Beyond Cultural Mismatch Theories: The Role of Antiblackness in School Discipline and Social Control Practices

Critical Ethnography

Critical ethnography is a unique approach to research design that both highlights oppression and aims to change it. Barton (2001) writes of the benefits in embracing such a methodological framework to study discriminatory practices in schools:

Solutions reside in documenting, critically analyzing, and acting on—indeed, changing—the discriminatory practices supported by urban schooling and society. Critical ethnography is a method in a logical framework useful for engaging in just this kind of work. (p. 914)

Within such a paradigm for research, there is a focus on both documenting oppression and facilitating empowerment (Barton, 2001), and the research process accelerates “the conscientization of the oppressed and the oppressors” (Trueba, 1999, p. 593). Accordingly, our longitudinal critical ethnography has been dedicated to uncovering and dismantling the dominant narratives at one predominantly Black high school, referred to as LHS, in a metropolitan area of the Midwest.

Study Context

This article highlights parts of a longitudinal critical ethnographic research study conducted at LHS. The study began in December 2014, when district and school officials asked the research team to perform a culture evaluation of the school, since the administrators had identified race, student-teacher relationships, and discipline as areas of concern inhibiting their goal of preparing students for college readiness. LHS is roughly 90% African American and has a predominately White teaching force. It is fully accredited by the state and offers a number of Advanced Placement courses and extracurricular activities, although students cite (and the administration confirms) that these advanced courses tend to be overpopulated with White students. LHS, at the time when the ethnographic work began, was a school that hyper-disciplined its Black students. Prior to beginning qualitative data collection for this longitudinal study in 2015, the authors obtained access to quantitative discipline data for the high school, that was collected over the 2012 to 2014 school years. This data documented 4,000 discipline referrals within a student body of approximately 800 students. While Black students made up 89% of the LHS student population at the time, they represented 97% of the reported disciplinary infractions. In contrast, White students, represented around 8% of LHS students but only received 1% of the disciplinary referrals. These statistics served as important indicators of the racialized discipline challenges that were facing LHS.

The research collaboration with LHS, by its nature of extending across years, had multiple entry points and a plethora of data sources that, when analyzed both independently and through triangulation, allowed for the deep understanding of the experiences of administrators, teachers, and students in the building. Through previous publications, the authors have highlighted many moments in the high school’s history that speak to the early and more punitive LHS context as well as to the school’s evolutionary journey to creating safer spaces for their Black student body. In the earliest analyses, physical signage around LHS revealed messaging that normalized and valued dominant White cultural capital while disesteeming and discrediting cultural capital associated with the local African American community (Marcucci & Elmesky, 2016). The authors discovered that beyond signage, teachers and staff were also utilizing stereotypic racialized discourse (both coded and explicit) when discussing their Black students—deficit language that resulted in increased educator bonding (Marcucci & Elmesky, 2022). As critical methods were enacted and LHS educators took on teacher-researcher roles with the authors, analyses from the 2016–2017 school year showed evidence of successful utilization of culturally relevant disciplinary practices (Marcucci & Elmesky, 2020). And, as the then-principal (2016–2018) decisively and holistically began to move LHS to embrace restorative practices, evidence of politicized caring began emerging within school spaces that had begun piloting such approaches (Marcucci & Elmesky, under review).

Building on these previous analyses from our ethnographic dataset, this article delves more deeply into understanding the oppression LHS Black students were experiencing and provides theoretical explanations for why this was occurring despite well-intentioned efforts to promote a humanizing culture at LHS. Here, we focus upon sharing the ways by which Black students were experiencing marginalization through centering three representative narratives that emerged from separately held teacher and student focus groups conducted in Spring 2015. We place these three vignettes into conversation with extensive data sources collected in the following years, which revealed similar (and contradictory) patterns of oppressive practice with LHS’ majority Black student body.

