Terrorizing Students: The Criminalization of Children in the US Police State

Violence in the United States has always been defined partly by a poisonous mix of chauvinism, exceptionalism and terrorism that runs through a history marked by genocidal assaults against Native Americans, the brutality of slavery and a persistent racism that extends from the horror of lynchings and chain gangs to current patterns of mass incarceration, which subject many Black youth to the shameful dynamics of the school-to-prison-pipeline and unprecedented levels of police abuse. Violence is the premier signature of what Ta-Nehisi Coates calls "The Dreamers," those individuals and groups who have "signed on, either actively or passively, to complicity in everything from police shootings to real estate redline, which crowds blacks into substandard housing in dangerous neighborhoods ... The Dream is about the totality of white supremacy in American history and its cumulative weight on African-Americans, and how one attempts to live with that." [11] In part, violence - whether produced by the state, corporations or racist individuals - is difficult to abstract from an expression of white supremacy, which functions as an index for demanding "the full privileges of the state."

Schools are no longer reliable spaces of joy, critical teaching and support. Too many are now institutions of containment and control that produce pedagogies of conformity and kill the imagination by teaching to the test. Within such schools, the lesson that young people are learning about themselves is that they can't engage in critical thinking, be trusted, rely on the informed judgments of teachers and administrators and that their behavior is constantly subject to procedures that amount to both an assault on their dignity and a violation of their civil liberties. Schools have become institutions in which creativity is viewed as a threat, harsh discipline a virtue and punishment the reward for not conforming to what amounts to the dictates of a police state. How many more images of young schoolchildren in handcuffs do we have to witness before it becomes clear that the educational system is broken, reduced largely to a punishing factory defined by a culture of fear and an utter distrust of young people?

The increasing visibility of police brutality in schools and in the streets speaks to a larger issue regarding the withering of democracy in the United States and the growing lawlessness that prevails in a society in which violence is one of the few resources left to use to address social problems. The US is paying a horrible price for turning governance at all levels over to people for whom violence serves as the default register for addressing important social issues.