Sept. 14 | Dr. Bettina Love - Punished for Dreaming at Politics and Prose Conn. Ave Store
Our Author Series partnership with Politics & Prose Bookstores continues, September 14, 2023 at 7:00pm for a discussion with Dr. Bettina Love — Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal - with Tony Keith Jr. — at their Conn. Ave. store.
In Punished for Dreaming Dr. Bettina Love argues forcefully that Reagan's presidency ushered in a War on Black Children, pathologizing and penalizing them in concert with the War on Drugs. New policies punished schools with policing, closure, and loss of funding in the name of reform, as white savior, egalitarian efforts increasingly allowed private interests to infiltrate the system. These changes implicated children of color, and Black children in particular, as low performing, making it all too easy to turn a blind eye to their disproportionate conviction and incarceration. Today, there is little national conversation about a structural overhaul of American schools; cosmetic changes, rooted in anti-Blackness, are now passed off as justice.
