5/30: Just another Day
https://twitter.com/deep_dab/status/1662901598010351620?s=12
The other day I saw a video of a high school graduation in Louisiana where police officers were stationed in the ceremony policing Black students for dancing. Ironically, Louisiana has a vibrant dance and music culture from Bounce Music to Jazz and Second Line. While in the ceremony, students were asked to refrain from dancing because it would “interrupt” the ceremony. In the video, you hear an attendee state that if students are dancing they will be asked to sit with their parents and leave. Some students practiced civil disobedience and decided to dance anyways and were asked to leave with their parents. This policing of Black enjoyment is common at schools all across the country in both higher-ed, primary, and secondary education schools both in everyday practices like metal detectors, and during special occasions like graduation. This is just another example of the ways that public schools serve as institutions of punishment and why many students are beginning to become disillusioned with schools. Queen Latifah said it best, “Just another day living in the hood, just another day around the way.”
Why is it that Black and Brown's youth are policed even on one of the most important transitions in their life? We are often told that this no-applause graduation rule is in place because school officials would like to have a smooth graduation without stops. At my Black high school, we were asked to keep save all applause to the end. (We did not!) It is like our presence, our celebration is perceived as a disturbance and met with routine policing and mundane violence. This practice is just a continuation of the silencing and policing of Black and Brown families that happens in educational settings through biased school curricula and culture, degrading policing and surveillance practices. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, In the 2017-2018 school year, 61% of all public schools have at least one security personnel on-site. Police are stationed in schools in hopes of protecting our students from the violence that is present outside school walls as well as the violence that is projected on Black and Brown youth by punitive zero-tolerance educational policies.
How effective are these police? Since 2008 there has been an almost 20% increase in security personnel in public schools nationally. Despite the increase in school resource officers, mass school shootings have only increased across the nation. Since 2018 there have been 167 school shootings, and this year alone we have had 23 school shootings. Increasing police numbers and budgets have clearly not been effective in reducing violence, but have continued to be effective in positioning Black and Brown bodies as what Mariame Kaba calls the prototypical target (Kaba, 2021). While analyzing the invisibilized policing of Black girls in educational literature, educator Connie Wunn shows that writes that schools use police officers and militarized surveillance systems (cameras, guards, metal detectors, etc.) to criminalize and arrests students at schools turning minor infractions into escalated interactions with police officers. (Wunn, 2015) The police serve to remind students that they are present with the school-to-prison nexus and that violence and arrests are a part of their everyday realities. Black students are disproportionately represented in suspension, expulsion, and other discipline metrics. Black girls, and gender conforming children overwhelmingly represented in these stats compared to white, latino, and indigenous counterparts. (See Monique W. Morris’s Pushout) Blackness continues to be criminalized in the everyday consciousness of the people.
I have seen countless videos of young Black students arrested, slammed, and abused by school resource officers and white supremacist educational partners. The one that plays rent free in my head is the incident in Spring VALLEY HS where a Black girl was brutally slammed by officer Ben Fields. (Love, 2019, pg. 34) I am reminded by Jared Sexton that captivity is always an unsettled condition for Black people. (Sexton, 2010) How do we make sense of the violent punitive culture that is present within our public schools without giving too much energy to the spectacle? I am reminded by UIC professor David Stovall that punishment and violence are not limited to small instances, but a historical process. Black bodies have always been the site of what he calls gratuitous punishment, meaning that there does not have to be a reason or logic for this violence on Black and Brown children, it just exists. It does not matter that they are not effective. Budgets will continue to increase because they stand as a symbol of safety for the community. I turn towards abolitionists' praxis when trying to reduce the harm that Black students face in schools, and understand we need to begin to separate our understandings of policing and safety. Black joy is constantly policed in schools and school settings and it is not enough to focus on spectacular or media-driven instances of policing but policing as an entire apparatus under state control. We can not continue to just accept that consistent policing in our schools as just another day. We must begin to work towards building institutions outside of the school that serves to use education as a tool of fugitivity and freedom rather than capture and indoctrination.
SOURCES
Digest of Education Statistics, 2019. National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Home Page, a part of the U.S. Department of Education. (n.d.). https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_233.70.asp
Kaba, M., Nopper, T. K., & Murakawa, N. (2021). We do this ’til we free us: Abolitionist organizing and Transforming Justice. Haymarket Books.
Sexton, J. (2010). People-of-color-blindness. Social Text, 28(2), 31–56. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-2009-066
Wun, C. (2015). Against captivity. Educational Policy, 30(1), 171–196. https://doi.org/10.1177/0895904815615439
YouTube. (2019). Epidemics of Injustice Session 3: David Stovall (pt 1). YouTube. Retrieved June 16, 2023, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqvIvZKqCKU.
