Twitter as a counter-storytelling site for students of Color working to abolish the police

• Date: 05 March 2024
• Pages: 551-567
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/EDI-12-2022-0361
• Published date: 05 March 2024
• Author: Re'Nyqua Farrington

Twitter as a counter-storytelling

site for students of Color working

to abolish the police

Re’Nyqua Farrington

School of Education, University of California Riverside, Riverside, California, USA

Abstract

Purpose –Given the historical legacy of policing Black bodies, this research focuses on the structures of anti-

Blackness within school policing and the strategies students of Color activists use as they work to defund or

abolish police departments in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD).

Design/methodology/approach –Specifically, this article looks to Twitter as a counter-storytelling space

for students of Color activists to organize and build movements to end anti-Black school policing. Through the

frameworks of critical race theory (CRT) and Black critical theory (BlackCrit), this research applies inductive

coding to analyze 42 Twitter posts from three students of Color-led organizations based in Los Angeles.

Findings –This document analysis presents four themes, which describe four dominant strategies students of

Color activists use in their campaigns to defund or abolish school police in the LAUSD: (1) centering Blackness

and Black student experiences, (2) making demands for the elimination of funding and support for school

police, (3) calling for a shift in funding to support Black students and (4) employing multiple tactics

concurrently.

Research limitations/implications –These findings demonstrate the importance of developing and

centering a critical understanding of anti-Blackness to achieve racial and educational justice within social

movements.

Originality/value –Moreover, the demands of students of Color activists reflect visions of public schools free

from anti-Black school policing.

Keywords Anti-blackness, Race, Racism, White supremacy, School police

Paper type Research paper

Before the mid-1900s, the concept of school resource officers (SROs), school police, or school

police departments did not exist. However, in 1950, the first formalized SRO program

developed to “improve relations between law enforcement officers and juveniles”(NCJRS,

1995, p. 1). Since the 1950s, SRO programs have proliferated in K-12 public schools across the

United States of America, and more formalized school police departments have been

established alongside this development. In fact, “approximately 58% of schools had at least

one sworn law enforcement official present during the school week”in the 2017–2018

academic school year, a drastic increase since the “1% of schools [that] reported having police

officers on site”in 1975 (Connery, 2020). Evidently, the concept of SROs, school police, or

school police departments does not represent a novel idea for twenty-first-century students.

Yet, this union between public schools and policing is not equally felt among all twenty-first-

century students. As Connery (2020) notes, SROs are more likely to work in schools serving

high numbers of students of color”and “among middle and high schools where more than

75% of students were Black, 54.1% had at least one SRO or security officer on campus”(p. 6).

Together Connery’s (2020) findings demonstrate the specificity of anti-Blackness that

persists through school policing even within already-disparate rates of policing among

students of color.

Connery’s (2020) findings about the elevated rates of policing among Black youth reflect

the hyper surveillance and criminalization of Black people in USA society. Thus, much like

previous neoliberal attempts at resolving these anti-Black policing measures in society,

educational policymakers relied on reformist strategies to increase the number of Black SROs

Twitter for

students of

Color

551

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:

https://www.emerald.com/insight/2040-7149.htm

Received 28 December 2022

Revised 10 January 2024

Accepted 3 February 2024

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion:

An International Journal

Vol. 43 No. 3, 2024

pp. 551-567

© Emerald Publishing Limited

2040-7149

DOI 10.1108/EDI-12-2022-0361

and improve individual relationships between school police and Black students, all while

increasing school police funding (Turner and Beneke, 2020). These neoliberal reforms did not

require a structural change to deep-rooted problems of anti-Blackness within school policing

across the United States. For example, in California following The Great Migration when

“millions of Black men and women fled the violent repression of the Jim Crow South, [and]

head[ed] north and west seeking economic opportunity,”white residents turned to the Los

Angeles Police Department (LAPD) to patrol Black students as a backlash to increasing

residential integration (ACLU, 2017, p. 3). This white backlash models not only the

pervasiveness of anti-Blackness in the police force, but also the shared anti-Black racism

among white [1] residents, LAPD and public school officials. An ideologically consistent

pattern of anti-Blackness persists in the twenty-first century as public school officials enact

neoliberal reforms in hopes of amending a historically anti-Black system of school policing.

Nonetheless, Black students in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) have

demanded police-free schools rather than reformist reworkings of anti-Black school police

systems. Within their respective students of Color [2]-led organizations, Black students have

cited disproportionate rates of harm against Black students by police officers and unsafe

school environments with school police as central claims to their demands to defund and

abolish school police (Students Deserve, n.d.;Reclaim Our Schools LA, 2022;Brothers, Sons,

Selves, 2021). These students’demands gained media attention after the police killing of

George Floyd in the summer of 2020 (Chang et al., 2020). Since this 2020 media coverage of

students of Color-led organizations calling to defund and abo lish the police, these

organizations in LAUSD have made progress in defunding the Los Angeles School Police

Department (LASPD) and diverting funds to Black students (Students Deserve, n.d.).

Notably, the perspectives of Black students and the students of Color-led organizations’

critical understanding of anti-Blackness play integral roles in the organizations’campaigns

for police-free schools.

Given the historical legacy of policing Black bodies, this research focuses on the

experiences of student activists in three students of Color-led organizations, Students

Deserve, Reclaim Our Schools LA and Brothers, Sons, Selves (BSS), to understand how they

make sense of their racialized experiences with school police and the formation of their

political identities. This study is important for two primary reasons. First, this phenomenon

clarifies the confluence of police and educational institutions in Black communities within

LAUSD. Secondly, this research traces the development of Black student activists’political

identities alongside their racialized experiences with scho ol police. Importantly, the

experiences of Black student activists can illuminate future possibilities of police-free

Black educational spaces. As such, this study first questions: How do students of Color

activists in the LAUSD understand how anti-Blackness shapes school policing and impacts

Black students? Secondly, this study questions: As students of Color activists divest and

disengage from school police, how do their strategies help racial and educational justice

advocates understand the centrality of anti-Blackness in broader social movements?

To answer these research questions, I perform a document analysis of 42 Twitter posts

created by three students of Color-led organizations based in Los Angeles; this document

analysis seeks to understand how students of Color activists understand the mechanisms of

anti-Blackness within school policing and the tactics students of Color activists employ as

they work to defund or abolish police departments in LAUSD.

Specifically, I turn to Twitter as a digital research site to examine how students of Color

resist police presence in schools. For these students of Color activists, Twitter functions as a

unique space for counter-storytelling–what critical race theorists regard as “as a way to

illustrate and underscore broad legal principles regarding race and racial/social justice”from

the vantage point of the oppressed or marginalized (Ladson-Billings, 2021, p. 42). Twitter, as a

digital counter-storytelling space, remains pivotal as twenty-first century technological

EDI

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