Knowledge Day 5
By: Na’Riyah McKinney
I’ve spent this whole summer chasing one question: how policies quietly reshape the lives of Black women without ever naming them. Most days that story hides in bill text and budget lines, and I have to go digging for it. Then I watched Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools, and for once the story climbed out of the footnotes and looked right back at me.
The 2019 documentary, directed by Jacoba Atlas and co-written with Dr. Monique W. Morris, is based on Morris’s book of the same name. Its argument is blunt: Black girls are punished, pushed out, and criminalized in school for behavior that would read as ordinary in any other child and the cauf isn’t a handful of cruel teachers, it’s a web of discipline policies, cultural assumptions, and implicit bias working together. The film builds its case around “adultification,” the habit of seeing Black girls as older, angrier, more sexual, and more responsible for themselves than they actually are, and around “insubordination,” a charge vague enough to become the paperwork that removes a girl from her own classroom. It lets girls as young as seven narrate their own lives. Morris’s north star, the line I keep turning over, is her wish for schools to become locations for healing so that they can become locations for learning.
Here’s what it gets exactly right. The film names the precise mechanism my Capstone is about. A dress code, a zero-tolerance rule, an “insubordination” line buried in a student handbook, none of them say the words “Black girl,” and all of them fall hardest on her. That’s indirect harm made visible in a way a legislative tracker never could be. It also refuses to shrink these girls into statistics; it treats their feelings as evidence, which is the exact practice I’ve been trying to build in my own research. And it gets the intersection right: you cannot do racial justice for only half a population, or gender justice only for the girls who fit a narrow, middle-class idea of “good.”
But watching it as someone who spent the summer inside the policy machinery, I kept noticing what it leaves at the edge of the frame. The film diagnoses the wound beautifully and then hands the cure almost entirely to individual schools and heroic mentors; the restorative-practice classroom, the leadership collective, the one teacher who finally sees a kid. Those matter enormously. But I spent June and July color-coding Florida’s 2026 legislative session and watching a bill I’d tracked in Georgia die in committee, and that work taught me the punitive discipline in Pushout doesn’t begin in the classroom. It begins upstream, in statutes and funding formulas and school-board codes written by people who will never meet a girl like Somaya. The film shows the harm at full volume; it spends far less time in the room where the policy is actually written, which is the room I’ve been learning to walk into. A viewer could finish it believing the fix is kinder adults, when the deeper fix is changing the rules we hand those adults.
I’d add one more thing, from running an education-focused nonprofit and from moving between Miami and rural Georgia this summer: the Pushout story doesn’t look the same everywhere. The film’s Miami and Oakland don’t map cleanly onto a place like Jones County, where the nearest alternative program might be an hour’s drive away. The dynamics are national; the policy levers are stubbornly local. That’s less a flaw than an invitation, a door the film opens that I think my Capstone can walk further through.
When I started blogging this summer, I wrote about learning to notice the things I’d normally walk past. Pushout is a film about girls who are impossible to miss and somehow never truly seen, hyper-visible as “problems,” invisible as children being harmed. Making that invisible harm visible is the whole reason I chose my CBI, and it’s the contribution I most want to leave behind. This film reminded me why the footnotes matter. There are real seven-year-olds living inside them.
Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools A clip from the short-film linked and researched.
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