“Because of layers of gendered racism, adults tend to view Black girls as more threatening, more aggressive, more mature and less innocent than white girls of the same age, robbing Black girls of the freedom to be children, according to a 2017 report by the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality. The report found
As a result, Black girls are often either suspended for violating dress code policies or pulled out of the classroom to change their clothes. Black girls are also disproportionately pulled out of class for being too loud, too assertive, too sexually provocative, too defiant and too adult-like, according to a law center and Education Trust report titled
My colleagues at New York Legal Assistance Group (NYLAG), where I am a supervising attorney in the Domestic Violence Law Unit, and I often see that when clients of color report abuse to law enforcement—or engage with the legal system—they are more likely to risk being charged themselves (or mutually arrested with their abuser). They
The views that Black women are innately promiscuous and sexually predatory is exactly why Black girls do not have never had the liberty of being children. Instead, they are forced to live in a world that turns their innocence into a sex symbol. As children, Black girls worry about the clothes they wear, how much
Lesson Overview Featured Article: “‘A Battle for the Souls of Black Girls’” by Erica L. Green, Mark Walker and Eliza Shapiro For years, education reform has looked at discipline disparities between Black boys and white boys. However, recent cases have brought to the forefront the ways in which Black girls are disciplined at rates close
The NWLC released a 2018 report titled “Dress Coded: Black Girls, Bodies, and Bias in D.C. Schools” that detailed their findings from interviews with Black girls in D.C. public middle or high schools and summarized reviews of schools’ publicly available dress code policies. They found that many of the schools banned traditionally Black hairstyles or head coverings
Black girls are viewed by educators as more suspicious, mature, provocative and aggressive than their white peers, said Rebecca Epstein, the executive director of the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality and an author of the first robust study of “adultification bias” against Black girls. The study found that Black girls as young as 5
Black girls meanwhile, find far less empathy. They are routinely seen as older than they are, and sexualized by society at a young age. A recent study by the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality showed that Black girls as young as 5 years old were perceived by adults to be “less innocent and
As we saw after the R. Kelly documentary, people will lay blame on everyone and everything rather than the responsible party—the perpetrator, the adult that knows better than a child. Victim blaming has a long history but it digs deeper with Black girls, who are held to different standards. A 2017 Georgetown University study found
In Blake’s study, Black women shared anecdotal evidence of the challenges they faced when simply interacting with teachers at school. “[T]he minute that the teacher think[s] that you’re… you’re sassing them — the minute that they think that you’re just being … rude, they just send you out the classroom,” said one teenaged Black girl