Harmonie Coleman
Harmonie is a master's candidate in HGSE's Teacher Education Program and will graduate in May of this year. As part of her program, she currently student teaches 7th grade ELA at Boston Latin Academy. Before coming to HGSE, Harmonie attended Emory University in Atlanta, GA and worked part-time counselling and tutoring students with disabilities. Through those experiences, she saw upsetting disparities in how disabled children of color were treated when compared with their white peers, and became invested in changing educational outcomes for these students. After graduation, Harmonie is looking forward to focusing more on this work as a special education teacher in New York City. This work is dedicated to her students: past, present, and future.
I began teaching at Emory Autism Center’s Walden preschool. To encourage inclusivity, the school welcomed both typically-developing and autistic children. I taught in the toddler classroom, where I changed hundreds of diapers, sang oodles of nursery rhymes, and played a number of invisible guitars. Our primary goal for the autistic children was the acquisition of language.
Michael, an autistic child, was two years old when he arrived at Walden. His main modes of communication were pointing and babbling; his parents had never heard him utter a word. Michael loved cheese bites, the playground, and most of all, the piano. I remember this because, to prevent him from crying, I often had to carry the little blue instrument with me throughout the day. By association, I became Michael’s favorite teacher. I conducted all his one to ones, or fifteen-minute, purposeful lessons. I’d stand up and hold my hands out, and try to get Michael to say “up.” I did this two times a day, three times a week, for four months. The fourth month, before I could even reach out my hands, Michael exclaimed “up” three times in a row. Smiling as he shouted the word to me, he jumped as high as his little legs would take him, and I scooped him up mid leap. In that moment, I knew that I wanted to be the kind of person who helped little boys and girls find the power to speak.
Later that year, life introduced me to 12-year-old Cleveland resident Tamir Rice. I met him the same day he stopped breathing. I saw his face—prepubescent and gleaming—on every media outlet’s late-night news and on everyone’s social media pages. His smile, cherub-like and not-quite-yet masculine, etched itself into my memory. Tamir received special education services. The day of his death, I imagine him playing at the park without a care in the world. I imagine him pretending to be a soldier, running around defending his fellow companions from the enemy. I imagine him pointing his toy-gun every which way, oblivious to how dangerous he may be perceived. I imagine him being confused at the sudden arrival of the police officers. Not alarmed. Just confused. I imagine him trying to explain that he was just doing his job… right before the first bullet hit his chest. I think about how these officers were so terrified of twelve-year-old Tamir that they shot first, and never asked any questions. I imagine their faces when they found out the gun was fake. And I am furious. In 2015, a jury found the officers not guilty. I am still furious.
With Michael, I saw what could happen when disabled children had access to equitable care and treatment. His growth excited me, and I remember my time at the autism center fondly. With Tamir, I saw what could happen when disabled kids were criminalized. I was eighteen when he was murdered. My exposure to “the real-world” was minimal, but I was paying enough attention to notice an important detail. The children I taught at Emory’s Autism Center, the children whom I so loved and protected, were predominantly white. Tamir, age twelve, was Black.
I have witnessed how we favor those whose bodies and minds are able. We stigmatize those whose struggles are visible, conveniently forgetting that we each have our own struggles, too. The artificial disability of race compounds this unequal treatment, making children who occupy the identities of both Black and disabled the most vulnerable. How do we determine which students are worthy of a quality education? And why do we value certain students’ educational—and life—trajectories over others? The answers to these questions are systemic. They are rooted in ideologies of racism and ableism and enforced by practices that degrade the communities in which little Black kids learn, live, and play. This essay seeks to address this purposeful degradation—and subsequent erasure—of those who are both Black and disabled from society. Why is it that we have grown comfortable with alienating those who most require our attention?
Black disabled students are uniquely disadvantaged by the legacy of segregation in the education system. While disabled students struggle to procure adequate treatment and fair placement, Black students are more likely to experience hyper-surveillance and resource-poor institutions because of systemic racism. Students who are both Black and disabled must grapple with both of these obstacles. Applying race to the study of disabled students’ experiences permits the use of intersectionality in an underemployed way. We often consider intersectionality in socioeconomic status, gender, and race, but less so when it comes to disability. Occupying the statuses of both disabled and Black exacerbates the already difficult processes of identification, treatment, and placement for disabled students through increased tracking, surveillance, and segregation.
