Punishing Students For Who They Are, Not What They Do
Until last month, I had never seen a stop-and-frisk happen. Despite the amount of attention devoted to the controversial New York City policy in the last year, despite the protests, and despite having lived in the city for almost four years, I had never witnessed a stop-and-frisk. And then, a few weeks ago, I watched as two policemen stopped middle-aged black man on 98th Street, and frisked him. I wondered, not for the first time, what it would take for those same policemen to stop and frisk me. Controlling for all other factors—location, time of day, behavior—what would it take for the cops to stop and frisk a pretty white lady on the Upper West Side?
Somewhere in America, there’s a politically aware white high school student asking himself the same question, not about stop-and-frisk, but about school suspension. How much would I have to misbehave to run the same risk of suspension as my black classmates?
If you’re a white middle or high school student, and you don’t have a disability, your odds of being suspended from school are one in fourteen. If you’re a black middle or high school student without a disability, your odds are one in four. According to a new study by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, a quarter of black students were suspended in the 2009-2010 school year. A quarter. For students with disabilities, the odds are one in five. And for black girls, the numbers are a stark demonstration of what happens when two forms of discrimination intersect: Black girls are more likely to be suspended than black boys or white