Black Paper #1: Clery Report as Symptom of Student Surveillance in Amerikkkan Schools
Black Paper #1: Clery Report as Symptom of Student Surveillance in Amerikkkan1 Schools
Note: The Social Justice Section of The COE Exchange welcomes commentary from a variety of perspectives. To date, the essays have focused upon racial oppression. In continuation of this spirit of resistance to racial oppression in schooling, this essay begins a new series of writing here at The Exchange. For far too long, an “authoritative report” from governmental or commercial sources has been labeled a “White Paper.”2 Here at this corner of The Exchange, voices that resist the altogether too common authoritative power of white privilege will be labeled a “Black Paper.” Come back often to read words that will challenge consensus and provoke serious dialogue.
- Matthew D. Davis, Coordinator of the COE Exchange’ Social Justice Section
University of Missouri-St. Louis Police Department released a Clery Report 09-1 on May 14, 2009 indicated that a young woman had been assaulted on the Metrolink platform close to UMSL. 3 The description of the assailants stated that “The perpetrators are described only as Black/Males, possibly 18-25 years of age.” This Clery Report troubles us. When looking at the description, we noticed that the words “black” and “male” begin with capital letters unlike the rest of the description. Also, the possibility of age of the assailants is a span of 7 years and a very difficult age grouping to determine by someone at night during an assault. However if one were to watch popular media at any time or any night of the week and on any channel, one would recognize these assailants. Popular media has provided society the image of what assailants should look like and they fit the description in the above report. Simply, Americans are persistently and persuasively taught that young black males are violent.4
Institutions such as schools, law enforcement, government agencies and popular media have colluded to portray crime to fit this picture of assailants. In his essay titled “Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh,” Loic Wacquant explains that historically American society utilized prisons as a tool for “replacing the carceral institution in the full arc of ethno racial division and domination in the U.S.”5
The University of Missouri is located in the northern (inner-ring) suburban area of St. Louis. To some who travel next to the campus, the area immediately surrounding UMSL is viewed as an urban environment filled with poverty. The UMSL campus, on the other hand, is populated with aesthetically pleasing buildings home to a mostly commuting student population. However, in a variety of St. Louis area communities, UMSL is spoken of as a “black college” in the heart of the ghetto. To these observers, UMSL is the ghetto.
(We must note this characterization is blatantly absurd and racist. UMSL remains a Predominately White Institution [PWI]; moreover, a PWI with a perpetual chilly relationship with many area African Americans.)
In the height of the mass incarceration of poverty-mired whites and people of color in the United States, Wacquant made a case for a close connection between prisons and ghettos. In his book, Wacquant states:
The astounding upsurge in black incarceration in the past three decades as a result of the obsolescence of the ghetto as a devise for caste control and the correlative need for a substitute apparatus for keeping (unskilled) African Americans ‘in their place’ i.e. in a subordinate and confined position in physical, social, and symbolic space.6
St. Louis has a long history of gentrification, segregation, and racialized policing policies. For many area residents and their network of friends across the nation, St. Louis continues to hold the reputation for an unfriendly and intolerant place for people of color. People of color have experienced a steady stream of racist residential housing policies in the region throughout the 20th century. 7 The expansion of the suburban areas to West County and South County make it abundantly clear that people of color are not welcome. To be sure, many African Americans remain confined to an “iron ring” within the city8 in fear of harassment by law enforcement and other state agencies. This racialized urban setting has been organized in extreme poverty and degenerative housing. Moreover, this housing stock can often be confused for prisons due to their architectural design, surveillance and police involvement.
The St. Louis Public Schools have often been complicit in the continued segregation of St. Louis9 and also been a pipeline to incarceration for many black males in the area.10 This combustible mixture of hyper-segregation and school-to-prison consequences has resulted in the blurring of the line between the ghetto and the prison. According to Wacquant,
This resulting symbiosis between the ghetto and the prison not only enforces and perpetuates the socioeconomic marginality and symbolic taint of the urban black sub proletariat and feeding the runaway growth of the penal system – this also plays a pivotal role in re-making of “race” and the redefinition of the citizenry the production of a racialized public via culture of vilification of criminals.11
Public Schools in urban areas such as St. Louis have deteriorated into institutions of internment with a function to ensure custody and control. The schools lack resources for educating; thus their purpose degenerates into the regulation of conduct in order to preserve order and reduce violent incidents. School buildings look like prisons with armed security forces that conduct spot checks and surveillance between buildings. Wacquant extends this line of analysis by asserting that the singular purpose of these schools is to “neutralize” youth considered unworthy and unruly by holding them for the day so they do not commit crimes in the community.12
Erica Meiners in her book Right to be Hostile: Schools, Prisons, and the Making of Public Enemies, concurs with Wacquant, claiming that public schools have institutionalized a culture of punitive policies against students, mainly in urban settings.13 The idea of keeping people of color out of “white space” is highlighted in the Clery report mentioned at the first of this essay. The description on the assailants implies that two African American males of arbitrary age assaulted an assumed student on the platform of the Metrolink on the UMSL campus.
