“Stay in a Child’s Place”: Adult Authority in Schooling in the Louisiana Delta

Abstract

It is well documented that Black children are disproportionately suspended and expelled in schools, but less explored is the importance of place in shaping disciplinary decision-making and student experiences of punishment. Drawing on over a year of ethnographic work at Abundance Junior High School (AJHS), a predominantly Black school of 150 students, I argue that school discipline in the rural northeast Louisiana Delta is shaped by racial, spatial, and social dimensions of place. Specifically, I argue that treatment and punishment of Black children in schools is shaped by (1) cultural expectations that they remain in “a child’s place,” a social position characterized by obedience and deference, and (2) socialization reinforcing respectability and compliance with authority informed by historical and contemporary threats of racial violence and Louisiana’s carceral logics. I conclude by discussing how these disciplinary and socialization practices, while motivated in part by the desire to protect Black children, ultimately reproduce forms of social control and harm students.