Right to Be Hostile

Schools, Prisons, and the Making of Public Enemies

Erica R. Meiners

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781135909031
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In Right to be Hostile, scholar and activist Erica Meiners offers concrete examples and new insights into the "school to prison' pipeline phenomenon, showing how disciplinary regulations, pedagogy, pop culture and more not only implicitly advance, but actually normalize an expectation of incarceration for urban youth. Analyzed through a framework of an expanding incarceration nation, Meiners demonstrates how educational practices that disproportionately target youth of color become linked directly to practices of racial profiling that are endemic in state structures. As early as preschool, such educational policies and practices disqualify increasing numbers of students of color as they are funneled through schools as under-educated, unemployable, 'dangerous, ' and in need of surveillance and containment. By linking schools to prisons, Meiners asks researchers, activists, and educators to consider not just how our schools' physical structures resemble prisons— metal detectors or school uniforms— but the tentacles in policies, practices and informal knowledge that support, naturalize, and extend, relationships between incarceration and schools. Understanding how and why prison expansion is possible necessitates connecting schools to prisons and the criminal justice system, and redefining "what counts" as educational policy.

CHAPTER 1
Surveillance, Ladies Bountiful, and the Management of Outlaw Emotions

Scene: A Social Studies class in a nondescript high school classroom, third floor of a three-story brick building.

Characters: David – 19-year-old African American male. Erica – 35-yearold white woman. Twenty-five other African American students between the ages of 19 and 50 years.

Background: It is halfway through the semester. Both Erica and David are crabby. Erica has had a long day in boring meetings and David has spent the day in court-mandated programs, and trying to find work.

Class starts. David walks in 10 minutes after class starts, right in front of the teacher, Erica, and waves to the group of men his age sitting at the back of the room, who shout back, interrupting Erica’s outline of the agenda for the night. David takes his seat in the back left of the room. Puts his headphones on his ears.

Erica: David, don’t you want to take those headphones off? Class has started.

David: No. I like them. I am not listening to music. He slumps over on the desk.

Other students watch and wait. Erica is getting visibly more crabby. Her face gets a little tinged with red and her voice pitches up. David pulls his hood up over his head and zips up his enormous parka even though it is a good 70-plus degrees in the room. His face is invisible under the faux fur rim of the hood.

Erica: David. You are in class now. Please take the earphones off.

The rest of the class is watching the interchange. The women have their arms crossed. No one makes eye contact with Erica or David. The men David waved to when he walked in are doodling intensely, or staring at their shoes.

David: No response. A faint electric whir is audible in the room, as David turns the CD player in his Sony Walkman on.

Erica: Listen, if you are not going to participate – don’t take up a seat. Feel free to go.No one is keeping you here.

No response form David but the whir of the CD player gets louder.

Erica: David – it seems like you have better things to do tonight – so why don’t you leave.

David: Why are you always picking on me? What have you got against me? Stomps out of the room and the rest of the room can hear him yelling up the hallway.

Rest of class sighs at Erica for mismanaging the event.

Erica sighs at herself for mismanaging the event.

I start this chapter, which focuses on what activists and educators call the “school to jail pipeline” with a brief discussion of anger because I am frequently surrounded by manifestations of anger, myself included. The keen restless rage of young men and women, such as David, whose anaesthetizing and pleasure-producing use of illegal medications often lead to incarceration, and release and rehabilitation (and housing) are conditional upon participation in anger management programs. Anger is a legitimate response to institutions that set you up for failure, or to a political state that systemically denies you the right to participate, but it is dangerous to be angry in public spaces. Yet, if one does not have the right to be hostile, where does the anger go when it is “a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change” (Lorde, 1984, 129)? Sometimes I am so angry I can’t think. There cannot be this much anger, just because, and I take this emotion, as feminist philosopher Jaggar terms it, an “outlaw emotion,” as a starting place for inquiry:

Outlaw emotions are distinguished by their incompatibility with the dominant perceptions and values…. Outlaw emotions stand in a dialectical relation to critical social theory: at least some are necessary to developing a critical perspective on the world, but they also presuppose at least the beginning of such a perspective. (Jaggar, 1989, 144–145)

Outlaw emotions can provide important insights into structural inequities. Jaggar argues that oppressed people have a kind of “epistemic privilege” and their responses “are more likely to be appropriate than the emotional responses of the dominant class. That is, they are more likely to incorporate reliable appraisals of situations” (Jaggar, 1989, 146). Failing to listen to anger or not interpreting anger as a critical commentary, risks missing fundamentally important critical perspectives on the world.