Historically, the status of disabled individuals in the United States has been marginal. Throughout the 19th and much of the 20th century, disabled individuals were confined to institutions and often subject to sterilization (Pew Research Center, 2016). In keeping disability separate from society, disabled people were denied their personhood and agency. Indeed, “the fate of many individuals with disabilities was likely to be dim…In 1967, for example, state institutions were homes for almost 200,000 persons with significant disabilities. Many of these restrictive settings provided only minimal food, clothing, and shelter. Too often, persons with disabilities…were merely accommodated rather than assessed, educated, and rehabilitated” (US Department of Education, 2010). It was only in 1975 that the Education for All Handicapped Children Act was written into law, providing equal access to free public education for disabled children. Most recently, in 1990, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) allowed for the inclusion of parental voices and the development of Individual Education Plans (IEPs). Today, schools’ accreditation and grading processes include their IDEA compliance. IEPs must be detailed, comprehensive. Schools are also required to submit demographics of students served under IDEA to their state departments of education and the federal department of education. These demographics include grade level, disability type, and racial identity. In American schools, Black students lead all racial demographics in students receiving special education services under IDEA (National Center for Education Statistics, 2018).
Today, many of American schools are nearly as racially and socioeconomically segregated as they were before Brown1 (Breslow, 2014). Over 2 million Black students attend schools with 90 percent racial minority students (Cook, 2015). The United States, home of educational segregation, maintains this title chiefly because of housing segregation and geographic isolation. Although the existence of segregation itself does not necessitate poor outcomes for Black students, it does lend itself to greater resource disparity. These resource disparities translate to academic disparities very early in children’s lives. In a U.S. News & World Report on school segregation post-Brown, reporter Lindsey Cook writes that “by age 2, disparities already show between Black and white children. Fewer Black children demonstrate proficiency in development skills such as receptive vocabulary, expressive vocabulary, matching, early counting, math, color knowledge, numbers and shapes” (Cook, 2015). These disparities clearly become exacerbated when children enter schools, with significant consequences for disabled Black students. For schools with less financial capital, special education services can become altogether non-existent. Just as Black students are less likely to have experienced teachers, disabled students are less likely as well (Holdheide & DeMonte, 2016). In fact, “teacher shortages may be the most acute problem in special education,” as “47 states reported shortages of special education teachers” for the 2013-2014 school year (Holdheide & DeMonte, 2016). It is thus evident that structurally Black disabled students experience a double disadvantage by the current education system.
Beyond this, the definitions of ability and whiteness have been virtually inseparable from slavery to the present-day. Coupled with the powerful persistence of racial stereotypes, insidious measures of ‘intelligence’ taint school-level interactions today. For example, IQ testing has been hugely influential in how we conceive of both race and intelligence. Alfred Binet developed the average IQ from a sample of white, middle-class children, chosen for the test specifically because their teachers deemed their performance as “average” (Siegler 1992). But it is worth asking: average for whom? The children tested had a very specific set of cultural knowledge. They also had been subjected to formal instruction, resulting in an academic skill-set much greater than children with less privilege. So, was their success on Binet’s test due to ability or racial bias? Binet’s test was originally conceptualized to identify students lagging in school, and eventually provide them with remedial services. Instead, it manifested into a means of perpetuating the subjugation of those already living in the margins. In schools across the country, Black children are overrepresented in special education programming whilst white children are overrepresented in gifted education (National Center for Education Statistics, 2018).
The overrepresentation of Black students in special education is a widely-recognized issue in the field of educational policy (Klingner et al., 2005). But what exactly happens to Black students when schools place—or funnel—them into the special education system? Immediately, these students receive a label, and this stigmatized label follows them all throughout their educational careers. We have heard of the term “school to prison pipeline,” but a “special education to prison pipeline” exists in our society as well. The US—despite making up only five percent of the world’s population—accounts for twenty-five percent of the world’s prisoners (Bronson, 2015). Of America’s ridiculously large prison population, sixty-one percent are people of color. Of that population, roughly thirty percent possess a disability (Bronson, 2015). The term “school to prison pipeline” refers to the contact that students have with the carceral system as a result of certain educational practices, like over-policing and zero-tolerance policies. For kids who may have behavior or emotional issues due to a disability, this pipeline is even more prominent. With this in mind, can we trace this population back to their educational experiences? And if so, what does that say about the special education services—or lack thereof—that these people receive as children?
To equip Black disabled students with the same skills that white, typically-developing children receive is still a disservice. Rather than equality, we should be working toward equity. Whereas solutions with equality in mind necessitate sameness, equitable solutions mandate fairness. This requires radicalism. In Michele Foster’s Black Teachers on Teaching (Foster, 1998), one experienced teacher stated: “I do talk about the ills of capitalism, but I don’t use those words. We discuss why it’s wrong to go to school just to make a lot of money or why it’s wrong to sell drugs to make money” (Foster, 1998, p. 179). Since then, I would contend that teaching has become even more political, particularly when teaching the children for which this work is written. We do our students a disservice when we claim they are too young or too inexperienced or too abnormal to comprehend things that impact us all. In a world that outright demonizes and “others” children who are both Black and disabled, educating them and teaching them their rights is the practice of freedom.1Brown vs. Board of Education declared school racial segregation illegal in 1954.