The trauma black and brown children experience in public education
Trauma inhibits wellbeing, negates human capacity, and limits the ability of children to live thriving lives. Trauma enters the lives of children in many ways, more often, occurring from physical and psychological abuse. It can be generational. That is, we can experience the same kind of trauma repeatedly across grandparents, parents, and future generations. If you are a black or brown child and happen to live in a poor community, you experienced generational trauma in the United States’ public education system.
I define black and brown children as African American, Hispanic, Chicano, and Native American. These children and their histories reflect an interlocking narrative defined by brutal attacks against their language and culture and discriminating and segregated policies in the United States. For centuries, black and brown children encountered physical and psychological violence in the United States public education system—trauma leading to significant disparities that continue to define public education’s narrative.
What does it mean to be black and brown in United States’ public education system?
For decades, laws prevented black and brown children to read and write. Doctrines denied the cultural heritage of black and brown children, using symbols of white superiority to reinforce white values and social norms. “Sally, Dick and Jane,” was the iconic first reader book, but Jane had blond hair and blue eyes. Children did not learn to embrace their indigenous stories, did not learn about the richness of their tribal ties, and learned their history from the perspective of the colonizer.
Black and brown children experienced forced assimilation and required to adapt to a system that did not reflect their cultural values. Their culture was demonized, demoralized, and often criminalized. Black and brown children attended segregated or “specialized” schools. School curricula continued to focus on remedial education with used books, depicting white children. When black and brown children began to integrate with white children, they experienced alienation through special education classes and punitive discipline.
Teachers had low expectations for black and brown children, allocated punishment in response to their unique language and body expressions, and diminished their identity by teaching a curriculum about white heroes. They did not learn about black and brown heroes, only their slavery, their trail of tears, and their battle in the Alamo.
Black and brown children became symbols of the United States failing education system, leading to reform and reliance on standardized testing. For black and brown youth, results from standardized test only confirmed their inferiority and inability to surpass their white peers.
Harsh and punitive discipline, demoralizing language and symbols, underrepresentation, policies supporting the removal of bilingual education, Black studies, Native American studies, and the continued emphasis on using performance on standardized tests as a metric of intelligence and academic prowess is the narrative the pushes black and brown children further in the margins, disenfranchised and disadvantaged.
What is our responsibility to black and brown children?
I am a community psychologist, so I look at the behavior of systems and their impact on individuals and their community. I focus on prevention, understanding the interventions that support marginalized youth in navigating the educational experience. But interventions only mitigate the challenges black and brown children face in the United States public education system and we have to move into the role of prevention.
I believe we have to remove our denial. Regardless of the gains made in education, clear disparities exist between poor, black, and brown children and their white peers across a variety of educational factors—school discipline, academic achievement, graduation, persistence to higher education, higher education completion, and education debt. These children, their families, their ancestors have contributed to this country—from the cotton and tobacco plantations to the farmlands. To deny this truth, to deny the lived experiences of black and brown children in the United States and continue to turn our heads and tell them the lie “just work hard and you can overcome,” removes our responsibility. We must be held accountable to the belief ‘education is a basic human right and the foundation for a more just society’ (Nelson and Prilleltensky 2005, 133; UNESCO 2009).
