Black Girls With Dark Skin Face Harsher School Discipline

by Denene Millner — Dec 12, 2014

While we lay down in the streets demanding justice for Black men and boys bucked down by abusive cops and call out into the night skies for radical changes to our separate and unequal criminal justice system, can we put in a word for our girls? Because a new report laying out disparities when it comes to Black girls and school discipline has me feeling some kind of way.

Consider this: Villanova University researchers found that there’s a direct correlation between Black girls’ skin color and the severity of consequences they face when being disciplined at school. Indeed, researchers’ analysis of data from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health found that Black students received much harsher punishments on average than young white girls who were accused of the same action. And if that isn’t outrageous enough, chew on this: the bias inherent in Black girls and school discipline is intraracial, too, with dark-skinned girls facing harsher punishment than light-skinned Black girls.

Marinate on that. Black girls with the darkest skin tones were three times more likely to be suspended than black girls with the lightest skin.

Speculation on why this is made me want to holler, throw up both my hands. Here, what the researchers had to say in this New York Times story about Black girls and discipline:

There are different gender expectations for black girls compared with white girls, said Lance Hannon, a Villanova sociology professor who conducted the analysis. And, he said, there are different expectations within cross-sections of black girls. “When a darker-skinned African-American female acts up, there’s a certain concern about their boyish aggressiveness,” Dr. Hannon said, “that they don’t know their place as a female, as a woman.”

Compared with black boys, who are disciplined at higher rates than boys of other races and ethnicities, researchers say black girls tend to be penalized more subjectively, like for having a bad attitude or being defiant.

Jamilia Blake, an associate professor of educational psychology at Texas A&M University, said that while black boys are seen as threatening, black girls are often seen as “unsophisticated, hypersexualized and defiant.”

The Times story illustrates the disparities with the story about two 12-year-olds—one Black, one white—who faced astonishingly different punishment for school vandalism. Both were suspended for a few days and slapped with a $100 fine, but when Mikia Hutchings’ family said they couldn’t afford to pay, the school made Mikia face a disciplinary hearing, and then sent the local sheriff to the girl’s house.

They sent the local sheriff to a 12-year-old’s house, yo. For writing the word “Hi” on a bathroom stall. She was charged with misdemeanor trespassing, which, the sheriff warned, could be upgraded to a felony. Mikia had to admit to criminal trespassing to have the charges dismissed in juvenile court, and spent the summer on probation, under a 7 p.m. curfew. She also had to complete 16 hours of community service and write an apology letter to a student whose sneakers were defaced during the graffiti incident.

The white girl went back to school after her parents paid the fine.

“I only wrote one word and I had to do all that,” Mikia told the Times. “It isn’t fair.”

Mikia is right. It isn’t fair. And as the mother of two Black daughters, both of them chocolate princesses who get stellar grades and follow the rules and make me proud but who are prone to do some of the very dumb things that little humans—kids—tend to do, I am scared. I’m scared that in the place that I send them for eight hours of their day, five days a week, someone with their inherent biases and their separate and unequal, wicked system will snatch up my babies, my beautiful, dark-skinned girls, and, on a whim, ruin them. Emotionally. Physically. Mentally.

This ain’t living.

How do we change this? What do we do? Send them to private school? Home school? Die-in at the local school board meetings? Occupy the school superintendent’s house? We scrape our pennies together to send my younger daughter, our seventh grader, to private school, where she can learn and soar sans judgement and harsh treatment. For my high schooler, I spend as much time as I can volunteering, walking the hallways, introducing myself to teachers and administrators, so that they know my 10th grader’s mother is here. Right. Here. But it doesn’t feel like enough. What do we do to protect our daughters?

Denene Millner

Mom. NY Times bestselling author. Pop culture ninja. Unapologetic lover of shoes, bacon and babies. Nice with the verbs. Founder of the top black parenting website, MyBrownBaby.

TAGS

Kris Visual

December 12, 2014 at 11:45 am

Studies exist now to validate what we have always known. Who does that help? The perception seems to be the closer we are to the status quo, the more we assimilate the better off we will be. Every time I hear a story like this I think of a bed of nails. The ones that dare to stick out get hammered all the way in leaving the other nails proud in their compliance. The interesting thing with that analogy is the more we hammer those various nails in the more likely the bed itself becomes a tool that injures anyone foolish enough to lay down on it.

This, in my opinion, is the state of America. Harsher punishment for those that don’t fit the image of the ruling class, which I think if we are honest with ourselves is exactly what we are dealing with. We are being told in no uncertain term our status in this country and we continue to be shocked and outraged. Love our babies. Protect our babies. Tell our babies the truth, all we got is us.