Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools

Chapter 3 divides its attention between two interrelated topics: sex trafficking fueling the “pullout” of Black girls and the stereotype of the jezebel. Morris pinpoints how educators, influenced by historical, social, and political attitudes, often sexualize and punish Black girls—even pushing them out of school spaces.

The issue of the “pullout” is different from the titular concept of the pushout, where Black girls are pushed out of schools due to punitive policies that criminalize them; the pullout concept is one where outside forces attract girls out of school. As the text has already established, schools can be negative, oppressive spaces for Black girls. Surviving such spaces is emotionally taxing, and many Black girls do not feel the incentive to return daily to this hostile environment—particularly when they are offered options on the street that appear to provide more immediate support. These circumstances set the stage for Black girls being pulled into sex trafficking and out of school. Sex work provides Black girls with immediate financial provision and the illusion of agency (as one girl tells Morris in Chapter 3, sex work made her feel “like a businesswoman” [107]), two things that the classroom does not give them. Sex work pulls girls out of school because some feel it offers a better chance at escaping their circumstances than school might—a notion fueled by schools’ misunderstanding, harsh treatment, and isolation of Black girls.

For example, Diamond’s experience—being caught between sex trafficking and school—reflects how educators often miss red flags in Black girls’ behavior and punish them instead of providing the help they need. When Diamond acted out by writing on the walls and was expelled, she was effectively forced to continue her sex work and life on the streets to escape her circumstances. Linking Chapters 2 and 3, Morris draws attention to the connection between harsh punitive policies and sex trafficking: “When girls in the sex trade are removed from school or sent the signal that their presence in school is problematic, they are being handed over to predators. Essentially, schools are throwing them away” (100). The dire reality is that US educators’ biased ideologies perpetuate child sex trafficking.

The second half of Chapter 3 examines the other side of this subject, analyzing how cultural products such as movies, television, and music help construct the harmful ideologies that inform pullout actions. Every day, one encounters media reinforcement of harmful stereotypes, stoking the fires of the pullout and pushout phenomena and endangering Black girls. Chapter 3 focuses on the “jezebel” stereotype, one that is particularly harmful in its contribution to the pervasive cultural sexualization of Black girls. This is not only relevant to street issues such as sex trafficking; the jezebel casts an equally concerning shadow over the classroom.

Before arguing how the jezebel stereotype appears in educational spaces, Morris again draws in historical context, continuing one of Pushout’s overarching themes of historical prejudice. In the same way that slavery-era ideologies still inform the discipline of Black female students by reframing their self-defense as willful defiance deserving punishment, the history of slavery still determines how Black girls’ bodies are viewed. As Morris covers, white American enslavers often relied on the jezebel stereotype to justify sexual violence against Black female bodies, as these white enslavers saw Black women as “eager for sexual exploits” and therefore “deserving ‘none of the considerations and respect granted to White women’” (115). Alongside Morris’s argument that Black female students already suffer from age compression (a dynamic where Black girls are viewed as adults by teachers and have their behaviors judged against an inappropriate “adult” metric), a concerning situation emerges where adults subsequently project hypersexuality onto Black girls because of historically oppressive ideologies.

Morris argues that iterations of this historical stereotype still pervade culture: “We see her not only in the presentation of hypersexualized ‘vixens’ in hip-hop videos but also in social discourses that produce public policy responses to child welfare, health, and criminalization or incarceration” (116). Here, Morris articulates cultural stereotypes’ devastating real-life consequences for Black girls. While a meme, video, or joke may be easy to dismiss as frivolous, these cultural objects have deep reverberating power in society, wreaking havoc on Black girls attempting to navigate their lives.

Dress codes provide particularly fruitful examples of the jezebel stereotype’s power. The latter half of Chapter 3 staggers several accounts from different girls to emphasize that they all had similar experiences with harsh scholastic discipline for dress code violations. A particularly telling account comes from Deja, a California student who was lectured for wearing shorts on a hot day while a white student, with shorts that were shorter, was not addressed at all. Deja’s story not only showcases the disciplinary double standard between Black girls and their white peers, but it also reveals administrators’ sexualized view of Black females: Deja recalled how a woman in her school’s office told her “I’m going to give you a pass this one time, but please don’t be letting the boys feel all on you and stuff” (127).

The girls whom Morris interviewed all pointed to pop culture as the primary medium that they feel disseminates the racism and misogyny affecting their everyday lives. One student, Carla, explicitly told Morris, “This is based off of media and how it portrays us as Black young females. If you see a [Black] girl in a movie even, if you see a girl wearing short shorts, and you see a guy, you automatically know they’re going to hook up” (127). Carla’s insight pinpoints the interrelation between the jezebel (and other historical stereotypes) and educators’ punitive treatment of Black girls. If one relates Deja’s dress code story to the issues of sex trafficking, the relation clarifies how administrators routinely miss red flags of Black girls being sexually exploited; adults who exploit children for sex work share their attitudes, albeit in different ways, with America’s school administration. This link establishes a clear and powerful through-line between cultural stereotypes of Black femininity and sexuality, attitudes of adults in power, and the subsequent victimization of Black girls.