Toward a Revised Theory of Safety and Fear: School Punishment and Zero-Tolerance

• In Event: 3432 - Intersectional Methodologies

Abstract

U.S. schools continue to define and manage student discipline through a paradigm of crime and punishment. Widely implemented since the early 1990s, the use of zero-tolerance policies as a means of ensuring school safety services is not a new phenomenon. Most theoretical explanations, fail to situate school criminalization, hyper-vigilance, and victimization of students of color within a broader structural context that places racial dynamics at the forefront, ultimately failing to fully explain the implications of these disciplinary policies on the safety of students of color within schools. In this paper, I build a Critical Race Theory (CRT) of fear and safety the undergirds the how we think about linkages between courts, schools, and racialized safety. This paper builds on sociology of punishment and race theory literature to develop of a more critical understanding of how zero-tolerance policies further racialize and unequally distribute safety. As such, I argue that in-school disciplinary policies reproduce racialized notions of safety and as such, create and reinforce racialized constructions of safety that function to legitimize surveillance and policing of students of color within public schools. I argue that these policies, though often implemented under the guise of protecting the safety of students and staff within schools, play a pivotal role in legitimizing the surveillance and policing of youth of color and facilitate whites’ tendency to link danger and violence to youth of color. In doing so, I demonstrate how in-school disciplinary policies reproduce racialized notions of safety and create consensus on the appropriateness of their use and promote and legitimize greater punishment of students of color.

Author

• Kay Sarai Varela, Texas A&M University