“I was called everything but a student”: Blackness and the Social Death of Student Status

Abstract

Using the conceptual tools of anti-Blackness and the Black habitus to analyze the interviews of 38 Black youth who lived and grew up in Baltimore City, this study contends that the negative associations placed on Black youth continue to dehumanize them and prevent them from the full embodiment of student status. This article explores Blackness and its relationship with the privileges and immunities of student status within America’s collective consciousness. Through the voices of Black youth, this article provides evidence that Black students in Baltimore have not been fully granted the immunity of student status. Instead, Black youth participants describe harm in their schools and neighborhoods, as well as a tenuous relationship between Blackness and “studentness.”