Suspicion Nation Read online

  A BIG PART of the problem is continued social segregation, as most of us live in communities dominated by our own race. George Zimmerman, for example, was on the lookout for people he didn’t know, which sounds like a reasonable approach for a neighborhood watch volunteer. But it appeared from the trial testimony of his friends and family that the people he knew were overwhelmingly white, increasing the odds that an innocent African American in his neighborhood would be considered suspicious. Brandy Green, Zimmerman’s African-American neighbor and Tracy and Trayvon Martin’s host, for example, was unknown to him. One of the most awkward moments in the trial was deep into the defense case when an older black woman, Eloise Dilligard, home ill, testified literally from her sickbed via Skype. The only African-American witness called by the defense, Dilligard was asked several times whether she considered Zimmerman a friend, and each time she pointedly refused to take the bait, firmly correcting defense attorney Mark O’Mara as to her relationship with his client: “a friendly neighbor.”

  In this aspect, Zimmerman is little different from the rest of us. Most white Americans have few or no real black friends. Families, too, typically are monoracial. While interracial marriages have risen in the last generation, still only 2 percent of marriages122 are between black and white spouses.

  The races aren’t just segregated. Separate but equal remains inherently unequal. Black Americans today continue to live in much poorer neighborhoods than white Americans, just as they did fifty or a hundred years ago. In fact, according to a 2011 Brown University study,123 the average affluent black household lives in a poorer neighborhood than the average lower-income white resident. Blacks are the most segregated racial group in America, the study concludes, living in areas with significantly worse public schools, safety, environmental quality, and public health. As Malcolm X said in 1964, “America preaches integration and practices segregation.” Still true.

  Today, black unemployment is significantly higher124 than it was in 1954, when the Supreme Court ordered schools to be desegregated in Brown v. Board of Education. This is in part because when whites fled from city neighborhoods to avoid sending their kids to integrated schools, the good jobs followed.

  Black income relative to white income has barely moved in the last fifty years, from 55 percent to 59 percent. That is, the average black person earns just over half of what the average white person takes home. And in the last thirty years, the median net worth for African Americans125 has gone down, and remains a tiny percentage of white median net worth. The average white family has a whopping twenty times126 the wealth of the average black family. African Americans carry significantly more debt relative to their income than whites. Socioeconomically, many blacks remain where their grandparents were fifty years ago, “smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society,” as Dr. King described it in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail.127

  Some readers may object to attributing any of these disparities to racial bias, on the grounds that individual responsibility may explain these numbers. Arguments may be made in the employment sector, for example, that individual African Americans bear some responsibility for their educational attainment, choice of career, job performance, and other factors that bear upon their personal income and ability to accumulate wealth.

  And all things being equal, individual responsibility would play the largest role in net worth outcomes. The most qualified candidate would get the job, the highest achieving employee would be rewarded the promotion and the raise. But as we shall see when we drill down in two important areas, all things are not equal, not even close. As a result, high barriers to good jobs and middle class income remain insurmountable for many African Americans.

  When we’re assessing results, a hard look at beginnings is imperative. Unequal educational opportunities in the early years of students’ lives produce more dropouts and poorly qualified job applicants. Disproportionate policing in inner-city neighborhoods, where many young people have their first encounters with the criminal justice system, and the consequences that flow from arrests and criminal records create lifetime challenges for many African Americans, who can be barred from jobs, schools, housing, and other basics of life for crimes as trivial as marijuana possession.

  That’s why racial disparities in public schools and the criminal justice system matter profoundly, because in each case racial inequality in the early stages produces grossly unfair outcomes for Americans of color—outcomes that are then used against them in justifying further disparities, creating vicious cycles. And each of these systems is funded entirely by tax dollars and is controlled by public policies we as a nation make. An understanding of implicit racial biases at play in these two institutions—schools and the justice system—is critical to understanding the very different positions of American blacks and whites in the twenty-first century.

  Pushed Out and Locked Out

  LET’S START WITH education. For the most part, forget individual responsibility here. A child cannot be blamed for an underfunded or poor-performing school, for barriers that only the most extraordinary children can surmount. Most kids of all races go to their nearest public school, and our shameful choice as a nation to let inner-city kids languish in understaffed, overcrowded classrooms with shorter school years and fewer class and extracurricular offerings limit their opportunities for success.

  Nationwide we’ve slashed and burned school budgets. Majority-African-American schools, already suffering, have been hit the hardest. For example, in the summer of 2013, Philadelphia’s school district, whose students are 85 percent black, laid off a jaw-dropping 3,783 school employees, including assistant principals, guidance counselors, administrative support staff, and nurses. Lacking teachers, Philadelphia schools can no longer afford the luxury of separate first-, second-, and third-grade classes, so students of different ages and abilities are combined128 in mixed-grade classrooms. Twenty-four schools were closed entirely, their students packed into the remaining schools. Art, music,129 and athletic programs were eliminated, as if these were frilly extras children in one of the world’s richest nations should simply live without.

