Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools

“Though media advocacy efforts have largely focused on the extreme and intolerable abuse cases involving Black boys, such as seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin in Florida or twelve-year-old Tamir Rice in Ohio, a growing number of cases involving Black girls have surfaced to reveal what many of us have known for centuries: Black girls are also directly impacted by criminalizing policies and practices that render them vulnerable to abuse, exploitation, dehumanization, and, under the worst circumstances, death.”

This quote highlights the framework through which Morris conducts her analyses and arguments in Pushout. While many social justice efforts focus on the systemic criminalization of Black males, Morris asserts that Black girls are also criminalized—and worse, largely forgotten, even by activists. Pushout responds to this void of research on the criminalization of Black females, attacking the issue at its roots by investigating how girls are oppressed as children in their own schools.

“The central argument of this book is that too many Black girls are being criminalized (and physically and mentally harmed) by beliefs, policies, and actions that degrade and marginalize both their learning and their humanity, leading to conditions that push them out of school and render them vulnerable to even more harm.”

Here, Morris presents her book’s thesis. Pushout argues that schools are harming, not helping, Black girls by marginalizing, targeting, and criminalizing them through harmful attitudes and policies. This results in these students being pushed out of educational spaces altogether, rendering the American education system a pathway to criminal lifestyles and confinement for Black girls.

“This work is intended to encourage a robust conversation about how to reduce the criminalization of Black girls in our nation’s learning environments. The pathways to incarceration for Black youths are worthy of our most immediate inquiry and response. Using gender and racial lenses to examine school-to-confinement pathways allows for an appreciation of the similarities and differences between females, males, and nonconforming students that is essential to shaping efforts that interrupt the pathways to confinement for all youth.”

This quote reflects the larger goals behind Pushout. Morris makes it clear from the start that she intends her book to start discussions in communities around the United States so that collective efforts can be made to revolutionize the American education system. She also wishes to draw attention to the importance of intersectionality in such work, arguing that reading the issue of