But Those Students Need Discipline! Race, Safety, and Discipline in Texas Public Schools

• In Event: 520 - Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities Paper Session. Toward a Sociological Critical Race Theory

Abstract

United States public schools continue to define and manage student discipline through a paradigm of crime and punishment. Having been 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, however, 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. I argue that while schools often implement these disciplinary policies under the guise of ensuring the safety of students and school staff, they facilitate whites’ tendency to link danger and violence to people of color by criminalizing young adults early in their lives. Using newspaper coverage from three Texas school districts, I conduct a structurally contextualized critical discourse analysis to illuminate the way in which zero-tolerance policies represent a discriminatory attempt to justify surveillance and policing of students of color within public schools. In doing so, I advance an alternate theoretical approach rooted in Critical Race Theory arguing that school zero-tolerance, and harsh punishment policies reproduce racialized constructions of safety and in doing so, thwart the ability of students of color to feel safe from criminal justice persecution while in school.

Author

• Kay Sarai Varela, Texas A&M University