Summary of So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo by Abbey Beathan

Author:Abbey Beathan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: so you want to talk about race white fragility why, it's hard talk racism black kids sitting together, cafeteria other conspiracy silence understanding, more than survive abolitionist teaching pursuit, waking finding myself race how less stupid about, new google e non fiction guide grit of for kids, summary 2019 2020 top book books paperback online
Publisher: Abbey Beathan Publishing
Published: 2019-02-17T00:00:00+00:00

Eight: What is the school-to-prison pipeline?

This chapter began with an email that was forwarded to Iljeoma Oluo by a friend named Natasha who had a five-year old boy named Sagan. The email was from Sagan’s school board who were reporting that Sagan has been misbehaving and that he had “assaulted” two staff members. He had also been making gun signs with his hand and pointing it to classmates. A school board member even argued that they should file charges against him.

However, as Iljeoma Oluo was reading through the email, she quickly realized what was wrong. It wasn’t with Sagan, but with the school. She talked to Natasha about the incident and she had said that Sagan had never been reported for bad behavior before. However, on that particular day, Sagan’s morning had started out bad. With every outburst that the little boy had, instead of being asked what was wrong and what they could do to help, he was instead told to stop whatever it is he was doing and was punished. No one asked the little boy what was making him upset, instead, they suspended him. He had only been in kindergarten for five months and he has already been made to feel that he was too “bad” to be taught. Luckily, the school didn’t file charges on Sagan for “threatening” his fellow students with his finger gun. Natasha was also able to convince the school board to lift her son’s suspension by threatening to sue. She, however, doesn’t know how she’s ever going to make Sagan love school again.

The public school system in the United States sees and labels black and brown children as outright violent and unpredictable. They are, as the system sees, future criminals. Statistics show that black and brown children are more likely to be suspended than white students and that 70% of students who are arrested in school are black.

Several things can be concluded from this statistic. Either black and brown children really are these violent and disruptive future criminals who don’t deserve the same treatment as their white counterparts, or there is something wrong with the system that marginalizes, criminalizes, and otherwise failing both black and brown students in large numbers. This problem that school systems have with how they educate their black and brown students is called the school-to-prison pipeline.

There are several factors that contribute to the school-to-prison pipeline including racial bias of school administrators and teachers, overall lack of cultural sensitivity in the schools, zero-tolerance policies, increased police presence in schools, and giving black and brown children blanket diagnoses on their difficulty to learn, instead of meeting their needs in solving learning disabilities.

The tragedy caused by the school-to-prison pipeline can often be gauged by the statistics – that’s a lot of brown and black children suspended, arrested, or diagnosed with a learning diability. However, what Iljeoma Oluo ultimately sees is the loss of childhood joy. Which is why she encourages people to act now to help address this issue and not

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