Data Collection and Analysis

While a wide variety of strategies have been utilized for eliciting an understanding of the interactions unfolding in LHS (e.g., photography, video recordings, artifact and documents, audio recordings, interviews, informal conversations, formal focus groups, researcher reflection circles/cogenerative dialogue, etc.), in 2015, focus group discussions served as the authors’ very first entry points for talking to stakeholders within the school and proved to be exceptional opportunities for listening to students, teachers, and administrators. Thirty-four teachers/staff and 13 students were invited by the then–assistant principal and grouped according to their free period (planning period for the teachers and staff or lunch period for the students; educators and students had separate focus groups). During each focus group, the authors first gave an overview of quantitative discipline data from the school, then participants responded to the data via a semistructured question protocol. The protocol included questions like, “Looking at the trends in the top 3 types of infractions, what are your reactions? Do these trends surprise you?” “Have you seen this trend within your own classroom?” and “How would you characterize the teacher-student relationships at LHS?” The focus groups typically lasted an hour. After most focus groups, the then–assistant principal returned to the room to discuss the authors’ initial reflections on the focus groups, and their conversations were recorded. This practice constituted early member checking in the analytical process (Tracy, 2010).

The focus groups were transcribed, and the transcripts were reviewed by one author using inductive, thematic coding (Terry et al., 2017). During this step in the analytic process, 18 different themes emerged, including themes like “misunderstandings,” “deficit-oriented view of students,” and “mistrust.” “Misunderstandings” was identified 18 times in the data, “deficit-oriented view” was identified 79 times, and “mistrust” was identified 15 times. Next, both of the authors collaboratively examined the transcribed data coded under these three themes, and the inductive process began to lead the authors to consider cultural mismatch explanations of the misunderstandings and mistrust. These codes were then brought back to three teachers who had participated in the spring focus groups, during the summer months immediately following; the authors began to work with these educators as co-researchers in a custom-designed “Teacher Researcher Residency Program” to gain additional insights with the data collected through the focus groups. The teachers engaged in an independent coding process of some anonymized focus group transcripts, and the authors were able to share and discuss their own emergent codes and themes, in relation to those analyses. Out of this joint analysis experience, it became clear that cultural explanations fell short as race-based tensions and deficit-oriented thinking among LHS staff emerged as additional themes.

Quality Checks

While prolonged engagement (Creswell & Miller, 2000) within the research context naturally added to the authenticity of this study, the collaborative and critical approach to developing shared consensus amongst and across stakeholder groups led to educative and transformative aspects of the research process (Lincoln & Guba, 1986)—and hence served to reinforce the authenticity of this research process.

Mismatched, Stereotyped, and Shunned Cultural Practices

In the first vignette, teachers in a focus group are discussing how they punished students for talking during a movie, while simultaneously and explicitly labeling this act of talking during a movie as an “African American” cultural trait. Interpreting it through the traditional cultural mismatch hypothesis, this vignette illuminates how Black students are penalized for utilizing a manner of speaking that is viewed to be at odds with cultural expectations of a school classroom. The practice of talking during a movie is not accepted by the predominantly White educators in the room. In this case, the students’ cultural practices were shunned as they “violated the discursive rules of classrooms that work to achieve compliance and acquiescence from students” (Vavrus & Cole, 2002, p. 108). However, our discussion of mismatched cultural capital adds a layer of complexity. Whereas this violation of norms could be explained through the cultural mismatch hypothesis, we argue that an antiblack orientation leads to a heightened shunning of any cultural capital coming from Black students:

During this discussion, Mr. M, a White teacher, is expressing frustration that some of his Black students “must speak the entire time to the movie.” Ms. E, also a White teacher, expresses agreement with Mr. M. Initially, they use cultural terminology and family socialization patterns to explain their students’ behaviors, referring to the students’ commentary as a “cultural thing” or “the only way you’ve ever gone to movies with your family.” However, Ms. E goes on to attribute the practice of talking while attending movies to race. Using explicitly racial terms, she describes these cultural practices—which could be expressed by various racialized communities—to ones that belong only to African Americans, saying, “in the African-American community, literally talking and having a dialogue with the screen has kind of become the norm” From a traditional cultural mismatch perspective, this vignette would show how dominant and nondominant cultural practices come into conflict in a school setting. According to Carter (2003), cultural capital—a concept most commonly attributed to Bourdieu (1986)—can be understood as dominant or nondominant relative to the position of those who enact it. While dominant cultural capital refers to “Bourdieu’s conceptualization of powerful, high status cultural attributes, codes, and signals,” Carter explains that nondominant cultural capital refers to “resources used by lower status individuals to gain ‘authentic’ cultural status positions within their respective communities” (p. 138). In this case, the teachers describe the experience as “rude,” “supposed to be a quiet experience,” and “they don’t know to not shout.” The teachers’ use of this language indicates a normative understanding of cultural ways of being within a school. The inherent power differential between teacher and student in educational settings allows the students’ cultural capital to be sanctioned and interpreted as misbehavior.

