The Uptake: “About sixty students from St. Paul’s Central High School walked out of their classes Wednesday (Feb. 26) as a statement against the “school-to-prison pipeline.” The students joined more than 100 protesters — many of them college students and other community members — who gathered outside the school before marching to the nearby St. Paul Reformation Lutheran Church for a program-cum-protest. Guests included Nekima Levy-Pounds, a law professor from the University of St. Thomas, the rapper Lioness and others who spoke out against a system they charged leads children of color down the school to prison pipeline.
The action was organized by the NAACP’s St. Paul Youth and Collegiate Branch with leader Dua Saleh, a graduate from Central High School and currently a student at Augsburg College. “We are protesting the funneling of youth into prison systems,” Saleh said, as well as the “criminalization, institutionalization and stigmatization of youth of color and low income youth.”
According to Saleh, schools will suspend kids of color for getting into a fight instead of sending them to a counselor or speaking to them with their parents. “That’s problematic because suspensions actually lead kids to being more likely to be homeless at some point in their life or being incarcerated at some point in their life. They’re also more likely to be expelled.”
When Saleh was a student at Central, she was one of the “good” Black kids, she said. “That’s because they had a different understanding of my blackness in comparison to other people’s blackness,” due to the fact that she was in AP and IB classes and was articulate. “I guess so they interpret my blackness in a different way than they interpret other peoples’ blackness.”
Still, she saw how other youth of color and low-income youth “were stigmatized by teachers.” “They were sent out by teachers for tapping their pencils because that was a disruption for some reason. They were sent out by teachers for speaking to each other because they didn’t know how to diffuse situations. It was problematic, and I saw it, and maybe I wasn’t affected by it directly, but I saw people and I know people who were suspended and who are now in jail as a result of this systematic oppression. So that’s how I’m affected by it.””
Read the rest here.
