Black and Brown Discrimination, Chiefly in Schools

 #Adam Hochschild, "Break It Up," Mother Jones, November + December 2020.

"Just looking at suspensions, for example, schools using restorative justice practices were able to reduce the number of days students were suspended by 44 percent in Denver, 77 percent in Minnesota, and 84 percent in one class of Texas's sixth graders." "According to the Department of Education, Black students are suspended and expelled at three times the rate of white students." 

"Corporate punishment is legal in Alabama public school, as it is in 18 other states, mostly in the South."

#Daniel C. Volk, "Color by Numbers," Mother Jones, November + December 2020.

"There's evidence that GreatSchool's ratings are exasperating racial segregation, not just within school systems, but in the communities around them." "GreatSchools  says it still attracts 45 million people a year..." 

"GreatSchools now maintains more than 100,000 school profiles, one for nearly every public school in   the country." "Researchers have found that students in predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods  now have fewer top-tier schools to choose from, face more competition to choose, are less likely to attend them, and have to travel farther to get to them." 

"Ruby Reyes, the director of the Boston Education Alliance, says test scores which GreatSchools relies on for its assessments, set off a chain reaction that schools struggle from. The cycle is exasperated by gentification that has pushed lower-income residents out of their neighborhoods in the city, completely. At the same time, charter schools have poached students, particularly in predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods, further draining [other] schools of funds."

#Edugin Rios, "Cop Out," Mother Jones, November + December 2020.

"Black students have accounted for nearly three out of four arrests at Oakland [California] schools, despite constituting 26 percent of students. From 2010 to 2012, not a single white student was arrested by Oakland School Police." "Since [George] Floyd's death, at least 40 other school districts around the country have significantly reduced their use of 'school resource officers' --" 

"It was another vast movement of people, the Second Great Migration, that led to the modern explosion of school policing." " A 1976 study showed that only 1 percent of the nation's schools had police patrolling their halls at least once a week."

#Paul Rauber, "Systematic Conism," Sierra, November/December 2020.

"For Black Americans, minor traffic infractions can turn deadly." "The Stanford Open Policing Project analyzed 100 million traffic stops from 2012 to 2018, and found clear evidence of racial discrimination. The [Project's] simple but effective methodology was to compare traffic stops during the day when the driver's race was clearly visible, with those at night." A Rauber solution for this discrimination is to remove the police from their traditional role of regulating vehicles.

"A 'Bicycling' magazine study of three metro areas found that Black riders in Oakland were stopped more than three times as often as white riders."

Germane to this discussion is the finding of the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics that 52 percent of people's contacts with the police come in the form of traffic stops.