This cultural mismatch interpretation, however, allows the perpetrator-free, multicultural narrative to stand, when, in fact, the teachers are actively engaging in racist behavior. The teachers’ racially explicit language gives unique insight. Speaking in such racially explicit ways is rare, given the deracialization of American discourse post–Civil Rights movement (Bonilla-Silva, 2010). Hence, this conversation—specifically the teachers’ usage of noncoded racial language—highlights the way that race interfaces with cultural mismatch. While this vignette indicates that nondominant cultural habits embodied by Black students are rejected because of their mismatch with the authority’s cultural ways of being, it also shows how cultures of antiblackness can be formulated and perpetuated by teacher discourse (Marcucci & Elmesky, 2022). In this case, the African American students are being penalized for using their cultural capital, which Ms. E explicitly labeled as a generalized African American cultural practice. Ms. E even claims that she stopped attending two different local movie theaters because “of a certain factor” that she interprets as an African American cultural practice. In her personal life, she specifically avoids spaces in which some Black individuals may be engaging in behaviors that she normatively views as inappropriate. In the end, both Ms. E and Mr. M “marginalized, disregarded, and disdained” (Dumas & ross, 2016, p. 417) these cultural behaviors coming from some of their Black students. Even if that disregard and disdain are not motivated by antiblack mentalities—which is difficult to empirically prove one way or the other—the teachers’ comments have implications for facilitating a larger culture of antiblackness in the school. While a cultural mismatch interpretation of this vignette allows for this perpetrator-free narrative, an antiblack interpretation changes the framing of the conflict.

Antiblack Logic in the Broader School Culture

Aspects of LHS had been found to espouse an antiblack institutional orientation that devalues the nondominant cultural capital coming from Black students and leads to problematic disciplinary functions (Marcucci & Elmesky, 2016). Arguably, antiblackness moves beyond the theoretical and into tangible symbols and practices at LHS. That is, an elusive logic of antiblackness becomes a palpable structure of antiblackness when there is explicit resource mobilization in support of the ideology—in this case, visual resources. At LHS, antiblackness is manifested through signage on building and classroom walls. As we argued in a previous analysis (Marcucci & Elmesky, 2016), in LHS at the time, Black students were reminded throughout the building that only particular ways of dressing were allowed, and that those more aligned with the dominant culture would be accepted. They were explicitly instructed not to “sag” their pants. Sagging pants, a dress style associated with Blacks, was featured in several signs. One sign was labeled “dress for success” with a variety of individuals from different races, all wearing suits (see Figure 3). A second sign featured a black-and-white photo of a Black boy with his pants pulled up to an abnormally high level and held in place with a belt; above him, in bold text, “No Sagging” is stated. The photo appears dated and shows the young boy holding a tea kettle, possibly to serve others (see Figure 4). In a third sign containing library rules, labeled “Things to know about Room 22,” again students receive the message that sagging their pants is not acceptable and to do so would be to break district rules (see Figure 5).

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Figure 3.

Professional dress expectation in school signage.

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Figure 4.

Antiblackness manifested in school signage.

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Figure 5.

Dress code and restroom rules in school signage.

