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California's Ban of "Willful Defiance" Suspensions at Schools. 

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California's Ban of "Willful Defiance" Suspensions at Schools. 

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Beginning from July of 2019, teachers are no longer able to suspend a student for "willfully defying" them as many people argue that it is unfairly applied to African American students. While there are different perspectives upon this decision, it is true that suspension rates of African American students in California is higher than the rates which they attend schools, meaning they may be unjustly suspended for a minor action. The fact that racial issues prevail even in school grounds shows how, as shown in the structural racism vs individual racism infographic, the United States, though makes effort to eradicate racism, still suffers from the institutionalized racism in the previous centuries.

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California schools will no longer be able to suspend students in elementary and middle school for disrupting school activities or "willfully defying" the authority of teachers or administrators, ending a practice that many say is counterproductive and unfairly applied to black students.

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation late Monday ending suspensions in all public and charter schools for "willful defiance" in grades 4 through 5 and banning them in grades 6 to 8 for five years. Such suspensions were already banned in grades K-3.

The broader ban comes in response, in part, to criticism that the willful defiance category of suspensions was a too-broad and arbitrary catchall for any behavior that a teacher finds objectionable, such as repeatedly tapping feet on the floor, refusing to remove a hat or failing to wear a school uniform.

"Ending willful defiance suspensions will keep kids in school where they belong and where teachers and counselors can help them thrive," state Sen. Nancy Skinner (D-Berkeley), the bill's author, said in a statement.

Under the legislation, school authorities could still remove disruptive kids from class, but would be encouraged to use alternative disciplinary practices, such as restorative justice or positive behavior support. Students could still be suspended for more serious actions, such as physical violence, theft or use of drugs.

The statewide action follows bans that have been put in place in at least five school districts throughout the state in recent years, first by the Los Angeles Unified School District in 2013 and later the Asuza, Oakland, Pasadena and San Francisco school districts.

Research has shown that suspensions and the accompanying loss of instructional time disproportionately affect students of color, particularly African Americans.

In 2017 and 2018, African American student suspensions represented 17% of total suspensions across the state, even though African American students made up less than 6% of total students in the state, according to California Department of Education data.

Research has also shown that suspensions do little to transform student behavior while increasing the likelihood that students will drop out of school or become involved in the criminal justice system.

"No student should be set back in their education for something as minor as chewing gum or talking in class," said Angela McNair Turner, staff attorney at Public Counsel. "SB 419 is a huge step forward in addressing equity in schools across the state and eliminating the school-to-prison pipeline for youth in grades K-8."

The original bill would have applied to grades 4 to 12 but was scaled back by the Assembly Education Committee. That committee also requested a sunset provision to the ban on suspensions in grades 6 to 8 to give school districts a chance to evaluate it.

The amended bill passed the Assembly and Senate with broad support and was backed by a wide coalition of youth and social justice groups, school districts and legal aid organizations.

The sole group to formally oppose the bill was the Charter Schools Development Center. Eric Premack, the group's executive director, said it is "generally supportive" of policies to reduce unnecessary suspensions and expulsions but that the bill "imposes 'one-size-fits all' disciplinary standards that are not a fit for all schools in all circumstances."

The new rules will go into effect on July 1.
Times staff writer Sonali Kohli contributed to this report.

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California expands ban on 'willful defiance' suspensions in schools

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California schools will no longer be able to suspend students in elementary and middle school for disrupting school activities or "willfully defying" the authority of teachers or administrators, ending a practice that many say is counterproductive and unfairly applied to black students. Gov.

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George Floyd & Police Brutality Tracing Back to the 1700s Slave Patrols.

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George Floyd & Police Brutality Tracing Back to the 1700s Slave Patrols.

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The death of an innocent civilian named George Floyd on May 25th in Minneapolis sparked the anger of many Americans, especially on the issue of police brutality towards African Americans or People of Color. In fact, police brutality and abuse of power is a persisting sequence which continued from the slave patrols of South Carolina in the 1700s. Clearly, systemic racism didn't completely abolish after the Civil Rights Movement, as it is still deeply embedded in the roots of American society as shown in the Overt and Covert Racism infographic in task 1, and authorizing power to certain individuals was exploited in a manner to further strengthen those discriminatory actions.

