Unaccounted Foundations: Black Girls, Anti-Black Racism, and Punishment in Schools

Abstract

For nearly three decades, racial formations theory has influenced ideas, discourses and political projects surrounding race and racism in the United States. The theory holds that although race is a permanent feature in the US, the formation, order, and set of meanings inscribed onto racialized subjects are contingent upon historical and political contexts. This framework conceals anti-black racism as an enduring social order that affects policies, policy outcomes and organizes the relationship between non-black and black bodies. One exemplary social institution through which this can be seen is the public education system and its culture of discipline and punishment in the US. Current interrogations of school disciplinary landscapes have focused in on disparities in discipline policies as they affect working-class/working-poor boys of color. While it is useful to examine the uneven rates of suspensions, expulsions, and arrests, focusing on these disciplinary discrepancies misses everyday occurrences of punishment that young black girls experience. This qualitative paper examines school discipline policies and informal punitive practices including the implications that these mechanisms have on the physical and emotional worlds of black girls. The study finds that black girls are rendered structurally vulnerable to discipline and punishment at the hands of adults and peers in ways that exceed or contend with the logics espoused through racial formations theory. Placing black girls at the center of analysis compels us to examine the anti-black logic of discipline and punishment in schools and at large.