There are implications for a culture of antiblackness when teachers hold “disregard and disdain” for behavior they view to be associated with Blackness. Institutionally communicated antiblack orientations are further fueled by the use of disciplinary sanctions in response to what Ms. E and Mr. M describe as “African American” behavior. Even while recognizing that “talking during the movie” is a form of cultural capital found within some African American families, both teachers still ultimately intervene to punish and prevent it. Mr. M feels the need to impose disciplinary actions for the act of talking, evidenced in his description of changing the classroom seating chart. He reveals that he changed the seating chart to prevent these talking behaviors. While denying a student their preferred seat is not as dramatic as a suspension or expulsion, these “disciplinary routines”—the more mundane forms of social control, like punitive seat changes—“are influenced by broader cultural narratives that associate blackness with criminality” (Diamond & Lewis, 2019, p. 831). Pike (2008), in their Foucauldian analysis on monitoring of lunchtime cafeteria, found that “it is common for separation and segregation to be employed as spatial tactics of discipline” (p. 418). Mr. M offers an example of the use of separation as a disciplinary routine. That is, punitive seat changes, while seemingly harmless, represent a spatial tactic of discipline, contributing to the wider school culture of social control. Schools have historically been found to reflect the culture of prisons and innately embrace the ideology of social control; however, this plays out differently in schools across the nation (Hirschfield, 2008). For example, patterns of bodily autonomy are different depending upon the racial makeup of the school. Hirschfield (2008) argues that “the gated community may be a more apt metaphor to describe the security transformation of affluent schools, while the prison metaphor better suits that of inner-city schools” (p. 84). In other words, while affluence—which is often associated with Whiteness—is understood as a commodity to be protected, inner city—which is often associated with Blackness—is understood as a commodity to be controlled. Controlling Black students’ movement and taking away their bodily autonomy is a common expectation and introduces incarceration-like impulses and practices into the classroom (Diamond & Lewis, 2019; Hirschfield, 2008).

These mundane, spatial disciplinary routines—rooted in and supporting a school culture of antiblackness—also reinforce associations between Blackness and criminality, even as they are created by those same associations. It is a circular, self-reinforcing logic of antiblackness. Importantly, this spatial tactic of discipline is a manifestation of the symbolic violence that antiblackness scholars discuss (e.g., Coles, 2016; Leonardo, 2004; Martin et al., 2019). The “gentle” (Bourdieu, 2001) acts of discipline may seem harmless but ultimately contribute to an antiblack culture of spirit murdering.

Matched yet Mistrusted Practices

In the second vignette, Ta’ron, a Black male student, reveals that he has sickle cell disease. Sickle cell disease (SCD) is a genetic blood disorder, associated with lifelong symptoms including pain episodes, swelling of hands and feet, and vision issues (Mayo Clinic, 2017). It is found most frequently in individuals with ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa, which means that in the United States there is a disproportionately high amount of SCD among African Americans. Medical professionals often recommend drinking sufficient water as a way to treat some of the symptoms of SCD (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2016). Ta’ron describes how his teacher regulates his use of the restroom, which is related to his diagnosis:

Ta’ron: I got caught in a hall sweep. In my eighth hour class—I have Sickle Cell, so my teacher always tells me to bring a water bottle because that’s the only way she’ll let me go to the restroom. So I try to go to the restroom before I go to class … and sometimes at lunch, I just don’t have to use the restroom at that moment. But after being in class, I might have to use the restroom, and she just doesn’t like us to go then because she feel like we should have went at lunch or in between the classroom times. But if we do that, and we get caught in a hall sweep then it's a detention. … So, she won’t let me use the restroom unless I have a water bottle because [if] I have the water bottle, then she sees that I’ve been drinking water. I feel like she just think that I just want to get out of her class, but that’s not really the truth, because here’s her classroom—right across from her classroom is the male’s restroom. So you can see me trying to walk away or go somewhere else because the restroom is right there.

Requesting permission to use the restroom in school may be perceived as a straightforward situation where students’ cultural practices should align with their teachers and with the norms of the building. Yet in Ta’ron’s account, a clash of cultural practices arises since students are expected to use the restroom during lunch or transition times, and if a student requests access during instructional time, then they must have a reason (proof) to use the bathroom (i.e., “she sees that I’ve been drinking water”). In this example, it appears that Ta’ron does not align with his teacher’s expectations of using the restroom during lunch time or bringing a water bottle. However, a closer analysis of his commentary reveals that Ta’ron is in fact attempting to align with dominant school norms. He is engaging with the teacher’s authority in four distinctly matched ways by (a) considering his teacher’s preferences regarding restroom use; (b) being proactive in trying to use the restroom during lunch, (c) requesting permission to use the restroom, and (d) respecting and following his teacher’s water bottle request. That is, Ta’ron recognizes that the teacher would prefer that he use the restroom during lunch, and he says, “I try to go the restroom before I go to class … I just don’t have to use the restroom at that moment.” He is proactively recognizing her preferences and trying to abide by them. He also implies that he asks the teacher before leaving to go to the restroom, as he mentions that she sometimes denies him permission (e.g., “she won’t let me go”). Finally, he normally tries to follow her rule for bringing a water bottle but says, “sometimes, I just forget.” While we do not have access to this specific teacher’s reflections, ¹ these practices reveal that Ta’ron, from his perspective, sufficiently recognizes the authority of the teacher and therefore is actively acknowledging the normative power structures and expectations of the school. Ta’ron’s practices as a student match LHS’s institutional expectations that students will conform to their teachers’ rules, and hence, he should experience less tension around restroom usage.

