While the school-to-prison pipeline is now a widely understood framework for discerning how students are funneled into the criminal legal system, advocates say looking at Black-white racial disparities in school discipline fails to capture the full scope of the problem. There is a growing area of social science research pointing to the role that colorism plays in school punishment—which includes detention, suspension, and expulsion—and a burgeoning movement to address the biases that shape this skin tone-based discrimination.
Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Pressley reintroduced for the second time last year the Ending Punitive, Unfair, School-based Harm that is Overt and Unresponsive to Trauma (PUSHOUT) Act, a bill that seeks to address the school-to-prison pipeline by providing federal grants to schools and states committed to overhauling school disciplinary policies that are often enacted in racially discriminatory ways.
In an interview with Capital B, one of the bill’s co-sponsors, Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, said that at one middle school in her district, Black students are 338% more likely to be suspended than their white counterparts.
Racial disparities in school discipline are nationwide and run deep into the lives of Black students. According to a New York Times analysis of U.S. Department of Education data, Black girls are more than five times more likely than white girls to be suspended at least once from school and are seven times more likely to receive multiple out-of-school suspensions. Researchers have noted that such disparities are not a result of different behaviors between Black and white students. Rather the crux of the issue is that educators perceive Black students to be more suspicious, aggressive, older, mature, and—in the case of young girls—more provocative.
The impact of being on the receiving end of suspension, expulsion, or referral to law enforcement doesn’t just end in the classroom. As adults, students of color are more likely to find themselves entangled in the criminal legal system, which mirrors these same racial disparities. While initiatives like Ending PUSHOUT focus on disparities between students of color and white students, discussions on race and school discipline merit a deeper look into how anti-Blackness shapes students’ lives—even in school settings that are primarily composed of students of color.
Recent studies suggest that the impact of skin tone within intraracial classrooms sometimes exceeds the impact of race in mixed-race classrooms. When compounded with gendered stereotypes, these disparities can create nearly insurmountable hurdles for darker-skinned Black girls.
What is colorism?
The term colorism is widely believed to have been coined in 1982 by Pulitzer prize-winning author Alice Walker, who defined it as the “prejudicial or preferential treatment of same-race people based solely on their color.” Within such in-group prejudice, those with lighter skin are treated more favorably than their dark-complected peers and receive advantages in the workplace, school, and social settings that dramatically inform their overall life outcomes. In an article for Learning for Justice, David Knight, an assistant professor of sociology at Columbia University, described colorism as a “global cultural practice” that emerged as part of European colonial and imperial history.
“Colorism is prevalent in countries as distant as Brazil and India,” Knight wrote. “Its legacy is evident in forums as public as the television and movie industries, which prefer to cast light-skinned people of color, and as private as the internalized thoughts of some Latino, South-Asian, or Black parents who hope their babies grow up light-skinned so their lives will be ‘just a little bit easier.’”
Colorism also works in tandem with other systems of prejudice such as “featurism,” or the mistreatment of those with facial features more commonly considered Afrocentric, and “texturism,” which targets those with coarse and kinky hair. In similar ways to racism, colorism doesn’t exist in a vacuum or uniformly impact people’s lives. Rather, it is inflected by gendered stereotypes, creating distinct experiences for Black men and women. Anti-Black stereotypes tend to associate lightness with femininity and darkness with masculinity and other traits commonly connected with masculinity, such as dangerousness, the propensity to cause physical harm, and impulsivity. In some social settings, the reinforcement of these masculine stereotypes may benefit some darker-skinned men while harming darker-skinned women.
Colorist stereotypes can shape almost every aspect of life even outside of academic or carceral settings. In the workplace, conceptions of Black women being difficult, incompetent, or unprofessional disproportionately harm darker-skinned women. Socially, darker-skinned Black women are more likely to face exclusion from social groups that are predominately white as well as those composed of their own peers. Historically, “paper bag tests” were used as a criterion for Black social clubs or events wherein, if your skin tone was darker than a brown paper bag, you would be denied entry. Shadows of such exclusionary practices remain in the form of mainstream media that fails to provide equal opportunities to dark-skinned women and social and networking events that silently prohibit darker-skinned members from joining.
In the context of the criminal legal system and other punitive systems of discipline, stereotypes associated with darkness negatively impact both men and women to varying degrees.
Colorism in the criminal legal system
As part of a 2018 research study, Harvard University professor Ellis Monk looked at the experiences of African Americans in the criminal legal system and how their skin tone shaped their outcomes. The study placed participants on a 1-7 shade scale from very light to very dark while controlling for other variables that could skew results, including earnings, employment, educational attainment, neighborhood conditions, and substance abuse. Monk found that skin tone is a significant predictor for arrests, with a one-level increase in the darkness of a participant’s skin tone representing a 14% increase in the likelihood of arrest. Similarly, darker skin tone significantly raised the likelihood of incarceration. The darkest-skinned Black Americans were found to have 103% higher odds of having been incarcerated compared to the lightest-skinned Black Americans.
According to Monk’s findings, “color is quite consequential in the criminal justice system,” with intraracial color inequality often rivaling interracial disparities between Black and white people. While the study focused squarely on arrest and likelihood of incarceration, it builds off of previous work, including “Looking Deathworthy,” a landmark 2006 study that found that the likelihood of a defendant being capitally sentenced increased the more “stereotypically Black” they are perceived to be based on Afrocentric facial features and skin tone.
A 2011 study by Villanova University researchers focused on women’s experiences in the criminal legal system and the impact of skin tone on their sentences. Using a sample of more than 12,000 women who were incarcerated between 1995 and 2009, the study found that those who were light-skinned received sentences that were 12% shorter than their darker peers, and these same light-skinned women also served about 11% less time.
Colorism in the classroom
Findings from earlier research on colorism within the criminal legal system mirror more recent studies that explore how skin tone shapes student experiences in school and how disciplinary measures such as suspension or detention are meted out specifically to darker-skinned girls. A 2013 study conducted by researchers at Villanova University and the University of Iowa found that Black girls with the darkest skin tones were three times more likely to be suspended than Black girls with the lightest skin. Such bias existed even when family income, test scores, and living environments were controlled for.
Later research conducted in 2018 by Tyese Brown, who at the time was a City University of New York (CUNY) Ph.D. candidate, also found the same disparity when analyzing school suspension rates within New York City’s public school system, where Black girls represent more than half of girls who are disciplined despite only comprising 34% of the total student population. Brown’s research found that lighter-skinned Black girls were three times less likely to be suspended than their darker-skinned peers.
In a 2014 New York Times article, Dr. Lance Hannon, one of the lead researchers in the 2011 Villanova University study, noted that the findings suggest that even when behavior across groups is similar, the perception of darker-skinned Black girls is shaped by how darkness is often masculinized.
“When a darker-skinned African-American female acts up, there’s a certain concern about their boyish aggressiveness,” Dr. Hannon said. “[T]hey don’t know their place as a female, as a woman.”
Despite this growing body of research and new platforms and initiatives that share educational content about colorism, such as Sarah Webb’s Colorism Healing and the “digital safe space” the Darkest Hue created by T.K. Saccoh, colorism remains largely ignored in discourse about racism in American society and the ways it shapes young people’s lives.
In a 2021 interview with Forbes magazine about the Darkest Hue, an online platform that both highlights how colorism shows up in popular media as well as shares first-person accounts from young dark-skinned Black women, Saccoh explained how colorism exacerbates the adultification that Black girls already experience. White adults who are found guilty of criminal acts or other forms of misconduct often get treated as children and are granted a veneer of innocence that Black children are often not afforded.
“I really think it’s so fascinating to me how age is not really the proxy for childhood innocence in our society. The real proxy is, what race are you?” said Saccoh.
Efforts such as the Ending PUSHOUT Act and the Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair (CROWN) Act that focus on hair texture bias must expand their understanding of the issue to include how anti-Blackness creates intraracial hierarchies that are as impactful as they are invisible. In choosing to tackle the issue head-on, leaders who are actively working to address bias and discrimination in school discipline can develop ways to measure and mitigate skin tone and gender bias for the benefit of all Black girls.
