Recent incidents involving the deaths of unarmed Black men at the hands of police officers have led to a resurgence in nationwide discussions about the devastating effects of systemic and pervasive racial inequality which is intertwined throughout American society and institutions.
Conspicuously missing from those conversations have been the voices of Black girls and women whose experiences from the moment they enter society through the nation's schools were documented in a report released Feb. 4 courtesy of the Center of Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies ( CISPS ) and the African American Policy Forum ( AAPF )—a New York-based think tank with a mission of promoting "efforts to dismantle structural inequality" while "advancing and expanding racial justice, gender equality and the indivisibility of human rights both in the U.S. and internationally."
The report "Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced, and Underprotected"—which Columbia Law School Professor Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw authored alongside Loyola Law School Associate Professor Priscilla Owen and UCLA Lecturer in Law Professor Jyoti Nanda—pulls together research, statistics, stories and observations from girls and stakeholders. Said report reveals a cycle of disproportionately applied harsh disciplinary action, failures to respond to bullying, interpersonal violence and discouragement faced by Black girls in New York and Boston public school systems that have often left them without access to an education regardless of their talent, desire and potential.
Rachel Gilmer is the associate director of the African American Policy Forum and the Center of Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies.
"Everywhere from the White House's My Brother's Keeper initiative to the grassroots movements that we have seen built around the death of Michael Brown, the discourse across the community and at an institutional level is that Black men and boys are the primary targets of racial injustice," she told Windy City Times. "It's led to this assumption that Black women are doing fine but we know that's not true."
The data the report gathered from the Department of Education nationally and in the New York and Boston school districts between 2011 and 2012 laid bare a sobering testament to Gilmer's statement.
Black girls were suspended at six times the rate of white students and disciplined 11 times more than white girls. In New York City 90 percent of the girls expelled from school were Black.
Gilmer noted that in those school districts located in Southern states where corporal punishment is still applied, the results are horrifying, particularly following a 2010 joint statement given by the ACLU and Human Rights Watch during a hearing before the House Education and Labor Subcommittee on Healthy Families and Communities which detailed the severe mental and academic repercussions on children struck by instruments such as the paddle.
"Many children who have been subjected to hitting, paddling or other harsh disciplinary practices have reported subsequent problems with depression, fear and anger," the statement read. "These students frequently withdraw from school activities and disengage academically."
"Between two school districts in Georgia and Alabama one school used the paddle 115 times on Black girls and one or two times on white girls," Gilmer said. "This is happening to girls who are young as five or six-years-old."
In 2012, a 6-year-old Black girl in Georgia was handcuffed and arrested by a police officer for "throwing items off the teacher's desk." In 2013, an 8-year-old was jailed for two hours because of a "tantrum."
"There was a young girl who was arrested for [conducting] a science experiment in Florida," Gilmer said. "A middle-schooler was suspended for writing 'hi' on her locker. Even if we just wanted to focus on boys, the moms who are raising them are suffering and we know that suffering starts when they are girls specifically with their educational experiences and with regards to their criminalization."
The report noted that a school's disciplinary measures have consequences that extend beyond the classroom—more commonly understood as the "school-to-prison pipeline."
Ironically, those schools which have instituted zero-tolerance policies to activities such as bullying have become a part of the problem. "They are put in place to supposedly make young people feel safe but what we're seeing with Black girls is that it's not making them feel safe at all," Gilmer said."There's a double standard. We are seeing young girls getting pushed out for being sexually harassed, for standing up for themselves in a classroom or against their peers."
According to the report, at-risk students described their zero-tolerance schools as "chaotic environments in which discipline is prioritized over educational attainment."
"The teachers don't care at all," one student was quoted as saying. "They do sweep-ups in the hallway. If they see you in the hallway with no pass, you've got to leave automatically. They do it every day. Literally half of the school gets kicked out by the end of the day."
"The lifelong consequences of getting pushed out [of school] are huge," Gilmer said. "It puts these women on a path to nowhere. It leads to further pathways to economic marginality. A lot of the reasons Black girls across the board are getting pushed out is because they don't fit traditional notions of femininity. A Black girl will say 'hey I'm asking questions in school and for some reason, when I ask a question it's seen as defiance.' So it's almost read as a gender non-conforming activity."
Between March 30 and April 3, the AAPF and CISPS held a number of online forums in connection with the report in order to determine how the experiences in school has affected Black women throughout their lives "and how the marginality that Black women face impact their communities at large given that they are so essential to caretaking in the community," Gilmer noted.
Those forums engaged more than 1,500 people and included discussions about Black women who are subjected to police violence, unreported and undiscussed domestic violence, economic marginality, health disparities and low collegiate graduation rates in four year institutions alongside the myriad of challenges they face on campus.
"It's so short sighted to think that we can help [Black] boys when the moms who are raising them have no money and no support," Gilmer said. "The biggest challenge we have right now is that even with the report out, there is still this incredibly pervasive myth that Black women are doing OK. We have to build a public will to understand what Black girls are going through and that this must be prioritized in our racial-justice agenda. We must bring girls forward to tell their stories and continue call upon the President for his initiative to be extended to Black girls as well."
Read Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced, and Underprotected at http://www.atlanticphilanthropies.org/sites/default/files/uploads/BlackGirlsMatter_Report.pdf.
For more information about the African American Policy Forum, visit www.aapf.org .
