On Spring Valley High, Police Violence, Rape Culture and the School-to-Prison Pipeline
On Spring Valley High, Police Violence, Rape Culture and the School-to-Prison Pipeline
When video surfaced recently of Deputy Ben Fields assaulting a young black female student at Spring Valley High School in South Carolina, I was still absorbing the details of a disturbing conversation I’d had with young, black, college-age women about rape culture and campus sexual violence. Despite the traumatic experiences relating to sexual assault that they or their friends and peers have experienced, not one felt they could report such incidents to the police.
Keep in mind that the students having this conversation are well aware of their rights, understand intersectionality through their own experiences as well as the various women’s and gender studies and ethnic studies courses that help contextualize these experiences, and are quite active in both Black Lives Matter and anti-sexual-violence movements. They are quite informed and conscious of how, when a police state intertwines with rape culture, certain men are empowered to touch, grab, fondle, manhandle, body-slam, drag and sexually assault women and people of color. And black women and girls, whose lives violently bleed at these intersections, are aware of how vulnerable our bodies have been made in these structures of systemic violence.
Kimberle Crenshaw and the African American Policy Forum have rightly pointed our attention to the ways that black girls are routinely “pushed out” of education through the school-to-prison pipeline. And Ta-Nehisi Coates recently reminded us of the long history of criminalizing black people—especially black resistance: from slavery (a system that penalized slaves who tried to run away or learned to read and write) to federal wiretapping of Civil Rights leaders. Intersectionality highlights how black women and girls are equally assaulted under state violence—not just black men and boys. And if Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s historical work on anti-lynching has taught us anything, it is that the brutal violence of our racist and misogynist/misogynoir systems, which gave us a police state and rape culture, are less concerned about “law and order” than they are about the submission and obedience of marginalized communities. If white male supremacy is to be “respected,” it will be through violence and fear.
For those who dare to “justify” Deputy Fields’ excessive use of force on this student, who—no matter what she was doing (chewing gum, texting or refusing to leave the classroom)—did not deserve to be body-slammed and dragged across the room, let us consider how quickly the student’s high school teacher would have been fired if he had behaved in a similar manner. We have taken corporal punishment out of the schools, and a new movement is encouraging parents to stop hitting their children, such as Stacey Patton’s “Spare the Kids” campaign. Yet, brutal violence is still being “normalized” by people who wear uniforms. Why is it acceptable for a police officer to act like a brute, yet we would not tolerate the same behavior from other authority figures, such as a teacher or school administrator? When did we decide that running our schools like a prison is a permissible way to socially condition our children, and black children in particular?
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Here’s our situation: Sexual violence is still a volatile threat facing women and sexual minorities, with black women and girls targeted at alarming rates. And yet, state violence compounds this problem by making police officers unreliable allies—worse, actual threats since their violence is equally as frightening as a rapist. There is also the under-discussed story of police officers who target black women for sexual assault. When police and rapists are on the same side of violence, what is a feminist to do?
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http://msmagazine.com/blog/2015/10/29/on-spring-valley-high-police-violence-rape-culture-and-the-school-to-prison-pipeline/