That said, this analysis argues that Ta’ron’s experiences are complicated since the specific medical reason that requires an increase in his restroom access is also associated with his Blackness. SCD is widely considered a “Black disease” (Bediako & Moffitt, 2011). In fact, Wakefield et al. (2018) found that children with SCD do perceive racial bias in their healthcare treatment, which we argue could reasonably extend into their schooling experiences. Dyson et al. (2011), in their study of Black students in England with SCD, found that the strict procedural focus within schools can be particularly burdensome to students with SCD. Dyson et al. write, “teachers do not recognise the legitimacy of these children’s accounts and use their own power of definition to impose other interpretations on the child’s behaviour, such as laziness, and occasionally these dovetail with wider gendered and racist assumptions” (pp. 480–481). Their findings from English schools confirm that educational professionals’ interaction with students with SCD are influenced by racialized patterns of thinking. While Dyson et al. use the term “racist assumptions,” we argue that it is a uniquely antiblack cultural orientation that facilitates what appears to be a mistrust of Ta’ron’s medical and bodily needs. From Ta’ron’s perspective, the teacher assumes he is using the bathroom as an excuse to get out of class. He says, “I feel like she just think [sic] that I just want to get out of her class, but that’s not really the truth.” Despite Ta’ron’s deference to the teacher’s authority, he senses that the teacher distrusts him. Despite the fact that he has a medical condition that requires increased fluid intake, he still feels that the teacher speculates that he might be using the bathroom as an excuse to get out of class.

Interestingly, Ta’ron’s perceptions are not farfetched. Additional teacher focus group data highlighted that some LHS teachers associated restroom use with nondominant cultural practices enacted by “troubled kids”—viewing the act of going to the restroom as a mechanism to avoid instructional time. As one teacher said,

I want a GoPro (camera) to be mounted onto their head and to just see … the amount of time taken to get there and back, you know. And some of those same kids who are the troubled kids, they want to get out and they want to roam the halls. And I know, heck, I remember I would do that same similar type of thing every day in high school, but man, they take their sweet time about it.

In this quote, the reference to mounting a camera on “troubled” students’ heads indicates a need for surveillance and a close monitoring of their movement, and it also infers a level of mistrust of the intent for students’ use of the restroom. In fact, we observed that, over the course of many years in the school, restroom access was synonymous with misbehavior (mismatched cultural practices) and, thus, it was sometimes withheld or, at minimum, difficult to obtain. We learned that similar to Ta’ron, in some classrooms, students were denied permission to use the restroom, and a limited number of hallway passes were available for checkout.

The strict policing of Ta’ron and other students’ movement was supported by the institutional policies and normative values at LHS, at that time. This expectation for conformity is evident not only in student and teacher commentary but also in visual cues throughout the building. In the sign, “Things to know about Room 22,” previously discussed in the movie watching vignette (see Figure 5), students are not only told what to wear but also reminded that bathroom usage is only to occur with a bathroom pass. Additionally, broader examination of school signage reinforces the message that the students require strict rules and must be given specific step by step directions. For example, in order to receive a lunch pass to the library, a five-step procedure is delineated for students (see Figure 6). This tight control of movement of the majority Black student body by the majority White teaching staff—seemingly justified by students “taking their sweet time”—contributes to the incarceration-like climate (Diamond & Lewis, 2019; Hirschfield, 2008) within the building, succinctly described by one teacher in the opening quote: “I mean it’s just there's a real lack of freedom here for everything.”

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Figure 6.

Institutional expectations for students to conform to school rules.

