Black girls are one of the fastest growing groups in the juvenile justice system and are more likely to face harsher discipline in schools across the country.
A new documentary "Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in School” explores the unequal treatment black girls face in educational settings.
Monique Morris is the author of a book by the same name and she produced the documentary. She spoke with WLRN’s Nadege Green.
Green: So this documentary looks at how black girls are treated in the school system. What did you find?
Morris: Black girls are uniquely impacted by what we call exclusionary discipline which are the suspensions, expulsions, arrest rates, referrals to law enforcement, corporal punishment — the full continuum of discipline as it manifests in our schools.
So not only are they overrepresented at specific points along the continuum, they're represented across the continuum across the nation and the only group that shows up this way. So Pushout the film is intended to explore what is contributing to that, what those stories are, how our girls are impacted once that happens to them and what we can do to change it.
Green: And what are some of those stories in the film? I know that you also feature an organization here in South Florida and a local student.
We do include narratives from girls across the country including [Kiara] from South Florida and the beautiful work of the S.O.U.L. Sisters Leadership Collective in helping her along her journey to recovery from some of the systems that have been part of a tapestry of oppression in her life.
Kiara, who is featured in the film, really demonstrates that while many of our girls experience exclusionary discipline in schools because of activities that are problematic to the school environment, they're doing it because of other harms in their lives and it was really important for us to tell that story because it's often not told.
Kiara is one girl, but there are so many girls like her in South Florida and beyond who feel that they are not seen, who are behaving in ways that are problematic for their own development, but primarily doing so because they have not felt fully engaged in their learning space or fully accepted by the community that they need to hold them close.
Talk a little bit more about trauma because I know one of the things you heard a lot from the young girls you spoke to is that no one ever asked them how they’re doing or even why they're doing this.
Trauma figures prominently in the narratives that we share in the Pushout documentary. Not to pathologize black girlhood or make black girlhood seem like it's somehow this horrible experience because black girlhood is so much more than the negative stories or the exclusionary discipline that they disproportionately experience. But what we do talk about and what is important in this conversation about trauma is that for black girls who are experiencing childhood disruptions and other things that happen to them in their lives; often in their learning environments and in community they're not seen as girls who can be harmed and therefore the response to them is harsh.
The censure is immediate and there's very little room, very little patience for them to get things right. There is not this routine rigorous way to center their healing in their educational process and that's something that we're hoping the Pushout film will encourage people to reconsider.
If You Go:
Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in School
Friday, Sept. 27, 6 p.m.
Miami Theater Center, 9806 NE 2nd Ave