Willful Defiance

Willful Defiance documents how Black and Brown parents, students and members of low-income communities of color organized to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline in their local schools and built a movement that spread across the country. The book begins in the Mississippi Delta where African American families were some of the first to name and speak out against the school-to-prison pipeline and challenge anti-Black racism, exclusionary discipline policies that suspend and expel students of color at disproportionate rates and policing practices that lead students into the juvenile and criminal justice systems. The book examines organizing processes in Mississippi, Los Angeles, Chicago, and other localities, showing how groups led by parents and students of color built the power to win policy changes to reduce suspensions and expulsions by centering the participation of people most impacted by injustice and combining deep local organizing with resources from the national movement. It shows how an intersectional movement emerged as girls of color and gender nonconforming students asserted their voice, the movement won victories to remove or defund school police and sought to establish restorative justice alternatives to transform deep-seated racism in public schools. The book documents the struggle organizers waged to build a movement led by community groups accountable to people most impacted by injustice rather than Washington-based professional advocates. It offers a new model for federated movements that operate simultaneously at local, state, and national levels, while primarily oriented to support local organizing and reconceptualizes national movements as interconnected local struggles whose victories are lifted up and “nationalized” to transform racially inequitable policies at multiple levels.

Exposure to Same-Race Teachers and Student Disciplinary Outcomes for Black Students in North Carolina

Using student-level administrative data from North Carolina, we explore whether exposure to same-race teachers affects the rate at which Black students receive exclusionary discipline, such as out-of-school suspensions, in-school suspensions, and expulsion. We find consistent evidence that exposure to same-race teachers is associated with reduced rates of exclusionary discipline for Black students. This relationship holds for elementary, middle, and high school grade ranges for male and female students, and for students who do and do not use free and reduced-price lunch. Although we find reductions in referrals for a number of different types of offenses, we find particularly consistent evidence that exposure to same-race teachers lowers office referrals for willful defiance across all grade levels, suggesting that teacher discretion plays a role in driving our results.

Exile and the Republic: Thomas McGrath and the Legacy of Jefferson's America

Of the many authorities Thomas McGrath rejected during his life, one of the most significant was the American Revolution, for his work explicitly questions the founders as a source of aesthetic and political creativity. “The National Past has its houses,” he writes in Letter to an Imaginary Friend, “but their fires have long gone out!” From his pronouncing the death of Virginia's deified presidents to his condemnation of the “local colorist” hunting for patriotic “HEADwaters” by which to camp, the poet's renunciation of the “false Past” amounts to a coherent commentary on the relations between American politics and modernist poetry (Letter, 315). E. P. Thompson has remarked in paving homage to his friend that “McGrath is a poet of alienation…. His trajectory has been that of willful defiance … At every point when the applause – anyone's applause, even the applause of the alienated – seemed about to salute him, he has taken a jagged fork to a wilderness of his own making.” Although his language strongly recalls that of Emerson's “Self-Reliance,” Thompson views McGrath as more than a romantic individualist. McGrath's alienation was not simply the estrangement that Marx saw afflicting all of capitalist society, nor was it a momentarily fashionable pose; rather, it was a calculated and thorough opposition to what Thompson calls “official culture” and its destruction of political, historical, and literary values. McGrath's refusal to make a “usable past” out of the American Revolution participates in this general defiance of “official culture,” as his work insistently reminds us that among the regular patrons of Monticello and Mt. Vernon were the many establishment poets well entrenched in bourgeois universities. In defying modernism's efforts to renovate the 18th century, McGrath makes a wilderness of his own, a wilderness which grows in opposition to the wellplowed fields of American empire.