One specific schoolwide policy to control student movement is known as hall sweeps. This practice also influences bathroom access for students like Ta’ron at LHS. Ta’ron relays his experience by beginning with the fact that he was caught in a hall sweep (i.e., “I got caught in a hall sweep”). During hall sweeps, adult staff systematically lock doors to all of the classrooms, and any student in the hall without a pass is rounded up and given detention. In the focus groups, students communicated overwhelming negative opinions of the hall sweeps, while in contrast, many teachers viewed them as a necessity. While one teacher expressed, “for two weeks we stopped doing hall sweeps; the halls were chaos,” a student described the hall sweeps as a hunting experience, stating,

The administrators round up all the kids in the hall, and they give them a detention or something. But the way they do it—like, they are legitimately hunting. They’ll be on their walkie-talkies. They’ll be like, ‘I got a runner.’ And kids are hiding in the bathroom.

Despite his engagement with the dominant capital of recognizing and respecting teacher authority, Ta’ron was either being denied the restroom or being caught in a hall sweep. Similar to Mr. E’s punitive seating changes in the movie theater vignette, hallway sweeps became another spatial tactic of discipline that perpetuate antiblack systemic violence, reinforced by perpetrator-free narratives.

Utilizing hallway passes represents a way in which students are able to match their cultural practices to school policies and hence avoid hall sweeps, yet Black and White students relay discrepancies in their encounters in the hallways both with and without passes. That is, racialized patterns emerge in viewing the inconsistent consequences experienced by students who matched or mismatched the norms for walking in the halls. For instance, one White male student, in the student focus group including Ta’ron, spoke about an incident where he was clearly not following rules:

As a senior, I’ve become a little disillusioned with the process of getting passes all the time, so I almost never bothered to acquire a pass when I need to go somewhere else in the school. If I pass an FA [Facilities Assistant, a.k.a a hallway monitor] in the hall, I will just—if I acknowledge them at all, I will just wave at them and they’ll just wave me along. No real threat of punishment or anything like that. It’s a little inconsistent.

The lack of consequences for this student is noteworthy, seeing that he is not engaging with normative power dynamics (“if I acknowledge them at all”) or with the policy requiring hall passes for movement in the building (“never bothered to acquire a pass”). In contrast, a Black female student shared her experiences in the hallways as involving much more intrusive scrutiny and a receipt of consequences despite her matched practice of acquiring a hall pass:

I get stopped in the hallway a lot even when I have passes from my teacher. But they assume that I am just wandering the hallway. And even when I do show them the pass, they want—take me to the teacher’s room so they can get a verification. I just feel like that’s not necessary.

Immediately following her comment, two White students joined the conversation—a different female student saying that she has “never been stopped in the hallway” and the White male student who had spoken earlier saying, “I rarely get stopped in the hallway.” The Black student then reiterated her contrasting lived experience, saying, “I get stopped a lot, even when I have passes.” Similar to Ta’ron, this Black female student is being penalized despite following the rules. None of the students in this focus group explicitly mention race as an explanatory lens for the inconsistencies—they instead use coded language, to differentiate whose movement is monitored more closely. They describe “good kids” as those who attend AP and honors classes (majority White students) and the general education courses (majority Black students) as having “a different mix of students” and “bad kids.” The White female who said she has “never been stopped in the hallway” also describes herself as “one of the good kids who gets good grades.” On the other hand, she talks about the “trouble you get yourself in” if a student is from the group of “bad kids who misbehave a lot and refuse.” Hence, LHS students appear to be penalized based on assumptions about their “goodness” level (which happens to coincide with their race), regardless of whether they match or mismatch the dominant cultural expectations of carrying a hall pass. Here again, the cultural mismatch hypothesis cannot explain their differing disciplinary experiences.

