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ZORA

A publication from Medium that centers the stories, poetry, essays and thoughts of women of color.

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Black Children and the School-to-Prison Pipeline

7 min readJul 31, 2019

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Illustration: Geneva Bowers

II always strove to give my daughter access to good schools in “safe” areas, but an experience in a public school has taught me how students of color, even in well-resourced schools and neighborhoods, can fall victim to the school-to-prison pipeline. As The New Jim Crow author Michelle Alexander explained in a recent interview, the school-to-prison pipeline is a metaphor that describes how children are pushed directly from schools into prison in lieu of opportunity. As a Black woman who once attended elementary school in inner-city Chicago, I learned that my daughter could also face systems that have longed deterred generations of Black children from reaching their full potential.

In 2016, my daughter and I embarked on a short walk from our apartment in Seattle to begin her fourth-grade year at a new school. We walked through Jimmy Hendrix Park, passed the local African American Museum, and arrived at her school. She was nervous; I was proud of our new journey, having two months earlier successfully moved from Illinois to Washington for a graduate degree. I was relieved that we were settled in a safe area.

Decades ago, like my daughter, I was facing my own transition in fourth grade. I learned…

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ZORA
ZORA

Published in ZORA

A publication from Medium that centers the stories, poetry, essays and thoughts of women of color.

Rasheena Fountain
Rasheena Fountain

Written by Rasheena Fountain

an artist, growing scholar, musician, poet, and essayist with focus on Black environmental memory, literature, migration studies, and blues/other Black music.