The “it was a different time” argument ignores all the people who pushed back against Joe Clark’s tactics and said they weren’t working *at the time.* https://twitter.com/romeo_5143/status/1344893141338435585

He couldn’t even point to “better test scores” or whatever BS goal we use to justify not allowing Black kids to talk during their lunch periods at zero-tolerance schools today.

It was just attention-seeking cruelty toward people the public wanted to see treated cruelly.

There was and continues to be a constituency for this kind of stuff — from zero-tolerance charters to involving the criminal legal system in fighting truancy — bc of a belief that what poor Black kids and their families need most is disciplining and punishment.

I’m forever haunted by this scene in a This American Life episode in which a (Black) school teacher at one of those zero-tolerance charters gives a demerit to a student for talking to another student in the hallway. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/538/is-this-working/act-two

The premises of a dysfunctional
Black pathology that has to be stamped out at all costs is so widely believed that it made a hero out of Joe Clark but it also power lauded educational models *today* branded around “grit” and “no excuses learning.”

Then and now, when people pointed out the problems with these approaches, how dehumanizing and counterproductive they are to their own aims, the defenders of those approaches will say that their critics have low expectations for Black kids and are scared of bold, new ideas.

It’s just so twisted that the institutional subjugation of Black children, a centuries-old USian project, is treated and marketed as a bold new idea.