Veronica

“Conflict is inevitable, and our allies are not disposable. We need to fess up to mistakes when we make them, and apologize when we’ve hurt someone, but we also need to abandon a culture of resorting to public humiliation, exile, and shunning of anyone who slips up.”
― Sim Kern, Genocide Bad: Notes on Palestine, Jewish History, and Collective Liberation

“you think about it, our easy reliance on carceral logics in schools is especially sad. After all, shouldn’t schools—allegedly places dedicated to learning, nurturing, and understanding child development—be the first place where it occurs to us to address problems through care, compassion, and gentle inquiry rather than through punishment and containment? To the contrary, Black and Native people have been criminalized—labeled “dangerous people”—in schooling spaces throughout history. Like a perpetual motion machine, this allows carceral logics to sustain themselves: school becomes the place where they are routinized and made acceptable beyond questioning at an early age, impressing upon both children and the adults charged with caring for them that this is the only way things can possibly work. That normalization is cast upon the rest of our society, which in turn fails to condemn everyday acts of punishment and disposal enacted against children because these acts are seen as inevitable necessities.”
― Eve L. Ewing, Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism

“[My school] feels like a prison, to tell you the truth. ’Cuz you have to stay in the classroom, use the bathroom when they tell us, eat lunch when they tell us, it’s like a jail…. That’s why kids act bad. They feel like they trapped in here.[20] Dewayne’s observation echoes a point made by Foucault in his classic Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, which you’ll remember from chapter 4. Through practices like those Dewayne describes, the human being becomes less a spirit animated by agency and more a “body as object and target of power,” a thing to be “manipulated, shaped, trained, which obeys [and] responds.”[21] In his everyday interactions in the building, Dewayne is reminded that his body is not his own. Necessary human functions like eating and using the bathroom can only be conducted with the approval and surveillance of those in a position of authority. Through these efforts, students are transformed into what Foucault calls “docile bodies”—bodies that can be “subjected, used, transformed, and improved” in ways that are endorsed by those in power. This process requires “uninterrupted, constant coercion, supervising the processes of the activity rather than its result”—think of students completing meaningless busywork where the quality of the outcome is of no consequence, only the fact that they are sitting still and doing it—“and is exercised according to a codification that partitions as closely as possible time, space, movement.”[22]”
― Eve L. Ewing, Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism

“For White students, schools have been intended to provide unified leadership for a unified nation. For Black students, schools have been aimed at establishing a class of subservient laborers. And for Native students, schools have been designed to normalize that vision which Jefferson painted as inevitable: total disappearance.”
― Eve L. Ewing, Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism