Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools

Throughout Pushout, the term Black typically describes the race of the students Morris researches; of course, the term is also of note as it appears in the book’s full title. Black differs from African American because it is a more generalized, inclusive term. While African American refers specifically to Americans with African descent, Black “is a larger umbrella term that captures individuals throughout the African diaspora (e.g., those of Caribbean and/or Latino descent who belong to the racial group indigenous to Africa)” (249). Morris then uses Black because it describes a larger group of Americans with a more varied ethnic background. Nevertheless, Morris acknowledges that some of the research she relies on in Pushout refers to its subjects as African American, so she occasionally uses that term over Black at certain points in her text.

A social theory that rose to prominence in 1989 with Kimberlé Crenshaw’s article “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex,” intersectionality interprets a person’s whole identity as being composed of multiple, interrelated facets such as one’s race, gender, sexual orientation, ableness, etc. The intersection of these different facets of identity creates a unique whole that informs a person’s perspective and how others relate to them, particularly when one or more of these identity facets is of an oppressed group. Intersectionality is a foundational concept and theme throughout Pushout, informing Morris’s thesis argument that Black girls are uniquely marginalized, targeted, and criminalized by the American education system, resulting in their pushout from classrooms.

The “jezebel” is a cultural stereotype that interprets Black girls and women as hypersexual and “promiscuous.” The stereotype’s historical roots are in American slavery, when white slaveholders used this prejudiced lie to justify their sexual violence against Black females. In Pushout, Morris argues that the jezebel stereotype still exists in contemporary culture through media products. Such harmful cultural misrepresentations of Black femininity inform peoples’ implicit biases against Black women—biases held by school administrators and educators. Pushout subsequently argues that the jezebel stereotype often impacts how Black girls are punished in schools (e.g., for dress code violations that are deemed “too revealing”) and thus plays a role in the pushout phenomenon.

Pushout is a systemic social phenomenon wherein Black girls are criminalized in schools for their physical appearances, manners of dress, and behaviors, receiving harsh punishments. The gratuitous “discipline” is justified by zero-tolerance policies that then push the girls out of educational spaces and into criminal (and subsequently, incarcerated) spaces. Morris argues that Black girls suffer routine racial and gendered discrimination in schools; historically oppressive ideologies inform the codes of conduct that police student behavior, resulting in Black girls being unduly targeted, punished, and pushed out.

The school-to-confinement pathway describes how discriminatory, zero-tolerance policies push Black girls out of school and into criminal lifestyles, where they are then punished by the criminal legal system. Morris argues that for many Black girls, schools do not offer paths to a healthy future, but to a future of confinement. A critique of the term “school to prison pipeline,” Morris offers “school-to-confinement pathway” as an alternative that fully encompasses the reality that Black girls face. Morris feels that limiting one’s analytical scope to prison is insufficient to examine pushout, and instead employs the phrasing “confinement” to address other forms of control, surveillance, and punishment. For example, Morris considers house arrest, electronic monitoring, and detention centers as other forms of exclusionary punishment that further marginalize Black girls from educational spaces and their communities.