The inference of this report is that UMSL police are now utilizing racialized policies to create a secure space for the students of UMSL. However, their report exacerbates the already problematic race and class division in the community of St. Louis and university campus. This report highlights a popular media-created idea of who criminals are that terrorize communities. These publicly circulated ideas over who are criminals have led to punitive policies in schools that result in subjective discipline practices for students of color. African American students are disciplined for behaviors like disrespect, excessive noise, threats, and loitering.14 In urban communities, African American youth are harassed by local state agencies like law enforcement for these behaviors. Numerous studies indicate that white and black youth have the same occurrences for weapons’ offenses but white youth have larger number of charges for drug-related offenses. This criminal reality remains hidden behind routine popular media imagery of drug dealers and users who are African American males and welfare moms. This imagery is reflected in the Clery report and remains a prevalent perception of the UMSL campus atmosphere.
This Clery report, moreover, is an example of the intertwining of state agencies in creation and enforcement of racialized policing policies. The report reinforces the pernicious perpetuation of popular media’s iconography of criminals as well as the racialized and divided atmosphere of St. Louis. The location of UMSL in the perceived ghetto of North St. Louis City and the attitudes of community residents commuting to the school is highlighted in the description of the assailants. As a doctoral student and a faculty member at UMSL, we were shocked by this report. We remain hopeful, if not optimistic, that our institution will act as better neighbors with all in St. Louis. True respect and human dignity must become a more visible part of the actions and words of the UMSL community.
Footnotes
- Marcyyliena Morgan asserts that “…when writing about America’s negative treatment of urban youth, it is common [in hiphop] to find it spelled Amerikkka, using the initials for the white supremacist group the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).” Morgan, The Real Hiphop: Battling for Knowledge, Power, and Respect in the LA Underground (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2009), 80-81. [↩]
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_paper [↩]
- Clery Report 09-1, University of Missouri St. Louis Police Department, May 14, 2009. [↩]
- A backdrop to this education over the race, gender, and age of violent individuals remains the stark, cruel reality of the racialized American judicial system. As scholar Todd R. Clear states, “The concentration of imprisonment among young black urban males is so extreme today that many of us [whites] simply assume that, when we encounter a young black man, he has a criminal record…” See his Imprisoning Communities: How Mass Incarceration Makes Disadvantaged Neighborhoods Worse (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007), 4. [↩]
- Loic Wacquant, “Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh,” in David W. Garland, Ed., Mass Imprisonment: Social Causes and Consequences (London: Sage Publications, 2001), 83. [↩]
- Ibid. [↩]
- Colin Gordon, Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). [↩]
- Ibid. [↩]
- See, for example, Daniel L. Schafly, 28 Years on the St. Louis School Board, 1953-1981: Rooting Out Corruption, Desegregating Schools in a Segregated Society, Coping with Massive Shifts of Population and Wealth (St. Louis: Author, 1995). [↩]
- Jennifer Hernandez, “Urban School Security: Student Safety or Abuse of Power?,” COE Exchange, April 16, 2009. [↩]
- Wacquant, “Deadly Symbiosis…,” 84. [↩]
- Ibid. [↩]
- Erica Meiners, Right to be Hostile: Schools, Prisons, and the Making of Public Enemies (New York: Routledge. 2007. [↩]
- Ibid. [↩]
Related Posts
- Urban School Security: Student Safety or Abuse of Power? (0.500)
- Schools of Being: Black America’s Battle for Humanness In An Era of Science-Sanctioned Hate (0.333)
- Educators’ and Lawmakers’ Collusion over the Expanding School to Prison Pipeline (0.333)
The police description of the assailant, “a Black male 18-25 years of age” describes some of the students in my classes and some of the people who work at the university. Are they all suspects? While descriptions of persons committing crimes are surely needed, there must be descriptors that do not indict an entire group. To illustrate the generalization issue, please read Leonard Pitts, the Pulitzer Prize columnist for the Miami Herold, article, “You don’t really know me” (http://www.miamiherald.com/living/columnists/leonard-pitts/story/1078637.html). The column addresses the issue of being identified as Black and the generalizations and accusations that are made from this singular identification.
The goal of the Clery act was to provide students (and parents) with information regarding crimes that have been committed on campus.
This incident was not a fictional occurrence on television or in a movie. The Clery report that was released reported basic information about the incident, and from what I have read, did not attempt to draw further conclusions.
The descriptions were vague, but if this was all the information provided then your critique should focus on the observational skills of the individual being assaulted, not on those who were communicating it. (Speaking as someone who has been physically attacked and threatened it is often difficult to take detailed notes.)
Factual information should be reported to the campus community. How our students engage that material and the conclusions that they draw will hopefully be made in light of the education that they are receiving here at the University. Our role in to help our students think critically about the information they receive. Denying information will not assist in this goal.
Failing (or refusing) to release data because of concerns it may have broader consequences is intellectually dishonest and I feel it is in direct opposition to the goals of the University.