Educational Choking, Lynching, and the School-to-Coffin Pipeline: The In-Between of Queer Youth of Color in Schools

• In Event: The Miseducation of Curriculum: Schooling and #BlackLivesMatter

Abstract

This paper exists at the intersection of several studies -- one year-long sonic (Gershon, 2013) ethnography conducted with students of color at a large, predominantly white Midwestern high school, and two narrative inquiries written with Anglo LGBTQ youth at the same high school. The purpose of this paper is think about what the author calls “queer battle fatigue”, a construct used to describe the effects that queer youth experience from daily encounters with homophobia, and the “school-to-coffin pipeline” for LGBTQ youth as these concepts relate to queer youth of color.
The ethnographic study found that students of color have had much of their ways of being and knowing suffocated through the process of schooling. Some students in this study, primarily girls, have knowingly traded a suffocation of their African American female selves for success at school, an understanding that tends to carry with it a distain for the Blackness that furthers their sociocultural ability to “act White,” which is in itself ultimately an impossibility. This is significant because as they continued to trade suffocation for the conditional cultural capital of “acting White,” their own ways of being ceased to exist.
Other students in this study, most often boys, have been funneled into school and social disciplinary structures that set the stage for their entire lives. As demonstrated in this paper, many of these students have fallen in to ways of being, everyday actions and interactions that reified stereotypical norms of Blackness. That they have done so by choice does not in any way negate either that this is a mechanism to negotiate being in school or very likely not the series of choices they wished to make. They have been ontologically choked. To these ends, students of color were often victims of “educational choking and lynching” (Author, 2015), despite their resistance and resilience to schooling.
The narratives collected from LGBTQ students present the pressures of being an out LGBTQ student as it relates to notions of being and becoming in school. The author’s argument is twofold. First, the author contends that LGBTQ student narratives are central to dialogues about intersectionality and counternarratives. It is argued that as students experience being and living an existence of “in-between”, adults should be most attentive as these are often the moments where queer youth frequently experience thoughts of self-harm and suicide. Second, the counternarratives presented in these papers showed how the challenges encountered in relation to questions of gender (in all its forms of expression and identity), are significant to questions of resistance and resilience and student agency at the intersection of schooling and suicide.
The significance of this paper is the examination of the intersection for queer youth of color. Those students who experience living within the double bind of marginalizing factors of race and sexual orientation. Those who are simultaneously ontologically choked or lynched while either experiencing the epistemology of the closet (Sedgwick, 1993), if s/he is not “out”, or living with Queer Battle Fatigue within the school-to-coffin pipeline.

Author

• Boni Wozolek, Loyola University Maryland