Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools

In her first chapter, Morris explores the concept of “ghettoized opportunity,” wherein access to a quality education in the United States is stratified along class and racial lines. How does Chapter 1 speak to economics’ role in the pushout phenomenon? Conversely, what is pushout’s role in upholding the “ghettoized opportunity” dynamic and its impact on communities of certain races and/or classes?

W. E. B. DuBois writes that the typical Black American “simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face” (DuBois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 9). Recall Morris’s conversation with a student named Paris in Chapter 3, who described how “society traffics individuals” by denying Black girls jobs, housing, and access to opportunities (116). How do these two quotes relate to one another in terms of describing Black experiences in the United States? When taken together, what do these two quotes say about the nature of systemic oppression?

Morris discusses how pop culture negatively impacts Black girls’ self-understandings and fuels the implicit biases of those around them. What might be a cultural product (e.g., television show, movie, song, music video, etc.) that is a positive influence for Black girls? What makes this media object and its representation of race and/or gender different from the negative examples Morris discusses in her book? How might your example empower Black females?

In his seminal text Black Skin, White Masks, anticolonial theorist Frantz Fanon described the psyche behind the Black experience of living in a white society, writing that he felt as though, “I am given no chance. […] I am the slave not of the ‘idea’ others have of me but of my own appearance” (Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Grove Press Inc., 1967, p. 115). Look through Pushout and revisit some of Morris’s interviews with Black girls. How do some of the girls’ comments mirror what Fanon describes? Do the girls’ experiences differ in any ways? What are the significances behind the similarities and/or differences between Fanon’s account and those of the Black girls in Pushout?

How do the themes and social analyses in Pushout speak to the historical legacy of slavery in the United States? What is the relationship between the era of American slavery and today’s culture and society?

Many of Pushout’s chapters open with epigraphs from childhood rhymes, poems, and songs. What significance do these epigraphs have to their respective chapters? How do these epigraphs illustrate the role that cultural objects play in disseminating certain ideologies?

Morris’s methodology includes qualitative research, such as interviews and case studies, that capture Black girls’ experiences from their own perspective. What dimension does this methodological choice bring to Morris’s work? Would Pushout’s thesis argument be as effective without the inclusion of such qualitative research?

The last sections of Pushout—including Chapter 5, its Epilogue, and Appendices A and B—switch up the text’s approach to the pushout phenomenon, tackling the issue from a practical perspective as opposed to a purely analytical one. How do these sections differentiate Pushout from other scholarly texts?