While the Movie Theater vignette highlights that nondominant cultural habits embodied by Black students are rejected because of their associations with Blackness, not merely because of their mismatch with authority’s cultural ways of being, the Sickle Cell vignette highlights that dominant cultural capital is mistrusted, even when reinforced by an authority from another institution (i.e., a diagnosis from a healthcare professional). In the case of Ta’ron, he abides by the teacher’s rules frequently, and yet, from his perspective, the teacher does not offer proper accommodations for his medical diagnosis (one that is uniquely tied to his sub-Saharan ancestry). His account—triangulated with the experiences of his peers, additional ethnographic data such as signage, and our own observations—suggests that it is not sufficient for Black students to utilize dominant cultural capital that matches the teacher and the institution. In Ta’ron’s case, he is still being punished, at times, by being denied the restroom or by being caught in the school’s hall sweeps and given detention. This raises important questions about whether Black students’ dignity and humanity are overlooked when cultural explanations are exclusively utilized to understand disciplinary actions. His experience pushes for moving beyond understanding teacher-student interactions as a misalignment of cultural beliefs or practices. Ta’ron’s struggle is an indication of how humanity is usurped from Black students inside of educational settings. Ta’ron is being denied his humanity, experiencing “the abjection from the realm of human” (Sharpe, 2016, p. 14). His story complicates the cultural mismatch hypothesis by directly bringing to light the ways in which antiblack logic manifests and serves to dehumanize students even when cultural alignment exists.

Matched—yet Again—Mistrusted Practices

A third vignette shares the experience of an African Caribbean student, Naila, who had recently immigrated to the United States. Although English was her first language, Naila had grammatical barriers that arose from being born in a country where English grammar rules differ from academic American English. She discusses how she was accused of plagiarism by a teacher:

Being from a different country … I have different grammar from everybody else, and I write different. I got a grammar coach a couple of months ago, and so I started writing differently in my English class, and … there’s this big thing in our class about plagiarism. And so [the teacher] came up to me and said I plagiarized this because my grammar is off. And I said I didn’t and she’s like, “I don't believe you.” She searched, and she couldn't find any evidence about it, and then I got a zero on it.

Academic American English is a particular style of English that has often been used to exclude students from the academy and other gated centers of learning (Scarcella, 2003). As Scarcella writes, academic English “involves mastery of a writing system and its particular academic conventions as well as proficiency in reading, speaking, and listening” (2003, p. 3). This form of English communication is highly valued by schools at all levels. Regardless of her proficiency in the academic English of her native country, Naila needed to adapt to the unique academic English in the United States, which is the dominant cultural capital in the LHS context and more broadly in American schools. Consequently, Naila reports that her family hired a grammar coach to assist in her development.

Naila’s efforts to develop and engage with American academic English additionally indicate her adherence to the achievement ideology—another institutionally sanctioned form of cultural capital perpetuated in American schools. MacLeod (2009) describes the achievement ideology as a pervasive orientation in society where the notion of individualized effort, in the forms of hard work and education, translates into success. In this vignette, Niala recognized an area of challenge (“I have different grammar from everyone else”), identified the source of her struggle (“being from a different country”), and then took steps to rectify the issue so as to find success in school (“I got a grammar coach”). Importantly, she reported that her family mobilized financial resources—hiring an outside tutor—to assist in this endeavor. These actions communicate a belief in the achievement ideology: that it is her responsibility to engage in a conscious process of building appropriate skillsets that would be valued in her school and lead to her academic achievement. Hence, Naila’s training with the grammar coach can be understood as the process of accepting and engaging with the achievement ideology. Her behavior and beliefs match the dominant cultural capital that was needed for her English classroom.

However, this match, arising from Naila’s work to acquire dominant cultural capital, did not only go unacknowledged but was actively penalized. Similar to Ta’ron’s story in the Sickle Cell vignette, Naila’s account in the focus group communicated her perspective that the teacher mistrusted her (“and she’s like, ‘I don’t believe you.’”). According to Naila, the teacher accused her of the unethical practice of plagiarizing and gave her zero points for the work. Naila attempted to stand up for herself (“I said I didn’t”). In doing so, Naila was attempting to “‘walk the walk’ and ‘talk the talk’ of the cultural power brokers in our society” (Carter, 2005, p. 138). Yet when Naila tried to “walk the walk” and “talk the talk” to navigate her new school system, she was not successful in the LHS setting where, as seen in Ta’ron’s narrative, deference to authority was being valued over self-advocacy.

