Pushout (5 page)

However, the isolation and neglect that facilitated ghetto or slumlike conditions for poor Black people in the United States has been present since Black bodies were enslaved, commodified, and traded for public and private use. American plantations established crude manifestations of racial ghettoization: the living spaces for Black field hands were separate, markedly inferior to those of White slave owners, and locations for random but persistent surveillance.
³³

Though haunted by slavery's despicable trauma and legacy of exclusion, Black spaces were simultaneously “home” and “public.” In other words, the public nature of Black living spaces was marked by its absence of controlled privacy, reinforcing the idea that Black people were available to the public gaze at all times. This dynamic continues today in streets, buses, schools, and elsewhere. Indeed, this ethos has been extended to many of the learning spaces where the majority of Black children are educated. The public school is constantly subject to a judgmental gaze, externally and from within.
This is doubly true given the ever-expanding surveillance of Black and Brown children.

Ghettoized Opportunity

In principle, access to a quality public education is not a gendered right. While the privileges of all women and girls are up against entrenched patriarchy, the selection of
which
girls are privy to a formal education has always been informed by race and class. Globally, education is by and large recognized as a key pathway out of poverty. However, not every type of education opens up that path, and the quality of education has everything to do with being prepared to thrive as an adult. School resources, the quality of teaching and curriculum, the quality of relationships with parents, and the community network to support all these elements shape the character of formal education. It should be no surprise that low-performing schools are also high-poverty schools that produce higher rates of dropout (as it is traditionally understood) and underperformance among its students, and that high performing schools are often low-poverty ones.
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High-poverty schools are often churning out—or tacitly ignoring—children who are expected to remain poor. Nationwide, about sixteen hundred “dropout factories” are responsible for nearly half of all students who leave high school before earning a diploma and about two-thirds of the students of color who do so.
³⁴
About 58 percent of Black students and 50 percent of Latino students who made the decision to leave school were being educated in one of our nation's high-poverty, low-performing schools.
³⁵
This suggests that a higher percentage of Black girls who dropped out of school—and who were likely struggling in school—were
also likely to have been attending a low-performing school. Such a path has grave implications for the economic opportunity for these girls.

Destiny, a Black and Latina girl from California, noticed that in many of these low-poverty schools, girls were searching for pathways out of poverty that were not made clear by their educational community.

“I noticed that girls who get caught up in prostitution, they feel like
working
is more important than anything else,” Destiny said. “So, like, the girls that I know who are prostitutes, I hardly ever see them because they are, like, working all the time . . . It's better to go to school and get a career, but it's like, if you can get money, like right then and there, then why would I want to go to school for however many years?”

What is often lost on girls is that the more education a person (of any race) has, the more likely she or he is to be employed in higher-paying jobs.
³⁶
The unemployment rate of Black women with less than a high school diploma is 20 percent, while the rate for Black women with a bachelor's degree or higher is 6 percent.
³⁷
Quality education matters.

Since the time when Linda Brown, Daisy Bates, and other Black women and girls stood on the frontlines of the battle to end racial segregation in schools, the educational story of Black girls has become more convoluted—largely
because
education plays such an important role in the economic opportunity for women and girls. When girls get access to a quality education, they tend to do well. But that is only part of the story.

The educational history of Black girls and how it is understood to this very day reflects an inconsistent and dichotomous narrative. In 1970, only 33 percent of Black women had graduated from high school. Today that proportion of Black women with a high school diploma or higher is 90.5 percent.
³⁸
Black women and girls have made tremendous gains in educational attainment—a fact that
has been and should continue to be widely celebrated. However, this statistical narrative of progress obscures other narratives that reveal a continued struggle for both academic achievement and anything resembling equality.

The No Child Left Behind Act, the 2001 legislation that reauthorized the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), ushered in an era that prioritized high-stakes testing and established an educational climate that linked assessment of student achievement to the single measure of performance on these tests. According to the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, which has voiced an open critique of the growing reliance on standardized tests, youth of color are disproportionately affected by grade retention (being held back) as a result of this practice.
³⁹
Though largely ignored in national discussions about state-level high-stakes standardized testing, Black girls have struggled to perform well on such tests, which inform advancement in school or graduation.
⁴⁰
Performance on national standardized tests also reveals racial disparities among girls.
⁴¹
These controversial, single measures of knowledge may deter Black girls from continuing on with their education or lead them to internalize that they are not worthy of completing school. They say things like “School's not for me” or “I was never good at school,” when their performance may actually be impaired by many other factors, including socioeconomic conditions, differential learning styles, the quality of instruction at their schools, the orientation and presentation of questions on the test, their own mental and physical health, and disparities in access to early childhood education.

For those who do make it to college, the story is encouraging but still incomplete. We know that the benefits of an education have grown more for women than for men across all racial groups since 1994.
⁴²
Among White Americans, Black Americans, and Hispanic/Latino Americans, there is a gender gap in college enrollment.
⁴³
However, when we examine the trends among only
women
, we find that while college graduation rates have increased among first-time, full-time White, Asian and Latina women, there has been no such increase among Black women.
⁴⁴

So what's the real story? Are Black girls performing at an unprecedented high level, or are they failing and being marginalized? The answer is: both. And the reason for these competing narratives is complex.