David and I each have legitimate reasons to be angry, perhaps, but although this is my starting place of inquiry for this project on the relationships between schools and jails, I also heed Lorde’s warning that any displays of anger will always be used against those that are marginalized. As Lorde writes, evocatively, in her essay, Uses of Anger:

Everything can be used / except what is wasteful / (you will need/to remember this when you are accused of destruction). (Lorde, 1984, 127)

Anger can be a vital tool to mobilize communities and individuals for change, yet it is simultaneously an emotion that is too frequently used to devalue or to erase the responses or analysis of those that are marginalized. Lorde, speaking to black women, offers a reminder that outlaw emotions are necessary and productive, and will be used to disqualify valuable critiques.¹

If anger is a legitimate response to an oppressive political state, who has the agency and the political power to be able to name their anger as anger? Certainly not youth or any other nonautonomous population, such as those incarcerated, women, the poor, and more. These populations, generally under forms of hyper-racialized surveillance, do not have the power

¹ Chapter 5 takes up the issue of how other institutions work to recast these outlaw emotions as pathologies or deviances.

to interrupt how their emotions are named, framed, and interpreted. This chapter examines educational structures and practices that name and shape these outlaw emotions and behaviors, because the stakes of anger in schools are high. Recent literature on what scholars, educators, and activists term the “school to jail pipeline” illustrates that a failure to control oneself, to keep that anger in check, to act and learn appropriately, in particular for those in any way marginalized, might mean school expulsion, criminalization, or pathologization. If you do not have the right to be hostile, anger can be read as violence, disruption, disrespect, or as evidence of inherent deviancy, or cognitive and behavioral impairment.

Of course, the movement from schools to jails is facilitated not just through these manifestations of outlaw emotions. Material inequities create fundamentally different schooling experiences and educational outcomes for students across the United States. The ongoing unequal allocation of resources, in schools and in the neighborhoods around schools, and the corresponding inequities in facilities, curriculum, and teacher qualifications, are well documented in texts such as Savage Inequalities and Shame on the Nation by Jonathan Kozol, Beyond Silenced Voices, by Lois Weis and Michelle Fine, and Ghetto Schooling by Jean Anyon. These works and many others highlight that poor students and students of color are offered unequal education in different physical structures and that college and university preparation is not the function of all public schools. These texts clearly demonstrate that tracking based on gender, race, and class is the norm in U.S. public schools. Building on this foundation, this chapter examines two practices of racialized surveillance within schools that create additional interlocking relationships between school and jails.

Zero tolerance and school discipline policies and practices and the category of special education work to shape the movement of youth of color and poor youth into prisons and jails. After surveying recent research on the “school to jail pipeline,” notably work from the Civil Rights Project, Opportunities Suspended: The Devastating Consequences of Zero Tolerance and School Discipline Policies (2000), and other interdisciplinary research, this chapter discusses the profession of teaching, specifically the feminization of the field, and speculates on the practices of teacher education that, perhaps, participate in this movement. Charles Mills’s theoretical frameworks enable a “studying up” (Nader, 1974) to consider the role of the profession to maintain a very specific gendered and racialized contract. I focus on the profession of teaching, in part, because this is the sphere where I and readers of this text—educators—may have direct influence.

Schools to Jails

As youth, overwhelmingly youth of color, who do not complete high school are more likely to enter prison than students who complete high school, pipeline metaphors are increasingly used to describe the school to prison movement of a population that the United States has identified as “superfluous” (Duncan, 2000). This research documents how curriculum, disciplinary regulations, pedagogy, and other educational structures and practices function to normalize an “expectation” of incarceration for youth (Ayers et al., 2001; Davis, 2003; Duncan, 2000, 2004; Wald & Losen, 2003). This analysis asks us to see direct links between the prison industrial complex (PIC) and education. Trapped in failing schools that are often physically deteriorating, disciplined and moved into juvenile justice systems through violations of punitive, zero tolerance policies, demoted or labeled through failure to pass high-stakes standardized tests or through biased assessment materials, and channeled to special education programs, poor and/or youth of color are undereducated. This scholarship tracks links between the public schooling system and the PIC to chart how youth of color are, as Duncan has termed it, “racially profiled” to be materially and conceptually moved from schools to jails (Duncan, 2000).

