(Un)Doing Hegemony in Education: Disrupting School-to-Prison Pipelines for Black Males

Abstract

The school-to-prison pipeline refers to the disturbing national trend in which children are funneled out of public schools and into juvenile and criminal justice systems. The purpose of this article is to theorize how this pipeline fulfills societal commitments to black male over-incarceration. First, the author reviews the troublesome perceptions of black boys and men in educational settings throughout the educational pipeline. Next, the ways in which black American boys are scripted out of childhood humanity are discussed, drawing upon tenets of discipline and punishment theory. Second, drawing from additional theories of power, the article re-interprets school discipline and achievement data in the educational pipeline as tools of containment that support school-to-prison pipelines for black males. The third section synthesizes the literature on black male behavioral responses in disempowering educational settings.

Integrating Hip‐Hop Culture and Rap Music Into Social Justice Counseling With Black Males

“…Despite having overcome countless hurdles to achieve demonstrable successes in virtually every American institution (e.g., education, politics, business), Black males, on the whole, remain a highly stereotyped and stigmatized American subgroup (Dancy, ; White & Cones, ). This stigmatization is rooted in hyperbolic, stereotypical tropes of Black males as hypersexualized and menacing individuals biologically predisposed or culturally inclined to engage in criminal, nihilistic behavior (Alexander, ; Collins, ; Jackson, ; Sealey‐Ruiz & Greene, ).…”

“…This stigmatization is rooted in hyperbolic, stereotypical tropes of Black males as hypersexualized and menacing individuals biologically predisposed or culturally inclined to engage in criminal, nihilistic behavior (Alexander, ; Collins, ; Jackson, ; Sealey‐Ruiz & Greene, ). The criminal proclivity narrative is ascribed onto Black male bodies early in childhood and intensifies markedly as Black males mature through adolescence and transition into adulthood (Dancy, ; Duncan, ; Ferguson, ; Henfield, ; Noguera, ).…”

“…A recent study revealed that Black boys are more likely than white boys to be perceived as older and more mature than they actually are and therefore less innocent (Goff, Jackson, Di Leone, Culotta, & DiTomasso, ). Educationally, Black males are more likely to receive more punitive disciplinary action (e.g., suspensions, expulsions, arrests) than white males for similar infractions; have routine exposure to lower teacher expectations; experience underrepresentation in more rigorous K–12 academic course work; and suffer lethal, extrajudicial encounters with vigilantes and the police with astonishing regularity (Dancy, ; Henfield, ; Howard, ). These trends are emblematic of a cumbersome nexus of oppressive ecological forces that weigh heavy on countless Black males.…”

Designed to Fail: Media Representations of Racialized Classrooms and Schools

“…These are White, male, elite standards historically based in colonialism. Dancy (2014) asserts that schools historically functioned to educate developing white males how to maintain the ruling class standards and hierarchies. Over time this led to the creation of different schooling systems to maintain the class divide (Dancy, 2014, p. 478).…”

Bearing Stigma, Carrying Gifts: What Colleges Can Learn from Students with Incarceration Experience

“…For others, this rite is overtaken by a different kind of marker-the transition from school to prison where education is interrupted or terminated, altering life courses for individuals and families (Fine and Ruglis 2009;Pettit and Western 2004). This school to prison pipeline has widely been acknowledged as disproportionately affecting young people of colorparticularly Black boys (Dancy 2014). While there are scholars who believe that the redistribution of black and brown bodies from schools to prisons is not a sign that the system is broken, but that both the education and prison systems are working as intended-to create widening inequality while fueling the need to fund both education reform and the prison system (Fasching-Varner et al 2014), countering these influences requires change in both of these systems as well as the intervention by institutions of higher education (IHE's), many of which have missions to promote educational access to all (e.g., The State University of New York-SUNY see Rosenthal et al 2015).…”