From the New York Times news section:
‘A Battle for the Souls of Black Girls’
Discipline disparities between Black and white boys have driven reform efforts for years. But Black girls are arguably the most at-risk student group in the United States.
By Erica L. Green, Mark Walker and Eliza Shapiro
Oct. 1, 2020… The disproportionate discipline rates of Black boys have long dominated discussions about the harmful effects of punitive discipline policies, but recent high-profile cases have begun to reframe the debate around the plight of Black girls. …
Just this week, the Common Application for colleges and universities cited disproportionate discipline rates for Black girls in its decision to stop asking students to report whether they had been subject to disciplinary action.
Statistically, Black boys have led the country in suspensions, expulsions and school arrests, and the disparities between them and white boys have been a catalyst for national movements for change. But Black girls’ discipline rates are not far behind those of Black boys; and in several categories, such as suspensions and law enforcement referrals, the disparities between Black and white girls eclipse those between Black and white boys.
Obviously, Black girls behave better than white girls: that’s why we reverently capitalize the word Black, unlike those white hellions.
It’s too bad America doesn’t have any other racial groups besides Black and white that could help us put white vs. Black comparisons into perspective. Imagine if there were 20 million people from Asia in the United States. Think of everything we could learn from having another race with their own discipline statistics besides just Blacks and whites. But of course there are no Asians in the U.S., so this immense article never mentions “Asians” once.
A New York Times analysis of the most recent discipline data from the Education Department found that Black girls are over five times more likely than white girls to be suspended at least once from school, seven times more likely to receive multiple out-of-school suspensions than white girls and three times more likely to receive referrals to law enforcement. Black boys experienced lower rates of the same punishments compared with white boys.
In New York City, Black girls in elementary and middle school were about 11 times more likely to be suspended than their white peers in 2017, according to a report from the Education Trust-New York, a research and advocacy group. In Iowa, Black girls were nine times more likely to be arrested at school than white girls, according to a state-by-state analysis conducted by the American Civil Liberties Union.
When everybody knows that Iowa whites are horribly behaved.
“We are in a battle for the souls of Black girls,” said Monique W. Morris, the executive director of Grantmakers for Girls of Color and author of the book “Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in School.”
The disproportionate discipline rates among girls indicate what researchers have long said about all Black children: It is not that they misbehave more than their peers, but their behaviors may be judged more harshly.
Granted, there used to be scholars like Charles Murray who would suggest that the Occam’s razor explanation for why statistics purport that blacks behave worse on average on some metrics is because blacks do behave worse on average on those metrics. But the Murrays have been shoved out of the Overton Window, so now we know that the only possible remaining explanation for statistical differences is that everybody hallucinates that blacks behave worse on average, so they then act on this colossal racist hallucination.
… Sophia Lusala, a junior at Iowa City High School, said she often felt the effects of the “loud, sassy, Black girl” stereotype. In math class last year, when a teacher said he would not review a certain lesson, she asked why — and landed in the hallway “to calm down,” she said.
“We’ve been in school growing our minds so that we can challenge things,” she said. “But when we do so, we’re punished for it.”
Black girls are viewed by educators as more suspicious, mature, provocative and aggressive than their white peers, said Rebecca Epstein, the executive director of the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality and an author of the first robust study of “adultification bias” against Black girls. The study found that Black girls as young as 5 were viewed by adults as less innocent than white girls.
“Developmentally, Black girls and white girls are the same — regardless of any differences in outward presentation,” she said.
Seriously, there is a difference in average age between black and white girls of first menstruation:
The sample, drawn from the US National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth Child-Mother file, consisted of 2337 girls born between 1978 and 1998. Mean age of menarche in months was 144 for African-American girls and 150 for whites.
So, that’s not a huge difference, but it exists. Back to the NYT:
…In 2014, President Barack Obama announced a national initiative called My Brother’s Keeper to improve the lives of young Black men. Motivated in part by the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012, Mr. Obama said the initiative was an effort to “change the statistics — not just for the sake of the young men and boys, but for the sake of America’s future.” Among the program’s goals: school discipline reform.
I suspect that deep down, what Obama would have preferred was to change the statistics for the better by improving the behavior of black youths. But, instead, his Administration issued orders telling local school districts to change the statistics by, in effect, lowering standards of behavior for black boys or face federal interventions over putative racism.
Not surprisingly, the black murder rate has gone up quite a bit between 2014 and 2020.
A few months later, Kimberlé Crenshaw, a professor and scholar of race theory, wrote an opinion article titled “The Girls Obama Forgot.” She also published a report that concluded Black girls were all but ignored by policymakers, funders and researchers in discipline discussions. An NAACP Legal Defense Fund report in 2014 said inattention to Black girls had “fueled the assumption that all girls are doing fine in school,” though they also sustained academic and economic setbacks.
An issues brief in March 2014 by the Education Department concluded that “while boys receive more than two out of three suspensions
Due, presumably, to Systemic Sexism
Black girls are suspended at higher rates” than “girls of any other race or ethnicity and most boys.”
But scholars say that Black girls are still seen as a footnote. “The attitude is: Everything starts with boys. Paint it pink, and it works for girls,” Ms. Epstein said.
As the nation’s political leadership has grown more diverse, that may be changing. Last year, Representative Ayanna S. Pressley, Democrat of Massachusetts, introduced a bill that targeted the disproportionate discipline rates of Black students, highlighting girls.
Senator Kamala Harris of California, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, tweeted in 2017, “It’s time to address the underlying issues in our education system that limit Black girls’ opportunities before they even reach college.”
LaTasha DeLoach has been working for years through the Iowa-based organizations G!World and Sankofa Outreach Connection to dismantle the perception that Black girls are not as endangered by systemic racism as boys.
“These are slave narratives,” she said. “Black men were publicly hanged, while Black women were raped in secret. This tendency to hide Black women’s pain dates back years.”
In 2015, when Ms. DeLoach was elected as the first Black woman to serve on the Iowa City Community School Board in 30 years, she began raising alarms about Black girls’ discipline rates. The data showed that 75 percent of Black female discipline referrals were for disruption, compared with 19 percent for white girls; 69 percent were for defiance, insubordination or noncompliance, compared with 19 percent for white girls.
“When you walk into a school here and you’re a Black girl, they’re just waiting for you to open your mouth,” Ms. DeLoach said.
The Iowa City Community School District said in a statement that it was “committed to identifying, understanding and rectifying disproportionality within our schools.”
Why is Iowa City so different? I mean, other than its statistics aren’t very different from every place else in the country that isn’t putting a major thumb on the scales?
… Cpl. Betty Covington of the Baltimore City School Police Department agrees.
In Baltimore, Black girls were about four times more likely than white girls to get suspended, and more than twice as likely as white girls to get expelled in the 2016-2017 school year, according to a 2018 report by the N.A.A.C.P.
How many white girls go to public school in Baltimore City, anyway?
And how white are the teachers and administrators in Baltimore public schools?
Corporal Covington “tells us that nobody can say we don’t have the magic,” Kaia Jones said. “We threaten society because we’re the latest trendsetters, we don’t let nobody walk over us, and people want to be like us. Black girls go through the most. But it’s because we’re just so powerful.”
… The long-term trauma for Black girls from disproportionate school discipline is little understood, experts say.
Their self-esteems must be just shattered.