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There are many precedents to the Ferguson, Missouri protests that ushered in the Black Lives Matter movement. Those protests erupted in 2014 after a police officer shot unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown; the officer was subsequently not indicted.

The precedents include the Los Angeles riots that broke out after the 1992 acquittal of police officers for beating Rodney King. Those riots happened nearly three decades after the 1965 Watts riots, which began with Marquette Frye, an African American, being pulled over for suspected drunk driving and roughed up by the police for resisting arrest.

I am a criminal justice researcher who often focuses on issues of race, class and crime. Through my research and from teaching a course on diversity in criminal justice, I have come to see how the roots of racism in American policing - first planted centuries ago - have not yet been fully purged.

Slave patrols

There are two historical narratives about the origins of American law enforcement.

The first slave patrols arose in South Carolina in the early 1700s. As University of Georgia social work professor Michael A Robinson has written, by the time John Adams became the second United States president, every state that had not yet abolished slavery had them.

Members of slave patrols could forcefully enter anyone's home, regardless of their race or ethnicity, based on suspicions that they were sheltering people who had escaped bondage.

The more commonly known precursors to modern law enforcement were centralised municipal police departments that began to form in the early 19th century, beginning in Boston and soon cropping up in New York City, Albany, Chicago, Philadelphia and elsewhere.

Police corruption and violence - particularly against vulnerable people - were commonplace during the early 1900s. Additionally, the few African Americans who joined police forces were often assigned to black neighborhoods and faced discrimination on the job. In my opinion, these factors - controlling disorder, lack of adequate police training, lack of nonwhite officers and slave patrol origins - are among the forerunners of modern-day police brutality against African Americans.

Jim Crow laws

Slave patrols formally dissolved after the Civil War ended. But formerly enslaved people saw little relief from racist government policies as they promptly became subject to Black Codes.

For the next three years, these new laws specified how, when and where African Americans could work and how much they would be paid. They also restricted black voting rights, dictated how and where African Americans could travel and limited where they could live.

On this day in 1917, Ell Persons, in his 50s, was lynched. He was accused of raping a white girl. He was beaten into a confession. He was doused with gasoline, burned alive and dismembered in front of thousands of spectators. Sandwiches and snacks were sold at the lynching. pic.twitter.com/hjTmKrAqTh
- Sankofa TravelHer (@SankofaTravelHr) May 22, 2019

Reverberating today

For the past five decades, the federal government has forbidden the use of racist regulations at the state and local level. Yet people of color are still more likely to be killed by the police than whites.

The Washington Post tracks the number of Americans killed by the police by race, gender and other characteristics. The newspaper's database indicates that 229 out of 992 of those who died that way in 2018, 23% of the total, were black, even though only about 12% of the country is African American.

Policing's institutional racism of decades and centuries ago still matters because policing culture has not changed as much as it could. For many African Americans, law enforcement represents a legacy of reinforced inequality in the justice system and resistance to advancement - even under pressure from the civil rights movement and its legacy.

In addition, the police disproportionately target black drivers.

When a Stanford University research team analysed data collected between 2011 and 2017 from nearly 100 million traffic stops to look for evidence of systemic racial profiling, they found that black drivers were more likely to be pulled over and to have their cars searched than white drivers. They also found that the percentage of black drivers being stopped by police dropped after dark when a driver's complexion is harder to see from outside the vehicle.

This persistent disparity in policing is disappointing because of progress in other regards.

There is greater understanding within the police that brutality, particularly lethal force, leads to public mistrust, and police forces are becoming more diverse.

What's more, college students majoring in criminal justice who plan to become future law enforcement officers now frequently take "diversity in criminal justice" courses. This relatively new curriculum is designed to, among other things, make future police professionals more aware of their own biases and those of others. In my view, what these students learn in these classes will make them more attuned to the communities they serve once they enter the workforce.

