The Issue
Black girls don’t misbehave more than white girls, yet in every state across the country they are more likely to be disciplined in school and often receive harsher penalties for the same infractions, experts and researchers have found. They are “dress coded” more frequently than white peers and often viewed as hypersexualized and “adultified” at an early age. Nationally, they are nearly six times more likely to get out-of-school suspension than white counterparts and more likely to be suspended multiple times than any other gender or race of student, according to research by the African American Policy Forum and Columbia Law School’s Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies. That disproportionality contributes to a cycle documented by the federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention in which black girls are three times more likely to be referred to juvenile court than white girls and 20% more likely to be detained.
Why does this happen?
Black girls are 16 percent of girls in schools, but 42 percent of girls receiving corporal punishment, 42 percent of girls expelled with or without educational services, 45 percent of girls with at least one out-of-school suspension, 31 percent of girls referred to law enforcement, and 34 percent of girls arrested on campus. Too often, when people read these statistics, they ask, “What did these girls do?” when often, it’s not about what they did, but rather, the culture of discipline and punishment that leaves little room for error when one is black and female.
Black girls describe being labeled and suspended for being “disruptive” or “defiant” if they ask questions or otherwise engage in activities that adults consider affronts to their authority. Across the country, we see black girls being placed in handcuffs for having tantrums in kindergarten classrooms, thrown out of class for asking questions, sent home from school for arriving in shorts on a hot day, labeled as “truant” if they are being commercially sexually exploited, and labeled as “defiant” if they speak up in the face of what they [identify] to be injustice. We also see black girls criminalized (arrested on campus or referred to law enforcement) instead of engaged as children and teens whose mistakes could be addressed through non-punitive restorative approaches.
