Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools

The Introduction of Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools presents and contextualizes the book’s main thesis: that Black girls are punished, traumatized, and criminalized by the actions and deeper ideologies of US educators, pushing these young students out of school and into confinement and incarceration. To contextualize this argument within larger socio-political issues, Morris draws on history, critical race theory, and gender theory. She interweaves these three disciplines throughout her Introduction to create a cohesive, emphatic argument that the pushout phenomenon involves the overlap of many different forces.

The first contextualizing section for Morris’s argument briefly explores historical perspectives on Black girls’ education, establishing that the pushout phenomenon, while a contemporary issue, has deep historical roots. This section is structured using two examples: Black education during American slavery and Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Though being caught reading or writing was penalized for people of color during the era of slavery, Black women still sought out education because they understood its power. Morris writes that for Black women in slavery-era society, “learning to read represented a reclamation of human dignity and provided an opportunity to ground their challenges to the institution in scholarship, literature, and biblical scripture” (5).

Education still carries this same liberating power for Black girls as they seek to escape oppressive conditions of state violence (such as the opening account of Dejerria Becton). Education is still a contested issue for Black Americans because of the limitations of Brown v. Board of Education. While the historical court case brought an end to de jure segregation (that is, the legally enforced separation of people amongst racial/ethnic lines), it did not seek to end de facto segregation (socio-economic methods of segregation that exist outside of the law books, such as xenophobia, tribalism, and enforced poverty). Morris notes in her Introduction that it has been more than 60 years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Gender and racial inequalities in American education persist because of the country’s failure to address other systemic issues (such as de facto segregation) that lie outside the confines of that landmark case.

The second half of Morris’s Introduction situates her argument within larger social and political discourses of the 21st century: namely, the school-to-prison pipeline and the intersections between race and gender at work in the pushout phenomenon. The term “school-to-prison pipeline” refers to how zero-tolerance policies disproportionately target and displace students of color, functioning as a “pipeline” channeling them out of schools and into prisons. The term arose during the 21st century’s unprecedented use of armed officers in American schools, which occurred alongside increased surveillance tactics on students. These punitive policies result in students of color being removed from school, arrested, and incarcerated. Regarding the school-to-prison pipeline, Morris argues that Black girls are marginalized (or altogether forgotten) in this discussion. Much of the relevant literature focuses on the discipline of Black males in schools, and scholars tend to conflate the diverse educational experiences of Black males, females, and gender nonconforming students. Pushout seeks to critique this trend and fill the void of research regarding Black girls’ experiences, hoping to encourage further scholarship into the academic and public discourse on the school-to-prison pipeline and make the topic more inclusive.

One of the Introduction’s most notable contributions to the school-to-prison pipeline conversation is the assertion that Black girls, instead of simply going to jail, encounter other forms of exclusion and confinement. Rather, Morris includes detention centers, house arrest, and surveillance strategies in the broader picture of how Black girls are institutionally marginalized and alienated from their communities. In seeking to refine and progress the discourse, the Introduction offers a new term: school-to-confinement pathways. Morris coins this term in the belief that, in its extended scope, it more accurately represents Black female students’ experiences with the educational and criminal justice systems.

In her Introduction’s final word, she reflects on her book’s ultimate intentions, emphasizing that it is a work of love concerned with drawing Americans together in a collective fight against racism and patriarchal oppression, especially that present in the educational system. Her Introduction demonstrates her intersectional methodology; the text balances history, critical race theory, and gender theory to present a rich, varied image of America’s criminalization of Black girls. The Introduction’s methodological structure also sets the stage for the rest of the book, as Pushout regularly incorporates American history and specific works of critical race theorists and gender theorists alongside Morris’s field research and case studies to produce comprehensive analyses.