Although recent educational research does name and deconstruct these intersecting relationships between the prison industrial complex and the education system, this linkage is not new, inviting the question of how some continually forget about these connections. Activists and historians continue to document how schools continue to function as punitive institutions for specific communities. For example, Haig Brown, in Resistance and Renewal (1988), charts how the First Nations residential schooling movement in Canada trained aboriginal communities for low-wage domestic labor, less than secondary status in the nation-state, under- and unemployment, and more. And Anderson, in The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935 (1990), chronicles how public education prepared African Americans for low-wage “Negro jobs,” or underemployment, specifically the work that was available after white men were employed. “Far from being novel, today’s prison industrial system is a variation on past educational and legal measures aimed at subjugating people of color in the U.S.” (Duncan, 2000, 36). In addition, Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1977) meticulously described how power manifests in schools and prisons through material apparatuses and the structure of schools: the actual panopticon, the construction of authority, hierarchical structures, and more.² Linkages between schools and jails are less a pipeline, more a persistent

² A panopticon, designed by J. Bentham in 1791, is a circular prison with cells distributed around a central surveillance station.

nexus or a web of intertwined, punitive threads (Simmons, 2004). This nexus metaphor, while perhaps less “sexy” or compelling than the schoolhouse to jailhouse track, is more accurate as it captures the historic, systemic, and multifaceted nature of the intersections of education and incarceration. As this chapter illustrates, frameworks that incorporate a history, potentially a “nexus,” are perhaps more useful for analysis and intervention.

Researchers have identified two contemporary educational policies and practices as the most significant and destructive for youth of color that facilitate their school-leaving experiences or under-education: contemporary discipline policies and the category of special education.

Discipline

The 1994 federal Gun-Free Schools Act (GFSA) required that each state receiving federal funds for education must have a state law requiring a mandatory one-year expulsion for any public school student who brings a weapon to school. According to the act, the school must refer the child to the criminal justice system. However, each state is free to “allow the chief administering officer of such local educational agency to modify such expulsion requirement for a student on a case-by-case basis” (Gun-Free Schools Act of 1994). Although a weapon is defined by the GFSA as a firearm or gun, bomb, grenade, rocket, missile, or mine, schools have added to the list objects that look like weapons, personal grooming items, and other, normally harmless items (Gordon et al., 2001). The laws have also been extended to include behavior perceived as a threat against a teacher, disrespectful to a teacher, or behavior that is defiant toward authority figures (Gordon et al., 2001).

Not unlike the “tough on crime” policies passed in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s despite a decline in incidences of violent crime, there is no conclusive proof that U.S. schools are becoming more dangerous, or that schools were sites of rampant community violence in the early 1990s to warrant the 1994 passage of the GFSA. Contrary to popular belief, the number of incidences of reported violence actually decreased or stayed the same in the 18 years preceding the GFSA’s 1994 passage. According to the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) 1998 report, The Condition of Education, “Victimization rates at school for high school seniors changed little between 1976 and 1996, with the exception of small increases in the percentage of students who reported being threatened both with and without a weapon in the previous 12 months” (NCES, 1998, 144). The decline in reported school violence noted in the 1998 report continues into the 2004 report, Indicators of School Crime and Safety, which states that in 2002, students ages 12–18 were more likely to be victims of nonfatal serious violent crime away from school than at school (NCES, 2004).³ According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, this decline in crime in schools reflects a similar decline in the national crime rate: “Between 1992 and 2002, crime in the Nation’s schools for students age 12–18 fell, a pattern consistent with the decline in the national crime rate” (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2004a).

Even if zero-tolerance policies are having either no or simply a marginal impact on school-based violence, and the decline in school violence reflects acts that the institution is compelled to report, not actual violence, these policies have other consequences. According to the Civil Rights Project, rigid zero-tolerance policies hurt the developmental needs of students by not allowing students to form strong and trusting relationships with key adults and by creating negative attitudes toward fairness and justice. Suspending already at-risk students may exacerbate the behavioral problems the school is trying to discipline against (Opportunities Suspended, 2000). Zero-tolerance policies also target, therefore negatively impact, students of color. School suspension rates for African American students are between two and three times higher than that of their white counterparts (Skiba, 2000; Skiba et al., 2000; Gordon et ala., 2001; U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights, 2002). For example, in Chicago during the 1998–99 school year, African American students represented 53% of all students enrolled, yet they represented 73% of those students who were expelled (Opportunities Suspended, 2000). Starting as early as preschool, this over representation of students of color in school suspensions and expulsions is...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• CHAPTER 1 Surveillance, Ladies Bountiful, and the Management of Outlaw Emotions
• CHAPTER 2 Strange Fruit
• CHAPTER 3 Life After OZ
• CHAPTER 4 Awful Acts and the Trouble With Normal
• CHAPTER 5 Political Recoveries
• CHAPTER 6 Horizons of Abolition
• References
• Index