  Shortly thereafter, in October 2013, asthmatic sixth grader Laporshia Massey130 died after feeling sick in a Philadelphia public school. No school nurse was on duty. No one called 911. One in five children in the school district suffers from asthma, a common inner-city ailment. The City of Brotherly Love, the birthplace of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the abolitionist movement, had decided that the health of its schoolchildren was no longer worth funding, though school nurses, facing budget cuts months earlier, had warned that deaths of children would likely occur.

  While Philadelphia’s majority black schools may have suffered the most recent round of deep cuts, they are in line with the cuts and underfunding associated with most black schools around the country. Majority black schools are significantly poorer, are less likely to offer131 academically challenging classes like calculus or algebra, and are less likely to have gifted-and-talented programs, arts, or even physical education classes. Teachers in those schools are more likely to be inexperienced and working for lower pay than teachers in majority white schools.

  Shouldn’t we spend more per pupil in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods to help poor kids with the tougher challenges they face? When we know that inner-city children are less likely to have had the advantages of preschool, or even decent nutrition, wouldn’t we want to give them more educational support? Yet confoundingly, by any measure, as a nation we spend significantly less on students of color, who are clustered in poor neighborhoods, than we do on white students in mostly suburban neighborhoods. The disparity132 is most pronounced in the comparison between students in schools that are more than 90 percent white versus students in schools that are more than 90 percent black. (Remember, most of our children are once again attending segregated schools.) Disgracefully, we bestow an average of $733 more per year of public money on each white chi
ld’s education in those schools than on the black students.133 For the average predominately African-American school, this is a loss of about a half million dollars a year, money that could hire a dozen new teachers or nine experienced ones (and thus smaller classes and more personal attention); school counselors to help troubled kids and encourage college enrollment; tutors; or equipment like computers, or even books. Many low-income school districts lack supplies as basic as textbooks. “We mostly don’t get homework in my math class because we don’t have books,” said Silas Moultrie,134 an eighth grader in San Francisco. In poor areas of New York City, some schools have next to no textbooks135 at all, and many teachers lead classes in fields in which they are not certified or proficient.

  These disparities take a direct hit on students of color. We know, for example, that African-American males are far less likely to graduate high school136 (only a bare majority, 52 percent, finish) or attend college than boys in other racial groups. A big part of the problem is what one educational reform group, the Schott Foundation, calls a “pushout” and “lockout”137 crisis. That is, black boys, often struggling in those bare-bones, underfunded schools, are frequently disciplined for even minor misbehavior with suspensions, which cut down on their learning time and “push” them out of educational opportunities. (When I talk about suspensions in this book, I’m talking about out-of-school suspensions, where kids are banned from school premises. Some schools use the less-punitive form, in-school suspensions, where students remain on campus, supervised by a teacher in another classroom.) The students who remain behind in school are “locked out” of better educational opportunities available to white kids in school systems that provide smaller classes, adequate materials and facilities, highly-trained teachers, and other resources that are critical to their success. Predominately white schools are also more likely to use corrective measures in response to children’s misbehavior, such as counseling, calling in parents for conferences, and coming up with a step-by-step remedial plan the student signs to teach the student better conduct, all while the child remains in school, attending classes.

  To see how African-American boys are so often pushed out of school, we need look no further than Trayvon Martin. In the public discussion of the case, some raised Trayvon’s three school suspensions in the months prior to his altercation with Zimmerman in an attempt to show that he was the violent, aggressive type who would instigate a fight with a stranger, as Zimmerman described. It’s likely that this is what the juror who believed Trayvon was a “bad kid” was referring to, as the media had extensively reported on his suspensions, though no evidence on this subject came into the trial.

  And indeed Trayvon had been suspended three times in his junior year of high school in the months prior to his death. The reason his father said that he removed Trayvon from his home, friends, and neighborhood in Miami and took him to Sanford, four hours north, was to help Trayvon focus on “priorities” during that third suspension. Because Trayvon was not going to school in Miami on Monday morning he found himself in Sanford on the night of Sunday, February 26, 2012.

  Three suspensions? Those unfamiliar with modern school rules may conclude that Trayvon was delinquent, or at least a troublemaker. But today being kept out of school doesn’t necessarily mean that at all. Because with little fanfare, public schools have ratcheted up suspensions as disciplinary tools for nonviolent offenses, and African-American boys like Trayvon too often bear the brunt of this punishment.

  Once disfavored based on the radical notion that we actually want children to be in school, suspensions have skyrocketed in the last few decades for infractions major and minor. After fighting, the second biggest category warranting suspension is truancy, tardiness, or cutting a class. This has all the logic of punishing a kid for drinking a beer by insisting he guzzle a fifth of bourbon. Other categories warranting suspension in some schools are bringing a cell phone to school or publicly displaying affection, which are both considered subsets of “willful defiance.” Students have been forced to sit home for days on end after criticizing teachers on Facebook.138 A six-year-old was suspended for forty-five days for bringing a camping tool to school that contained a fork, spoon, and knife.139 The situation is absurdly out of hand.

