Monique W. Morris: Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools
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BOOK REVIEW
Monique W. Morris: Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools New York, The New Press, 2016, 282 pp, ISBN: 978-1-62097-342-4 Yael Massen1
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Received: 8 October 2020 / Accepted: 13 October 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Dr. Monique W. Morris’ Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools presents an urgent and timely narrative on the historic cycle of victimization Black girls continue to endure in pursuit of an education. Civil rights protesters proclaim “Black Live Matter” and urge fellow activists to “Say Her Name” at the vigils of Black (Trans) women murdered at the hands of police. Yet, Americans continue to overlook the effect law enforcement policies in public—particularly in schools—have on the childhoods of young Black girls. Pushout’s introduction opens with a description of fourteen year-old Dejerria Becton’s violent encounter with a police officer. The nation’s collective misogynoir is exemplified by Dejerria Becton’s circumstance—her name is unknown, but her body and image are instantly recognizable upon mention of a 2015 viral video: a bikini-clad girl from Texas crying for someone to “call [her] mama” as a white officer presses into her prone, squirming body with his knee, grinding his body weight into her back (Morris 2016, p. 1). Morris sets the tone of her book with this image of Dejerria, calling upon society’s heightened awareness to sexual assault and the nation’s fleeting recognition of harms perpetrated against Black girls via the overpolicing of their bodies. Pushout, then, is uniquely constructed to interrogate both the source of and solution to the victimization of Black girls: school. Chapter one of Morris’ book, “Struggling to Survive,” provides a background for the structural barriers Black girls navigate in pursuit of an education, including the school-toprison pipeline. Morris posits that the school-to-prison pipeline framework continues to erase the experiences of Black girls in the classroom by focusing on the conditions
* Yael Massen [email protected] 1
Indiana University Maurer School of Law, Bloomington, IN, USA
and experiences of Black boys and young men in response to exclusionary disciplinary measures (i.e. suspension, expulsion). Morris argues that the testimonies of Black girls offer nuanced evidence that their victimization in schools disproportionately results in their punishment and lays the foundation to undermine Black girls’ beliefs that schools can adequately protect them from harm. Black girls are tasked with developing a strategy to navigate a learning environment that will not protect them: be the “good girl,” conforming to standard of White, middle-class femininity, or be the “ghetto” or “ratchet” girl and deviate from gender-based social norms related to socioeconomic status, sexuality, and responses to power figures. An account from an eleven year-old girl, Danisha, in a detention facility documents her self-definition as a “ho” rather than a girl who experien
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