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My research agenda focuses on Black girls with disabilities caught up in the school-prison nexus. Grace's story is why. Her story is not unique but so disturbing & common-We criminalized Black disabled girls daily #DisCrit #DisabilitySolidarity #BlackLivesMatter 
#SayHerName https://twitter.com/jbrownedianis/status/1283024482618290176
#SayHerName https://twitter.com/jbrownedianis/status/1283024482618290176
We are incarcerating Black girls in a pandemic for not doing (boring) online schoolwork because our commitment to punishing Black girls is so strong. Even when teachers reject criminalization, schooling's arbitrary rules are used to construct Black girls as criminals 2/ #DisCrit
There are about 45,000 children in youth prisons. Though the number has decreased significantly since 2000, the racial and gender disparities are growing. The population of Black girls incarcerated for minor crimes is significant. 3/ DisCrit
Though girls are underrepresented in youth prisons overall, Girls of Color are overrepresented. Black girls are three-and-a-half times as likely as white girls to be incarcerated. 4/ #DisCrit https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/incarcerated-women-and-girls/
Disabled youth are also overrepresented in youth prisons. In public schools, youth with disabilities is about 14% of population. That number increases to at least 33% of the youth prison population. 5/ #DisCrit https://neglected-delinquent.ed.gov/fast-facts/united-states#students_served
When combined with race, these disparities are exacerbated even further with Black youth with disabilities accounting for 50% of students with disabilities in youth prisons. 6/ #DisCrit https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1188495.pdf
Though we can assume Black girls with disabilities are overrepresented in youth prisons given the trends, we actually do not know because we have such poor reporting in youth prisons. I am looking for funding to change this if anyone has a lead! 7/ #DisCrit
“Students in special education have been traditionally been imagined as a protected class in schools, but, in fact, have rarely been protected from the deleterious effects of disproportionate disciplinary actions, poor curriculum, and problematic pedagogy” (p. 39) 8/ #DisCrit
This quote is from my book focusing on the education trajectories of Black girls and other Girls of Color through the school-prison nexus. Named nexus because there are a web of institutions, policies, & histories that links schools & prisons. 9/ #DisCrit https://www.routledge.com/The-Pedagogy-of-Pathologization-Dis-abled-girls-of-color-in-the-school-prison/Annamma/p/book/9781138696907
Just understand that this trend is not new. Black girls with disabilities are being criminalized for minor behaviors. But because of decarceration, language of the worst of the worst justifies incarcerating them during a pandemic for not doing their homework 10/ #DisCrit
By the way-the goal is not to say well some deserve to be there but let the ones go that did something minor like Grace. Instead we demand that ALL Black girls (& all youth) be released because youth prisons do not show to have quality education or improved outcomes 11/ #DisCrit
I found that once incarcerated, adults used language of criminal thinking to convince themselves that Black girls' thinking was so manipulative that they had to be incarcerated to fix it. They used ableism, racism & misogynoir to label, surveil & punish Black girls 12/ #DisCrit
Youth prisons do not keep us safe from crime or rehabilitate incarcerated youth. They do not address the contexts of lack of access to resources like health care, child care, or quality schools. They focus on fixing Black girls, blaming them for life circumstances 13/ #DisCrit
Grace's case is important because it is normal. Anti-Blackness & white supremacy are dependent on ableism to suggest that Black disabled girls' behaviors & thinking are so damaged that only jail can fix them. What jails really do is remove them from public memory 14/ #DisCrit
Grace's case should make you an abolitionist. #GynnyaMcMillen's case should make you an abolitionist. Disabled Black girls-ALL Black girls-deserve better than we have given them. #SchoolToPrisonPipeline #DefundJuvenileJustice #AbolishYouthPrisons #AbolishPrisons #FreeThemAll
