We need to\u00a0talk about the sixteen-year-old South Carolina girl thrown from her desk<\/a> by a police officer this week. First, some background:<\/p>\n Tony Robinson Jr., who recorded the final moments, said it all began when the teacher asked the girl to hand over her phone during class. She refused, so he called an administrator, who summoned the officer.<\/p>\n \u201cThe administrator tried to get her to move and pleaded with her to get out of her seat,\u201d Robinson told WLTX. \u201cShe said she really hadn\u2019t done anything wrong. She said she took her phone out, but it was only for a quick second, you know, please, she was begging, apologetic.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cNext, the administrator called Deputy Fields in. \u2026 He asked, \u2018Will you move?\u2019 and she said \u2018No, I haven\u2019t done anything wrong,'\u201d Robinson said.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I saw what was going to happen, my immediate first thing to think was, let me get this on camera. This was going to be something \u2026 that everyone else needs to see, something that we can\u2019t just let this pass by.\u201d<\/p>\n Districts across the country put officers in schools after teenagers massacred fellow students at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999. Schools now routinely summon police to discipline students, experts say.<\/p>\n \u201cKids are not criminals, by the way. When they won\u2019t get up, when they won\u2019t put up the phone, they\u2019re silly, disobedient kids \u2014 not criminals,\u201d said John Whitehead, founder of the Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties and human rights organization.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n You can see the video in this clip here:<\/p>\nhttps:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=-QXqD2HsxAQ<\/a>\n It turns out that the girl\u2019s mother just died\u00a0and she is currently living in foster care<\/a>.<\/p>\n Also, it is being reported\u00a0that the officer in question is a \u201cschool resource officer<\/a>,\u201d one of two assigned to the school. Can I say how uncomfortable this makes me, as a mother? What happened to trying to work with students and help them grow in positive and productive ways? Now we skip all that and go straight to criminalizing them? And can I say how understandable it is that the girl had her phone out, given her recent loss? Aren\u2019t teachers supposed to take these sorts of things into account, and to serve as mentors to needy students like this one?<\/p>\n Let\u2019s not ignore the role race plays here, or the fact that this has happened before<\/a>.<\/p>\n News surrounding a confrontation in a Baltimore school is raising new questions about the role race plays in discipline for black girls. Baltimore television station WBAL has been reporting on an October incident that led to three students at the city\u2019s Vanguard Middle School being injured, and later arrested and suspended, after\u00a0an altercation with a school security officer<\/a>.<\/p>\n School officials have supported the officer\u2019s assertion that she was attacked, kicked and punched by the girls, but the school\u2019s security tape shows something more complicated. By the end of the incident, the officer had struck one of the girls repeatedly with her baton \u2014 causing an injury that required multiple stitches \u2014 and pepper sprayed the two others. All three girls required treatment at a hospital.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The problem is systemic.<\/p>\n It\u2019s just one incident of many that have played out across the country in which reported misconducted by black girls at school prompts a seemingly disproportionate \u2014 and often violent \u2014 response by school and local authorities.<\/p>\n But why? That\u2019s what Columbia University law professor Kimberle Williams Crenshaw and her associates, Priscilla Ocen and Jyoti Nanda, set out to explain in their study,\u00a0Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced and Underprotected<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n They examined data from public schools in Boston and New York City, and the results are startling: Girls of color, and especially black girls, are subject to discipline that is harsher and more frequent than that of their white peers, and are six times more likely to be suspended than white girls. The racial disparities in punishment are greater for girls than for boys.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Racialized discipline and the criminalization of children affects black boys as well as black girls. Let\u2019s not forget this video<\/a> from earlier this month:<\/p>\n