interventions such as positive behavioral interventions and supports (PBIS), restorative justice strategies, and equity discourse amongst school leaders and administrators. While these reformed approaches to school discipline are considered effective in decreasing students’ experiences with suspensions, expulsions, and school-related arrests, Black girls continuously face mundane and gratuitous assaults from school actors. Schools instead recreate practices that reproduce harm and anti-Black violence against Black girls (Annamma et al., 2020; Neal-Jackson, 2020; Shange, 2019; Smith-Purviance, 2021). This paper suggests educational reform efforts and equity discourses circulate narratives of “progress” and care for Black girls that dismiss the anti-Black school violence they face. This paper describes how “mundane” disciplinary practices like PBIS referrals/write-ups, reward systems, and improper restorative justice practices reinforce a specific kind of anti-Black violence that forces Black girls to navigate, refuse, and resist their illegibility as “student,” “girl,” “child,” and “human” in schools (Hines & Young, 2020; Smith-Purviance, 2021; Wun, 2015).

To understand the specificities of Black girls’ experiences I use anti-Black-girl violence, which draws on theories of afro-pessimism and Black feminism, in addition to literatures on anti-Blackness in education and Black girlhood studies (Baldridge, 2020; Dumas, 2014;2016; Hines & Young, 2020; Lindsey, 2018; ross, 2019;2020; Shange, 2019; Smith-Purviance, 2021). The data from this multi-sited qualitative study includes interviews with thirteen school administrators, teachers, and staff, twenty-eight Black girls aged 10-14, and document analysis of student records at two midwestern, predominantly white suburban middle schools.

This paper examines the ways schools perpetuate inequality and anti-Black-girl violence through the day-to-day, equity-centered polices, practices, and operations that undermine Black girls. Although school actors in this study tout their equity approaches as an effort to make schooling better for all students, Black girls remain persistently under attack and are repositioned as “the problem.” I describe how equity becomes an impossibility for Black girls as they are not granted “equal access” to restorative mediations with school administrators and are forced to “just drop it” and forgive white peers and teachers who enact violence against them. Additionally, PBIS reward systems increase harm against Black girls as award descriptions celebrate their “compliance” with harmful racialized and gendered stereotypes, while referrals work to blame and de-victimize Black girls who refuse violence from school actors. As a result, the schools’ “equity” approach to discipline reform is grounded in deceptive progress narratives that reinforce the same anti-Black-girl violence as traditional disciplinary policies and practices.

This paper illustrates how anti-Black-girl violence is (re)embedded in equity and reform discourses that claim to create change for “all” students yet require Black girls’ suffering. Educators, scholars, researchers, and practitioners must understand how anti-Black suffering is reproduced via education reform to eradicate policies, practices and discourses that veil the harm Black girls and all Black youth continue to face.

Author

• Ashley L Smith-Purviance, The Ohio State University