"What Are You Doing?" Teachers' Affective Orientations Toward Black Girls

• In Event: Black and Hispanic Students' Educational Experiences and Opportunities

Abstract

Scholarship on school discipline has traditionally focused on formal sanctions (e.g., suspensions) and their disproportionate application to Black boys. But recent intersectional work has highlighted the experiences of Black girls and how implicit bias results in disproportionate informal sanctions (e.g., reprimands). Despite these advances, subtle forms of discrimination occurring in everyday student-teacher interactions remain overlooked. I use one year of ethnographic observations in a racially diverse elementary school to highlight teachers’ affective orientations. I show that compared to other students, Black girls experienced three forms of negative affective orientation: impatience, skepticism, and denials. This study shows the need to extend the lens of implicit bias beyond disciplinary encounters in order to capture more fine-grained, yet routine, forms of interactional discrimination.

Author

• Peter Francis Harvey, The University of Pennsylvania