I found it brutally ironic that this show premiered on HBO just as the nation turned its attention to Parkland, Fla., where a 19-year-old living with mental illness went to his former high school and shot and killed 17 students and educators. More ironic still was that in response, the President of the United States called for teachers to be armed with high-powered weapons and floated to offer them “a little bit of a bonus” if they were willing to take up arms in the classroom. This would help schools become a “hardened target,” he said, using language peddled by the National Rifle Association.
What should have been dismissed within hours as madcap rambling by our president has instead become the subject of serious policy discussions. Within days, Donald Trump’s words began to shape public policy in Florida and in Washington. Perhaps it is the logical next step in our cruel abandonment of our children to the criminal justice system that we would contemplate meting out in the schoolhouse the ultimate punishment – death – at the hands of teachers. But it is also madness.
And make no mistake: Although the perpetrators of mass school shootings have been almost exclusively white, there’s little doubt that arming teachers will lead disproportionately to the killing – by teachers – of children of color.
The school-to-prison pipeline has been, without question, built on the foundation of racially discriminatory school discipline practices. Every study that has examined harsh school disciplinary policies has revealed that such policies are visited with greater frequency on children of color. In 2013, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund filed a complaint challenging the practice of the Bryan Independent School District in Brazos County, Texas, of issuing Class C misdemeanor tickets to high school students for disrupting class or swearing; although black students constituted only 21% of the school population, 46% of the misdemeanor tickets were issued to African-American students. Similarly, the Department of Justice challenged the school discipline practices in Meridian, Mississippi, where the majority African-American high school sent its own kids to a juvenile detention facility over minor disciplinary incidents.
More broadly, African-American girls are 5.5 times more likely to be suspended from school than their white peers, according to the National Women’s Law Center, and 18% of African American boys received out-of-school suspensions versus only 5% of white boys, according to data from the U.S. Department of Education. Children as young as 5 or 6 years old have been handcuffed in schools and even arrested, which happened to a Miami boy who was led away from school in handcuffs after an altercation with a teacher earlier this year. The children subjected to this kind of harsh treatment are almost always children of color.
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