“Gender and race norms place black girls at risk,” said the report’s lead author, Kimberlé Crenshaw, in its launching webinar yesterday.
Often, conversations about race in education focus on the achievement gap between Black and white boys, but many efforts refuse to acknowledge that Black girls experience these same gaps between themselves and their white counterparts – and often in greater numbers. Sometimes, the magnitude of racial disparities for girls is greater than that of boys, despite the minute attention paid to black girls’ lives.
The report highlights the negative impacts of zero-tolerance school systems and punitive disciplinary philosophies on girls, such as how law enforcement and security personnel make girls feel less safe. “It feels like you’re in jail,” one interviewee told researchers. “It’s like they treat you like animals, because they think that’s where you’re going to end up.” Girls interviewed for the study also cited sexual harassment as part of their educational experience, and reported that administrators did little to protect them from harassment and violence. Some were punished for engaging in self-defense or asked to leave classrooms where they were being harassed in order to make the disruptions stop.
Black girls are also targeted unfairly by administrators for suspension and expulsion. In the 2011-2012 school year, for example, 12 percent of all African American girls in pre-Kindergarten through Grade 12 were suspended, a suspension rate six times the rate for white girls and higher than rates for white, Asian, and Latino boys. In some school districts, all the girls suspended were Black. In one, Black girls were 53 times more likely to be expelled than their white counterparts.