Suspicion Nation Read online

  Suspensions. The responsibility for securing written assignments missed during the suspension period will be the responsibility of the student. Under no circumstances are teachers required to make special provisions to comply with this procedure.

  The message to kids: Ordered to miss school? Teachers aren’t going to make any particular effort to help you catch up. You figure it out.

  A close look at Trayvon’s offenses143 and his school’s own policies about the consequences that should flow from them raise serious questions about whether he was treated fairly for his infractions. Trayvon’s school set forth a detailed five-tiered disciplinary policy in an effort to make clear what punishments would be warranted for various types of misbehavior, ranging from petty “Level I” offenses like inappropriate public displays of affection or unauthorized use of electronic devices to hardcore “Level V” offenses like armed robbery or homicide. Trayvon’s first offense, tardiness/truancy, is not listed anywhere at any level. The closest violation, the more serious “cutting classes,” is listed as a Level I offense. According to the school policy, this would not warrant a suspension but instead lesser corrections such as calling parents, a reprimand, a student conference, peer mediation, or revocation of privileges to engage in student social activities. Which makes more sense—let’s take kids who’ve made small mistakes and pull them back into school by helping them modify their behavior, not push them out for it.

  So why was the heavy penalty of suspension imposed upon Trayvon when it wasn’t called for under the school’s own written policy? Was his race a factor in the school’s decision to push him out, as appears to happen frequently in his school, county, and state?

  His second suspension, for writing on a locker, would have fallen under the school’s Level II category for disruptive behavior. One incident of graffiti would have warranted, according to Krop High’s own plan, calling Trayvon’s parents or instituting a “school-based program that focuses on modifying the student’s inappropriate behavior or promotes positive behavior.” Suspension would have been appropriate only for Level II “serious or habitual infractions.” Yet Trayvon’s offense consisted only of writing three letters on a locker one time. Even taking into account his prior “offense” for tardiness, this action could not rise to the level of “serious” or “habitual.”

  So why was he suspended a second time? Why did the school not use the opportunity as a teaching moment, helping him learn the lessons of respect for school property, appropriate language in appropriate contexts, and free speech and its limits, as their own policy required?

  Trayvon’s third offense, possessing an empty baggie with marijuana residue, would have arguably been a Level III offense, possession of a controlled substance. (Is residue a substance?) Under the Krop High rules, the principal should have called Trayvon’s parents for this one, then handed down a one-to ten-day suspension. Trayvon got the maximum penalty, a ten-day suspension.144 And thus his father took him to Sanford.

  Why did he get the maximum? Other factors may have been at play in the decisions to punish Trayvon with three suspensions his junior year, but based on publicly available information, he appears to have been trapped in precisely the type of overly punitive “pushout” cycle that leads to a disproportionately high number of students of color being kept from attending school. Writing on lockers, being late for class, or possessing marijuana are behaviors that require adult intervention, but they are also extremely common teenaged offenses that should lead to more engagement with the misbehaving kid, not relegating him to the streets or a home where adult supervision may not be present. No one could have predicted the horrific outcome that befell Trayvon in Sanford, Florida, and his school administrators are in no way responsible for Zimmerman’s shooting of Trayvon. But officials should be accountable for decisions that erect more barriers to success for African-American kids when better options are available.

  Of course all schools need options to deal with unruly kids. Many teachers would prefer to send children to talk over their problems with the school guidance counselor. But in this era of budget cuts, school counselors have been eliminated in many districts. Similarly, fewer teachers are available for after-school detention, to coach teams, or to lead music or drama classes, which motivate students’ good behavior so that they can stay on the team, in the band, or in a school play. Suspended students often wind up alone, walking the streets, bored, or spending time with other kids who are dropouts or who have also been suspended—a recipe for failure. In 2013, the American Pediatrics Association called for pediatricians across the United States to take stronger steps to discourage out-of-school suspensions and expulsions because they are so harmful to children’s chances of success, and with no benefit to the schools. The APA concluded that “research has demonstrated … that schools with higher rates of out-of-school suspension and expulsion are not safer for students or faculty.” So concerned was the APA about the impact of mass suspensions on children’s lives that it called upon its member pediatricians to inquire during checkups about whether children are being suspended and to advocate for preventative programs and those that administer consequences for rule-breakers within the schools.

  Suspending schoolchildren, who are then ten times as likely to drop out, has profound short-and long-term consequences for them. High school dropouts are all but unemployable in today’s tough job market, where 60 percent of new jobs now require a college education. They’re last hired, first fired, and will earn145 $200,000 less over their lifetimes than their peers who finish high school, and one million dollars less than college graduates. The United States high school graduation rate is already miserably low, ranking twenty-second out of twenty-seven developed countries. Almost no high school dropout will ever earn more than $40,000 per year,146 making supporting a family extremely difficult. Those who don’t finish high school are more likely to be illiterate, to become teenaged parents, to abuse alcohol and drugs, to wind up in prison, even to commit suicide. So helping kids complete school, rather than pushing them out, ought to be our priority.