Caricatures of Black femininity are often deposited into distinct chambers of our public consciousness, narrowly defining Black female identity and movement according to the stereotypes described by Pauli Murray as “‘female dominance' on the one hand and loose morals on the other hand, both growing out of the roles forced upon them during the slavery experience and its aftermath.”
⁴⁵
As such, in the public's collective consciousness, latent ideas about Black females as hypersexual, conniving, loud, and sassy predominate, even if they make it to college and beyond. Public presentations of these caricatures—via popular memes on social media, in advertising, or in entertainment—prescribe these traits to Black women. However, age compression renders Black
girls
just as vulnerable to these aspersive representations.

As children or as adults, Black girls are treated as if they are supposed to “know better,” or at least “act like” they know. The assignment of more adultlike characteristics to the expressions of young Black girls is a form of age compression.
⁴⁶
Along this truncated age continuum, Black girls are likened more to adults than to children and are treated as if they are willfully engaging in behaviors typically expected of Black women—sexual involvement, parenting or primary caregiving, workforce participation, and other adult behaviors and responsibilities. This compression is both a reflection of deeply entrenched biases that have stripped Black girls of their childhood freedoms and a function of an opportunity-starved social landscape that makes Black girlhood interchangeable with Black womanhood. It gives credence to a widely held perception and a message that there is little difference between the two.

Thirteen-year-old Mia from California echoed this when she described her own experiences avoiding truancy arrest.

“Half of us look older than our age,” she said nonchalantly. By whose standards?

The legacy of slavery and segregated opportunity socialized punishment and discipline (as opposed to, say, love and opportunity) as an appropriate response to “bad” Black girls who rebelled against normative ideas about proper feminine behavior. The current practices and prevailing consciousness—in homes, neighborhoods, schools, and other places young people occupy—regularly respond to Black girls as if they are fully developed adults. And in turn, the responses to their mistakes follow a similar pattern. Society treats them this way, and our girls believe the hype. And when they do, adults ignore the power dynamics that affect youthful decision making. They also miss the specific ways in which Black girls learn adaptive behaviors—ways of responding to oppressive conditions defined by race, sexuality, class, and gender. Any or all of these may come into play as girls confront growing pains within structures where (their) age is ultimately nothing but a number.

Black women and girls in America are subjected to dormant assumptions about their sexuality, their “anger,” or their “attitude.” They have long understood that their way of engaging with the world—how they talk, how they walk, how they wear their hair, or how they hold their bodies—is subject to scrutiny, especially by those in positions of relative power. They feel the gaze. They intuit its presence. They live with this knowledge in their bodies and subconsciously wrestle with every personal critique of how they navigate their environments.

Poverty matters, too. The idea that Black girls in ghettos behave in ways that cast them as “low-class” places a glass ceiling on their opportunity—a stained glass that obscures their vision of what is possible. The interactions between race, gender, and poverty may block a young woman's ability to even see her success, particularly
if she has been conditioned to respond to her poverty by selling “fruit cocktail.” If Black girls do manage to locate their dream and partner it with an opportunity, the lack of Black female role models in certain professions and the active way in which Black girls are discouraged from pursuing certain professions (e.g., those in the STEM fields) make visioning their futures difficult.

A poor or low-income Black girl might be enrolled in school, but she may not be encouraged to demonstrate her leadership skills on a school sports team or in other areas of school leadership. She may be the first face that greets you in the office or the voice you hear when you call to make an appointment, but her opportunities to break through to the next level or to become a leader are all too often limited or nonexistent. Her senses might even intuit that upward mobility is possible, but if she manages to crack through the ceiling, her mobility will likely be impaired. And, impaired or not, she will still have to navigate the misinformed gaze of Black femininity. She will still feel the pressure to work twice as hard to be respected for her contributions.

Sixty years after
Brown v. Board of Education
, our nation remains in the throes of defining what a quality, desegregated education looks like for all children. But one thing is certain—the civil rights movement was not about our girls (or our boys) being assigned to racially integrated yet structurally unequal high-poverty and low-performing schools. That struggle was about expanding opportunity, not limiting it.

The real and perceived experience of being a Black female student is informed not only by historical ideas about girls attempting to navigate spaces that have underserved their educational needs but also by how well Black girls have performed against the odds. When asked to describe public school in their own words, girls routinely say that their schools are filled with classrooms and hallways where people “fight” and are disciplined, where security personnel roam the halls, and where they learn about a democracy they don't experience in school.

Many of the Black girls that I have spoken with perceived their district or community schools as chaotic and disruptive learning spaces in which fighting and arguments were the norm and where adolescents were vying for attention and social status. These conditions led some—like Mia, who was in middle school—to consider going to school a waste of time.

“All the schools . . . like, they're hecka bad. Like . . . people be smoking up in the gym, and it's always a fight every single day,” she said.

“They gotta have like four cops in the school building,” she continued. “Like, every single day, all day, 'cause somebody tried to bring a gun, and somebody tried to do something stupid. I don't know . . . Sometimes, if you're already like that, and you're already raised up to be around people like that, like, you just get used to it and you don't really care, you know? And then you start doing bad.”