Producing and Reinforcing an Antiblack Institutional Orientation

While cultural mismatch theory may have originally interpreted this interaction as a cultural misunderstanding between Naila and the teacher, an antiblack lens reveals different insights. Rather than exonerating the White educator from wrongdoing—as cultural mismatch prioritizes White sensibilities over justice—an antiblack lens shows us that this interaction resulted in racialized harm—intentional or not—committed by the White educator towards Naila, the Black student. The interpretation of Naila’s story through an antiblack lens is further supported by the variety of data sources spanning this study where many stakeholders noted a discrepancy in how Black and White students were treated in LHS. Stakeholders specifically spoke of a segregated “school-within-a-school” setup. Although the percentage of White students was only around 8% of the total student body, according to administrators, teachers and students, the honors and AP classes were predominantly White. Additionally, the disciplinary interactions and overall culture of those classes were described as significantly different from classrooms where the majority of Black students attended. As one White student expressed,

I feel like the whole school culture is very different for [White] kids who are in a lot of honors and AP classes and [Black] kids who aren’t. ’Cause I’m in a lot of those classes and … I don’t see students disrupting class very often or refusing staff requests. I don’t see a lot of the class cutting. And if this does happen, they don't get punished as much. It feels like a sort of separate LHS, when I compare those classes to my electives where I’m just with the general [Black] student body—just the way everyone reacts.

Although research evidence has shown that differential behavior does not explain the hyper-disciplining of Black students (Skiba & Williams, 2014), the White student articulates that perhaps Black students misbehave at higher rates than White students (“I don’t see students disrupting class very often or refusing staff requests”). At the same time, this student perceives White and Black students being penalized differently even when they engage in the same misbehavior (“if this does happen, they don’t get punished as much”). These racialized patterns are similar to those characterized in the student commentary around hallway pass usage, shared in the previous vignette. Here the student articulates, with great clarity, a school-within-a-school phenomenon: that White and Black students are treated differently by teachers and staff, regardless of if they are engaging in the same behavior (or cultural capital). In other words, there is evidence suggesting that teachers’ interpretations of students’ cultural capital—even when dominant—could be racialized. While we do not have a specific incident when a White student was accused of plagiarism, as Naila was, the “school-within-a-school” theme, along with the first two vignettes, suggests that an antiblack institutional orientation may have been permeating LHS at the time.

If Naila’s experience is understood to be one that is culturally aligned with school norms to excel academically yet still one that is degrading her basic right to be innocent (unless proven otherwise), we again see that there is an antiblack institutional orientation that dissolves students of their humanity. This experience was not isolated and is best reflected in an open letter circulated during the 2016–2017 school year by one Black female student, writing on behalf of “The Student Body.” It was addressed to the collective teaching staff at LHS. The letter states,

You belittle us in class and make us feel like we are stupid when we ask a question and yet you wonder why students are not coming to school or simply skipping your class. Whether it is known or unknown the fact still remains the same: TEACHERS HAVE THE POWER OVER THE STUDENTS. WHAT OUR TEACHERS SAY TO US ON A DAILY BASIS IMPACTS US MORE THAN YOU THINK. (original capitalization)

Although the letter does not directly mention race, these sentiments highlight the presence of antiblack influences, pointing attention to existing power differentials that allow for the degradation of a majority Black student population by a majority White teaching staff. The Student Body letter does not allow the normative perpetrator-free narrative to stand, specifically asking teachers to take responsibility for their impact on the predominantly Black student body. Moreover, the letter acknowledges the great impact of this belittling dynamic on students’ state of mind as well as its influence on their engagement in cultural practices that will mismatch school expectations (e.g., absence and skipping class). Race, although often the unnamed elephant in the room, did impact how teachers interact with their students at LHS. During the teacher researcher residency summer program, where some teachers reviewed the focus group data, one White male teacher acknowledged the presence of “issues of [racial] bias” while referring to the demographics of the students as “the identity of the building.” Racialized interpretations of Black students’ cultural capital have practical, social, emotional, and academic implications. Even though Naila hired a grammar coach and embraced the prevalent achievement ideology that hard work leads to success (both forms of dominant cultural capital that match school expectations), she still received a zero on her assignment. Ultimately, despite her engagement with dominant capital, the school as an institution did not facilitate her success as a student within the backdrop of antiblack logic. In a school where her teacher punished the cultural capital coming from her, as a Black individual—despite it being matched to dominant culture norms—an antiblack institutional orientation is produced and reinforced. Specifically, the perpetrator-free narrative, where Naila’s teacher did not admit wrongdoing, persisted.