Shock, outrage and then silence — such characterized the mainstream response to a school resource officer assaulting a Black female student and dragging her out of the classroom in handcuffs.
Media sensationalized the event and in doing so masked the systemic issue: how schools are not only pipelining Black and brown students into prisons but also operating as spaces of racial violence.
Growing up in an immigrant household, my brother and I are reminded constantly of how education is our “golden ticket.” These ticketed dreams are grounded in the belief that education is an accessible path to upward mobility for all children. As an advocate for education reform, I have often preached this narrative of education as a fabled, great equalizer.
But for far too long we have been conditioned to regard education as a benign agent of justice and equality in the white imagination, rather than as a propagator of state violence. Schools are not just failing Black students but are intrinsically involved in their oppression.
The Spring Valley assault was not an isolated incident. Rather, it is evidence of what many refer to as the school-to-prison pipeline. “Zero tolerance” policies have resulted in the disproportionate — and thus racialized — discipline and punishment of Black and Latino/a students. Black students are three times more likely to be expelled from school than white students. These disparities in school punishment mirror disparities in incarceration rates whereby Black people are incarcerated at six times the rate of whites.
Schools as racialized spaces perpetuate the containment and criminalization of Black youth through surveillance and policing. Schools in Black and brown urban communities have experienced an alarming rise in the presence of law enforcement and surveillance in the form of metal detector checks, random sweeps and searches and restricted movement on school grounds. Schools are inherently connected to other sites of criminalization in our society.
Yet the school-to-prison pipeline narrative operates within the same white imagination. It attributes the racialization of schools to policy and prejudices, not the structure of anti-Blackness rooted within our school system. The pipeline requires the narrative of Black helplessness, as Africana studies scholar Damien Sojoyner points out, by mischaracterizing racial violence as an ahistorical phenomenon that “happens” to Black youth.
In reality, the expansion of policing and surveillance in schools is a concerted response to organized Black struggles against systemic injustice. In this light, schools, prisons and police do not create “safety” as much as they discipline, contain and commit violence against Black people.
Efforts to reform education must work to dismantle the white imagination that not only detaches schools from the policing, surveillance and criminalization of Black youth but also disassociates racial violence from its historical roots in suppressing Black agency. Until then, we will keep living a “golden ticket” lie.