In addition, law enforcement officers and leaders are being trained to recognise and minimise their own biases in New York City and other places where people of color are disproportionately stopped by the authorities and arrested.

But the persistence of racially biased policing means that unless American policing reckons with its racist roots, it is likely to keep repeating mistakes of the past. This will hinder police from fully protecting and serving the entire public.
Connie Hassett-Walker, Associate Professor of Criminal Justice, Kean University. This article first appeared on The Conversation.

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The history of police brutality in the US goes back to slave patrols of the 1700s

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There are many precedents to the Ferguson, Missouri protests that ushered in the Black Lives Matter movement. Those protests erupted in 2014 after a police officer shot unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown; the officer was subsequently not indicted. The precedents include the Los Angeles riots that broke out after the 1992 acquittal of police officers for beating Rodney King.

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Racial Disparity Behind COVID-19 in the U.S. 

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Racial Disparity Behind COVID-19 in the U.S. 

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Amid the ongoing global health crisis, it is reported that African Americans have a mortality rate which is 3.57 times higher than that of white citizens from the Coronavirus. As a recent article significantly relevant today, it demonstrates how deeply  systematic racism is ingrained in the U.S., which reinforces individual racism by precipitating falsities or prejudices of black people with their high mortality rate of the virus. Although Jim Crow Laws and other types of legal racial segregations terminated after the Civil Rights Movement, the news illuminates how those historical events left dire traces to its African American descendents.

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Chowkwanyun and Reed note three destructive tendencies. The first is to assume that if black people are getting sicker than white people, the problem is biological-that African Americans may be more susceptible to infection, and more fragile once infected. (There is no reason to believe that such genetic differences exist.) Conversely, after I reported that COVID-19 figures were rising more slowly in Africa than they had been in other areas, many tipsters emailed me to suggest that Africans are genetically different, and protected from COVID-19. None of my correspondents included any genomic data to back up this claim, but the temptation to believe it is epidemic. Cary Gross, the Yale researcher, told me he has heard similar theories. "No," he said, unequivocally. These differences are not because of subtle variations in biology. "If you drop an anvil on someone's foot, the foot's going to break."

Second, Chowkwanyun and Reed say, disparity figures encourage people to assume that groups are afflicted because of their own misbehavior. Yolonda Wilson, a bioethicist at the National Humanities Center, notes that the vocabulary of the pandemic in America changed as the disparities became better known. What started as a public-health issue shaded into a moral one, she told me. "The language of crisis was replaced by the language of personal responsibility," or irresponsibility.
Ibram X. Kendi: Stop blaming black people for dying of the coronavirus
Finally, by emphasizing disparity figures without context, Chowkwanyun and Reed write, we encourage the false impression "that certain social problems are primarily 'racial'-and therefore of concern only to supposed minority interest groups." Context might reveal, for example, that black people are hit harder because they use crowded public transportation at a higher rate than white people, or because they are more likely to work in jobs that require in-person interaction. Neither of these factors is exclusive to one race or another, and absent this context, it would be easy to dismiss COVID-19 as a "black disease," much as AIDS became a "gay disease," to the detriment of gay and nongay alike.
Jim Downs: The epidemics America got wrong
Chowkwanyun and Reed advocate instead an approach that focuses less on outrage and more on hard data. "People need to take a breather to parse data in more sophisticated ways," Chowkwanyun told me. He warned against a "pro forma" kind of racial-disparity research that simply says We have a racial disparity here, and we have to react to it. It's outrageous! "Just saying 'There's racism here' can be counterproductive. We are pushing people to be more precise."

That means collecting data that currently do not exist. "When a patient comes to a clinic, they can self-report their race, but how do they self-report socioeconomic status? How do you actually gather that information?" Most states still aren't collecting the relevant data systematically-not even data on race, let alone other characteristics.

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What's Behind the COVID-19 Racial Disparity?

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Chowkwanyun and Reed note three destructive tendencies. The first is to assume that if black people are getting sicker than white people, the problem is biological-that African Americans may be more susceptible to infection, and more fragile once infected. (There is no reason to believe that such genetic differences exist.)