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Friday, September 25, 2009

Suspended for SWB Common

By Jane C. Hood
University of New Mexico
      When we read the Journal's Sept. 11 report about two black boys who were suspended from Valley High School for making “gang signs,” we were not surprised. My colleague, Nancy López, and I are social scientists who have been studying the links between race and high-school discipline for the past three years.
       Five years ago, the U.S. Department of Education found that in every state but Idaho black students were being suspended more than were others. The difference was substantial. The DOE study found that on average, black students were three times more likely than white students to be suspended or expelled from school. This racial gap in suspension rates is a consistent finding in studies of school discipline across the United States.
       What causes this disparity? Do black students, particularly black boys, commit more infractions or more serious ones than do whites or Latinos? Russell Skiba and his colleagues at the University of Indiana found that boys of all races got into more trouble at school than did girls, but they saw no racial differences in rates of disruptive school behavior. These researchers therefore concluded that black students suffered differential treatment especially for infractions involving subjective interpretations. Labeling a hand signal as a gang sign involves just this kind of judgment.
       Our own research here in New Mexico corroborates Skiba et al's findings. Our data include qualitative interviews and classroom observations as well as school records from a variety of New Mexico schools and districts. In a statistical analysis of data for all freshmen in one New Mexico school district (2005-06), we found that even after taking into account both the nature and severity of the infraction, black 9th graders were 2.7 times more likely than white ones to be suspended from school.
       Of course, we know nothing about the kinds of hand signals the two brothers were using at Valley High School. Nonetheless, given all of the above research findings, we suspect that the boys may be guilty of SWB, “Signaling While Black”!
       Jane C. Hood is an associate professor of sociology at the University of New Mexico.
       

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