How are carcerality and antiblackness embedded in educational organizations? Racial upheaval in 2020 started conversations and created opportunities to understand how carcerality and antiblackness are entangled. This article draws on participant observations from two large research projects in California—one in an urban context and the other in an agricultural landscape—to provide a symptomatic reading of responses to demands to defund school police in 2020. Our findings show how “safety” and “protection” were shared grievances that countered demands to defund school police in one context and oblique identifications with blackness in another. We conclude with recommendations for researchers and practitioners who want to attend to the anti-Black logics that make and remake educational carcerality.
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