Standing in Solidarity with Black Girls to Dismantle the School-to-Prison Pipeline

Taught in the Matrix: A Review of Black Girls’ Experiences in U.S. Schools

“…School discipline policies are particularly salient to the disciplinary domain because it attends to the socially constructed rules that regulate students’ behaviors and actions while upholding interlocking systems of power that disproportionately impact Black girls. Indeed, most studies in this section focused on the following aspects of discipline: the increasing rate at which schools use policing as solutions to criminalize Black girls’ behavior; disciplinary policies leading to in-school suspension, out-of-school suspension, or placement in an alternative education program; or, rules that seek to discipline Black girls’ bodies and cultural behaviors (e.g., Annamma et al, 2019; Cumi et al, 2017; Gibson et al, 2019; Hines-Datiri & Carter Andrews, 2017; Morris, 2014; Martin & Smith, 2017; Slate et al, 2016; Wunn, 2016, 2018; Zimmerman, 2018). Other studies were more conceptually focused, offering new lenses and frameworks to understand school discipline policies, for example, as “captivity” (Wun, 2016) and militarized spaces that harm Black girls (e.g., Evans-Winters, 2017; Lindsey, 2018; Smith, 2016).…”

“…Higher incidences of teacher-reported problems related to African American girls were largely attributed to differences in the race of the teacher. As a result, scholars advocate for culturally relevant teaching and leadership practices intended to cultivate and impart ways of knowing that support critical consciousness development, while helping Black girls to assert their agency and their full identities in schools (Cumi et al, 2017). It is important to note that Black female teachers are also subject to similar exclusionary and unfair treatment within schools (Coffey & Farinde-Wu, 2016), which further underscores calls for disrupting racialized organizational practices as well as implications for greater racial and ethnic parity between teachers and school leaders (White, 2020).…”

“…operate in a "rigged system" producing "winners" and "losers." Bécares & Priest, 2015;Butler-Barnes et al, 2018;Campbell, 2012;Cleggett, 2017;George, 2015;Gist et al, 2018;Joseph et al, 2016;Morris, 2014;Phillips, 2015;Shen, 2017;Watson, 2016;White, 2018;Young et al, Agyepong, 2013;Annamma et al, 2019;Cooper, 2015;Cumi et al, 2017;Evans-Winters, 2017;Gibson, 2016;Gibson & Decker, 2019;Hines-Datiri & Carter Andrews, 2017;Hines-Datiri & Wilmot, 2018;Lindsey, 2018;Martin & Smith, 2017;Morris, 2014;Parks et al, 2016;Slate et al, 2016;Smith, 2016;…”

Using a Critical Hip-Hop School Counseling Framework to Promote Black Consciousness Among Black Boys

“…According to El-Amin et al (2017), critiquing the attitudes, beliefs, and concepts that undergird with the ideology of Whiteness (e.g., emphasis on rugged hyperindividualism, competition, demonizing difference) is essential to any conversation on critical consciousness. A brief perusal of the school counseling literature reveals what can be considered audible silence about the need to interrogate how Whiteness and other related forms of oppressive ideologies (e.g., academic elitism/classism) shape education, education reform (Ladson-Billings, 2006; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995), and school counseling theory and practice (Cumi et al, 2017). Part of this could encompass a serious conversation about how the institutionalization of multiculturalism, as a concept, has centered Whiteness by clumsily constructing non-Whites as the perpetual cultural other.…”

“…Smith et al, 2010), recommendations for school counselors on how to connect conscientização to youth-driven social movements where Black students are using their voices to decry injustice are virtually nonexistent in the school counseling literature. This dearth warrants immediate attention because, as Ratts and colleagues (2007) remind us, it is imperative for school counselors to demonstrate leadership by creating spaces where Black students can summon their inherent power to “speak up for themselves” (p. 92) as they combat anti-Black institutional policies and practices impacting their lives (Cumi et al, 2017; A. R. Washington & Henfield, 2018).…”