  When we choose to spend significantly less of our education dollars on predominately black schools, we can expect the kids in those overcrowded schools with crumbling plaster, nonfunctioning toilets, poor lighting, inadequate ventilation, and inoperative heating and cooling systems to perform poorly on tests, and they do.147 When we cut art and music and drama and sports and all the “extras” that made school fun for many of us, we can expect children attending boring, bare-bones schools to rebel and have more disciplinary problems, and they do. And when we push out and lock out large numbers of African-American boys, in particular, for minor infractions that many successful adults committed when we were kids (cutting class, writing on a locker, smoking marijuana), we should expect hostility toward school in general, falling behind in classes, and ultimately giving up on the enterprise altogether, as so often happens.

  Certainly rules that are not helping out kids to begin with, and which are administered in a racially disparate manner, causing so many African-American kids to be pushed out of their own schools, spiking their dropout rates, must be reformed. When we disadvantage this group of kids at the beginning of their lives, we ensure that their lives will be poorer, sicker, rife with unemployment and struggle. We ensure that those job, income, and wealth numbers for African Americans don’t budge, as they haven’t in the last half century. It’s no secret that education is the key to success in adulthood. Yet we allow rampant inequality in underfunding of inner-city and majority-black schools, together with grossly differential treatment of students of color, and then expect them to compete with kids who had all the advantages of personal attention from experienced teachers, extracurricular activities, tutors, and counselors, and who, at a minimum, were kept in classrooms learning whenever possible.

  A country that allows all this to continue right under our noses, despite report after report about how inner-city schools are little more than dropout factories or priso
n pipelines, cannot seriously contend that it is an egalitarian nation. A country that shrugs at its segregated schools, knowing that racially ghettoized schools teach little black kids that they are inferior, has lost its right to claim that everyone in America has equality of opportunity. A country that pays substantially more per pupil for white suburban kids than for black inner-city students cannot pretend when it comes to high school graduation, college admissions, and the job market that everyone begins at the same starting line and has an equal shot at success. And if urban kids weren’t failing fast enough, now we’re actively pushing them out of classrooms in record numbers via the new insanity of mass suspensions.

  Racial bias need not be explicit to be shattering and self-perpetuating. No one has to say, “Let’s discriminate against African-American kids today.” No one has to be a Racist with a capital R, donning a white hood, spewing racial epithets or committing hate crimes. The common implicit racial bias that African Americans are less good and less worthy can lead to results that are just as insidious, namely a culture that turns a blind eye to policies that harm children of color and allow them to struggle in inferior schools, subject to harsher discipline, throwing up obstacles to their achievement and success, ensuring that the cycle of poverty continues for the next generation.

  African-American children as young as six get the message loud and clear that they matter less to us. Who among us can tell them that they are wrong?

  “Et Tu, America?”

  “In our courts, when it’s a white man’s word against a black man’s, the white man always wins. They’re ugly, but those are the facts of life … The one place where a man ought to get a square deal is a courtroom, be he any color of the rainbow, but people have a way of carrying their resentments right into a jury box.”

  —HARPER LEE, TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

  THE SECOND MAJOR public sphere in which racial bias runs rampant is the American criminal justice system. Shine a light in any corner of it, from initial arrest to sentencing and parole, and you’ll discover that blacks bear the brunt of our most highly punitive laws, experiencing our criminal justice system markedly differently than whites. African Americans are far more likely to be watched, stopped, charged with petty crimes, convicted, and sentenced to longer terms than members of other races. As crime victims like Trayvon Martin, African Americans are more likely to be seen as aggressors, dangerous, violent, even when they are unarmed or have no criminal record, with only the defendant’s word to support that narrative.

  In polls, overwhelming majorities of blacks148 believe that African Americans are treated differently by police and the courts. Only half as many whites agree. Unfortunately, the complaints of African Americans are borne out by the research, which reveals that disparity at every turn.

  Consider juries, which should be drawn randomly from the community, and which we’d hope would reflect the diversity of the local population. In reality, that’s rarely the case. In most places in the United States, African Americans in court are highly unlikely to have a jury of their peers. Of the six women who served on the Zimmerman jury, for example, five were white. The sixth, Maddy, identifies as Hispanic. When the jury was empaneled, many commentators felt that the lack of African Americans on the panel in this racially-charged case was unfortunate, but that it “just happened,” the luck of the draw.

  But as it turns out, it’s the norm for minorities, especially African-American men, to be underrepresented on American juries, as a direct result of laws barring them from jury service. Most states prohibit felons from jury duty and even voting—usually for life. Those with a criminal record, even veterans, even those who did their time years ago and have been contributing, taxpaying citizens ever since, cannot serve on juries. More than two million African Americans cannot vote or be jurors because of felon disenfranchisement laws—four times higher than the rest of the population. (We’ll see why so many blacks have criminal records in a moment.)

