Kills dreams or build them
Kills dreams or build them, the fate of black and brown children
“I felt like I did not belong, like I wasn’t worth anything and didn’t mean anything,” Natalie, a young Latina student sighed. She was one of many students at the university who signed up to participate in a study on ethnic minority students’ experiences in public education. Her interview remains in our memory—we play it continuously back while reading research and watching popular news media. The research, the media, weave a narrative into our conscience—the stories of poor black and brown children in the public school system haunt us.
As a researcher, I have listened to many poor black and brown children talk about their lives in the public school system, their families, and neighborhoods. Sometimes we never learn their stories, oftentimes woven into numbers that group them together or they remain silent. If you listen to these children, you will find deep stories of pain, generations of poverty, and some children first-generation American and immigrants. You will see how some children crawl their way out of generational trauma—social deprivation, institutional racism, and violence. You will see tattoos line their bodies—words that diminish their intellectual ability and talent, culture, and, to some degree, human dignity.
Each year the National Center for Education Statistics releases reports on the status of education. One report shared findings on suspension and academic achievement of English Language Learners (ELLs). The results did not reveal any surprises—ELLs missed more days from school due to suspension and scored lower on statewide tests. A recent report released by the Office of Civil Rights—outline suspension disparities between black and brown children and their white peers. The moment black and brown children enter the public school system and to the moment they leave, they experience harsher punishment at disproportionate rates than their peers.
Imagine existing in this world, feeling pushed out, isolated, punished because you speak differently, have varying body language, or express yourself in ways that counter norms on how “good” girls and boys are supposed to behave. How would we feel if we encountered this continuously—day after day after day?
Black and brown bodies tossed around, transitioning in and out of remedial education, special education, between neighborhoods and schools. Schools and classrooms aim to push them out, deposit their bodies into temporary “holding cells” until they enter ones that are more permanent.
Some of their bodies end up in the criminal justice system. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, a disproportionate number of black children comprise school arrests in the United States; however, these arrests occur for minor school offenses. Some of their bodies rot away in neighborhood streets, dead from the hands of other brown and black children or the police. When the U.S. Department of Justice reveals black males between 14 and 17 have a higher probability of death by homicide than any other child, then we have a problem.
We want to rest our heads at night and believe “we are not like them, they are different from us.” We want to focus on the pathology of these children, pointing fingers at cultural deficits, poor parenting, violent-ridden neighborhoods, or criminalizing them.
In our work, teachers, administrators, community organizers and children see failure and know the public school system will never create winners among all children or equity—yet somehow they believe in the idea of hope that a “change will soon come.” Every now and then, they see glimpse of hope peek its way through the darkness in the few poor black and brown children who make it through, students like Natalie who make it into college; they climb out from the bottom, but the scars of their journey remain.
Lillian Smith wrote in Killers of the Dream, “So we stand: tied to the past and clutching at the stars! Only by an agonizing pull of our dream can we wrench ourselves from such fixated stuff…”
We must ask ourselves, what do we want for our children? In our work, we aim to find ways black and brown children can “clutch” the stars, can be resilient against the markings of pain and despair. Stories of failure are too common, have evaded our history for too long, and we need different ones. We must work together to address institutional racism and school practices that reduce opportunities for brown and black children to succeed and create stories of hope—build dreams versus kill them.
Dawn X. Henderson, PhD, is a Community Psychologist and member of Division 27 (Society for Community Research and Action) of the American Psychological Association. Her research focuses examines how racism and classism permeate exclusionary practices in public education and community and school-based interventions for suspended youth. Alexis Lunsford is a Research Assistant and graduate of Winston-Salem State University. Any comments or feedback can be sent to dawnxhen@gmail.com.
