ABSTRACT
In response to the far more severe punitive actions facing Black students as opposed to their white counterparts, the parents, teachers, and advocates of Black pupils often proclaim there to be a racial “double-standard” in school discipline that must be addressed. However, to make such a claim is to erase the standard of anti-Blackness that has long been set by the history of this world. The problems with seeking to “address” such disparities without addressing the anti-Blackness underlying them go beyond simple futility. Gendered disparity logics that do not account for anti-Blackness recognize the problems facing Black boys, but only to paint them as either uniquely targeted or uniquely uneducable men. As Calvin Warren states, Black students have a “different relationship to violence” than non-Black subjects, queer and female, because they have a “different relationship to ‘nothingness.’”.