  Since the early 1970s, the percentage of students suspended from school has doubled. Nationwide, the trend is toward more mandatory suspensions from school, for longer periods of time. This began in 1994 when the federal government began its zero tolerance policy against kids bringing guns to school—a laudable concept, but which spawned a host of other “zero tolerance” laws, getting kids kicked out of school for minor infractions. For example, in New York City in 1998, only seven offenses warranted zero tolerance mandatory suspensions. That number quadrupled to twenty-eight categories of mandatory suspensions by 2009.

  This punitive treatment is a policy cousin to our country’s choice to imprison five times more Americans today than a generation ago, spawning a culture of mass incarceration that we can no longer afford. Similarly, in our schools, with little fanfare or public discussion, we’ve instituted punitive policies resulting in mass suspensions, particularly for minority kids. And just as authority figures’ implicit racial biases disadvantage blacks in the criminal justice system, African Americans, especially boys, find themselves disproportionately subject to school suspensions for perceived suspicious behavior.

  Two million middle and high school students are forced to stay home each year, missing out on classroom instruction. Given that the purpose of schools is to educate, banning children from schools should be a last resort, reserved for those students who pose a threat to the safety of others. Instead, forcing troubled or angry kids to stay away has caused a host of problems for children and has not improved overall school discipline or performance. (Notably, some cities like Baltimore have gone in the other direction, working to keep at-risk kids engaged in school, with some success.)

  And while suspensions have increased for all racial groups, African-American suspensions have skyrocketed at eleven times the rate of other groups. Black male students were the most likely to be suspended (and disabled black males the most likely of all). A Children’s Defense Fund study of almost three thousand schools from the 1970s showed that black students back then were also more likely to be suspended, but the disproportionality has climbed sharply since. Today African-American students are suspended more than three times as often as their white classmates, twice as often as their Latino classmates, and more than ten times as often as their Asian classmates in middle and high schools nationwide.

  Why has the rate at which black students are suspended shot up so dramatically in a generation? A big part of the problem is that notwithstanding all the talk of “zero tolerance,” most suspensions are discretionary, varying widely from school to school, even within the same school district. The same suspicions and fears that lead to racial profiling on the streets are in play in the schools as well. Civil rights leaders find the statistics “appalling.” Gloria Sweet-Love,140 who served on a Tennessee school board for two decades and is now the state’s leader for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), explains that white teachers are more likely to deem a black student “threatening” instead of simply disobedient, and therefore more likely to “make an example” of him or her.

  We can see this by analyzing the racial disparity in suspensions in Trayvon’s state, county, and even his school, and by comparing his particular offenses with the punishments he was given. Was Trayvon’s race a factor in his suspensions?

  Florida, Trayvon Martin’s home state, has seen a rash of lawsuits brought by the NAACP and the Southern Poverty Law Center over its racial bias in the doling out of suspensions and other harsh disciplinary actions. In Okaloosa County, for example, 50 percent of school arrests involved African-American students, even though they make up just 12 percent of the school population. African-American students were six times more likely to be arrested at school than wh
ite students. In Flagler County, African-American students account for 70 percent of expulsions, even though they represent only 16 percent of the student population. In Miami-Dade County Public Schools, where Trayvon was enrolled, half of all students who received multiple out-of-school suspensions in 2009 were black. At Dr. Michael M. Krop High School, Trayvon’s school, again nearly half of the 105 suspensions in 2009 were given to black students, who made up only 24 percent of the school’s enrollment. Any numbers revealing this level of significant racial disparity should be unsettling, but these are especially so given that we are talking about schoolchildren, and forcing them out of their classrooms.

  With this context, let’s examine Trayvon’s suspensions. Were they justified? Was he appropriately “pushed out”? The three suspensions he’d been given that school year were for tardiness, writing the letters “WTF” on a locker, and possessing a plastic bag with marijuana residue. Each time the decision was made by high school administrators to push Trayvon out of school, though he was planning on taking the SAT and going to college like his older brother Jahvaris. (Trayvon had hoped to pursue a career in aviation.)

  As with any student, each of these suspensions increased his odds of failure, disconnecting him from his teachers, disrupting his classroom attendance and participation. Even a single suspension can double a student’s odds of dropping out, and multiple suspensions make the possibility of graduation even more remote.141 Put another way, if we wanted to increase the number of high school dropouts in America, we’d suspend more kids for petty offenses, causing them to fall behind in their classes and disconnect from school until they just decide to give up on it entirely.

  Ironically, Trayvon’s own high school student handbook142 preaches this concept, stating that “Miami-Dade County Public Schools believes attendance in school is critical to a student’s success.” Is there anyone who would argue with that? Yet its “You’re on your own, kid” policy toward suspended students is consistent with that of most schools, which burden children with the obligation of making an extra effort to keep up once they’ve been barred from school and fallen behind. Trayvon’s high school student handbook reads: