Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools

One of Pushout’s most prominent themes is historical connections and incorporations of historical analysis. What role does history play in Morris’s research? Would Pushout’s argument be weakened without incorporating history, or would the text benefit from a strictly contemporary approach?

In her first chapter, Morris explores the concept of “ghettoized opportunity,” wherein access to a quality education in the United States is stratified along class and racial lines. How does Chapter 1 speak to economics’ role in the pushout phenomenon? Conversely, what is pushout’s role in upholding the “ghettoized opportunity” dynamic and its impact on communities of certain races and/or classes?

W. E. B. DuBois writes that the typical Black American “simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face” (DuBois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 9). Recall Morris’s conversation with a student named Paris in Chapter 3, who described how “society traffics individuals” by denying Black girls jobs, housing, and access to opportunities (116).