  According to one Georgia study,149 for example, in some counties more than half of African-American men are excluded from jury service because of prior criminal convictions. Nationwide, according to another study,150 almost one-third of black men are barred from jury duty. In Seminole County, Florida, where the Zimmerman trial took place, jurors are automatically disqualified if they have ever been convicted of a felony, or if they are currently facing prosecution—rules that apply in most of the United States. (Some states have provisions where ex-cons can petition for reinstatement of their jury rights, but who spends time and money for the inconvenience of serving on a jury?)

  The disqualification of these large numbers of black men from juries is particularly disturbing given that so many black men are caught up in the criminal justice system and face trials themselves—yet they are the least likely to get a jury of their peers. In the Zimmerman case, the defense’s theory of selfdefense meant that in a very real sense, Trayvon Martin was on trial, accused of being a hair-trigger homicidal assailant. As we’ve seen, while both whites and blacks harbor implicit racial biases, whites are far more likely to judge a young African-American male as aggressive in nonthreatening situations. Thus the absence of African-American jurors in the case, as in many cases, could very well determine the outcome.

  And yet because of our little-known and rarely discussed jury exclusion laws, it was unlikely that Trayvon Martin would get a panel of his peers. And in fact, he did not. (This is a particular problem in Florida, where nearly all cases seat just six jurors. In states with twelve jurors, the odds of at least one or two nonwhite jurors increase.)

  Authority figures in the courtroom too are also less likely to be black. Prosecutors, as we’ve seen, are the most powerful players in the system, yet few are African-American. Nationwide only about 5 percent151 of state attorneys are black, and many counties in America have no black prosecutors at all. This lack of diversity means that determinations as to who was the aggressor, who was the victim, who gets charged and for what crime is missing the voices and experiences of African Americans, who are more likely to see members of their own race as individuals and are less likely to see dark skin as inherently criminal. (While many blacks harbor implicit racial biases, they do so in significantly lower numbers than whites, as we’ve seen, and blacks are far more cognizant of racial biases at play in the criminal justice system.) None of the Zimmerman trial courtroom prosecutors were African-American, for example, and they readily accepted most of the defense version of the altercation, especially the allegation that Trayvon was on top and assaulting Zimmerman. In addition, they seemed entirely unable to communicate with their star witness, Rachel Jeantel, who spoke in an urban dialect. These types of problems are not unusual when many of those swept into the system as defendants, victims, or witnesses are African-American but few of the attorneys are.

  African Americans are underrepresented as judges too, and studies152 show that especially in cases where race is an issue, black judges rule differently. An African-American judge may have had a different perspective in the Zimmerman trial as to whether lawyers would be permitted to use the words “racial profiling” and whether evidence of the Bertalan burglary was relevant to Trayvon’s inherent suspiciousness. Even the image of a strong, authoritative African-American judge in the case may have undermined some of the blacks-are-criminals messaging at play in the case.

  While those administering justice—judges, lawyers, and jurors—are disproportionately white, those being judged are disproportionately black. This is in part because of where we send police to look for crime—overwhelmingly, it’s inner-city, majority-black neighborhoods—and in part due to the more punitive treatment African Americans receive once they’re swept up into the system.

  From start to finish, it’s a major advantage to show up with white skin in the American criminal justice system. We know that in judgment calls where a suspect may be held or let go, African Americans are more likely to be detained153 than whites accused of the same crimes. If arrested, whites
are more likely to be permitted to plead down to a lesser crime. When discretion may be exercised, such as by prosecutors offering plea bargains, African Americans are offered deals with higher charges and stiffer sentencing. When they are tried and convicted, whites get lighter sentences than blacks for the same crimes. In one study, judges154 were found to impose as much as eight additional months on black defendants than on whites committing identical offenses.

  The War on Drugs has swept up such vast numbers of African Americans into prisons and second-class citizenship thereafter that it’s been aptly called The New Jim Crow by prominent Ohio State law professor Michelle Alexander. In at least fifteen states, blacks are admitted to prison on drug charges twenty to fifty-seven times more than whites, though blacks and whites use at the same rates, and whites are more likely to sell drugs.155 To achieve that astonishing disparity, racial biases are at play among thousands of policy makers (who determine that it’s acceptable for policing to be focused intensely in inner-city neighborhoods), police officers (like those found to engage in racial profiling), prosecutors (who routinely exercise their discretion in favor of leniency for white but not black defendants), judges (who impose different sentences on whites and blacks for similar crimes), and juries (who are more likely to see blacks as aggressors and whites as victims).

  Most of these are people with good intentions who would be deeply offended at being called racist. Some have black friends or family members. Some are people of color themselves. All that is interesting but not particularly relevant. Because the system’s outcomes demonstrate irrefutably the widespread acceptance and practice of racial discrimination in the administration of justice. While many in America take it as a given that blacks are more likely to be criminals, the horrific level of criminalization and mass incarceration of African Americans has in fact occurred only recently. African Americans are now incarcerated at more than twenty-six times the level they were in 1983, and Latinos are imprisoned twenty-two times more. (Whites are incarcerated at “only” eight times the level they were in the early ’80s.)