It’s everyone’s favorite topic in a capitalistic society, of course! MONEY.

So, let me start by asking, what is a child worth?

Don’t answer that, yet. I know what you want to say, “Priceless, innocent…the future.” But, I’m not asking what they should be worth. I’m asking what the system says they are worth.

Fortunately and unfortunately, the system tells us.

Back in Part 1, I wrote about English capitalists who prioritized private ownership, competition, and individual wealth accumulation. I wrote about Dr. Cedric Robinson’s racial capitalism— the argument that slavery, violence, imperialism, and genocide were not side effects of capitalism but its engines. I also wrote that Black bodies were not incidental to the accumulation of wealth during the Transatlantic Slave Trade, but they were its revenue source.

Hold that.

Now let’s talk about what a commodity actually is, because that word is doing a lot of work in my dissertation and it deserves precision in this series.

Karl Marx (1867) defines a commodity as an object that satisfies human wants of some sort or another. He distinguished between use value (the utility of an object) and exchange value (the price of said object on a market). But Marx’s framework has limits here, because chattel slavery predates full industrial capitalism and he was primarily theorizing factory labor. Anthony Farley, professor of Jurisprudence takes us further. In The Apogee of the Commodity and The Black Body as Fetish Object, Farley argues that within the system of capitalism, humanity is ownership, and individuals are either owners or commodities that can be bought and sold. The Transatlantic Slave Trade transformed complex human beings into what he calls “readily changeable objects”— a form of human commodification that reduced human beings to objects that can be easily bought, sold, or altered by a market-based system. However, it is Igor Kopytoff’s 1986 framework that I want to anchor this post to, because it captures something the others miss. Kopytoff doesn’t define commodity as a fixed state. Instead, he defines it as a process with tension between two conditions:

1. Commoditization — being treated as something that can be bought and sold.

2. Singularization — being treated as unique, sacred, and outside the market.

If we examine chattel slavery using Kopytoff’s framework, it was the violent imposition of the commodity state onto a person. In other words, to be enslaved was not simply to be owned, but it was to be forcibly removed from the category of the human and inserted into the category of the exchangeable, the evaluated, and then sold, while the fullness of your personhood continued to exist beneath the price tag the market placed on the body.

So, I’ll be using Kopytoff's framework for this post because it names something that is still happening. In schools, specifically in special education, Black students are not dehumanized in the absolute sense like during chattel slavery; Black children remain recognizable as children, as students, and as members of classrooms in schools. But they are also subjected to a mechanism of classification: A Black child is a child — singularized, loved by their friends and family, and irreplaceable. However, they are also commodified with an IEP, an education disability label, and a restrictive placement with a price tag attached.

In New York City, that price tag is roughly $42,000 per school year as of 2025. For a child placed in a separate special education school, the price tag climbs to almost $100,000. For a child in a different state, the price tag might be lower or higher, not because the child's needs have changed, but because the funding formula dictates it.

NYC Special Education Process

But, before we continue to follow the money, let’s follow the child.

In New York City, the special education process goes like this:

Step 1: A letter is received from a parent or educator requesting a special education evaluation.

Already, the child is not in the room, but the conversation is about them, not with them.

Step 2: The school-based support team social worker schedules a social history meeting with the parent.

This is where the parent learns their rights, and it is also where they learn how hard it will be to use them.

Step 3: Parent consents to the evaluation and signs the form.

One signature starts the federal countdown (60 days to complete an evaluation).

Step 4: The school psychologist assesses the student (cognitive and academic and/or behavioral depending on the referral concern).

Tests may be normed on a diverse population, but they’ve been designed around white, middle-class, English-speaking expectations of language, knowledge, and behavior. Thus, the results confirm what the referral already assumed.

Step 5: The school psychologist writes the report and schedules an IEP meeting.

The narrative is written before the parent sees it, and the recommendations are already drafted based on the results of the testing, teacher reports, and student educational documents.

Step 6: The IEP meeting is held with parent(s)/guardian(s), school psychologist, teachers, student (if they’re 14 years or older), and district representative.

A room full of educators telling a parent what is “wrong” with their child and the parent signs off because someone told them special education is “additional help.”

Step 7: If found eligible, the student receives an IEP and a placement is made.

The child is now an additional line item in the school’s budget.

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Let's Talk About the Price Tag

According to the New York State Comptroller, IDEA funding passes through the New York State Education Department (NYSED) and is allocated by the City’s Department of Education (DOE) to schools based on both census and poverty data. Additionally, IDEA funds are only to be used for special education students, which includes any service required by a student’s IEP (Individualized Education Program) such as academic, behavioral and/or health aides, school psychologists, other IEP-related services, staff training, and parent education.

During the 2025 fiscal year, the New York State Education Department allocated $302 million in IDEA funding. However, this total does not include an additional $44 million that was set aside for students whose parents placed them in non-public schools—private or separate special education schools where students with disabilities are placed at the expense of public funds when it has been determined that the public school cannot meet the child’s needs associated with their educational disability.

Earlier this year, NYC’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced a $5.4 billion city budget shortfall, pointing to chronic underfunding in six key areas. One major driver was “Carter−case"spending on due process cases (and NYC DOE is happy to give parents whatever they want, especially when lawyers and advocates are involved, but that’s a story for another day), which hit $1.3 billion in 2025, almost twice the amount of what was budgeted and nearly a quarter of the overall deficit. The current 2025-2026 school year is said to spend approximately $42,000 per student in schools, which is nearly double the national average at $21,065 per pupil, and the number is even higher for students with IEPs.

Now, New York City’s first draft of the 2026 budget included $291 million in federal IDEA money for future school years. That is about 14% of all federal education aid and nearly 6% of what the Department of Education spends specifically on special education. The city also added $13.5 million, raising IDEA funding to $304 million, which sounds great in theory until you find out that most of the funds went to supporting staff salaries instead of the students’ needs.

What Disability Was Invented to Do

To understand why the funding stream works the way it does, we first have to re-emphasize what the American economy was built on, and what it has always required of Black bodies.

The US economy as we know it was not built despite slavery. The US economy as we know it today was built because of it. Author Edward Baptist provides direct data-driven evidence in his book, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by demonstrating that cotton picked by enslaved African hands in the American South was the primary engine of American capitalism. Additionally, the wealth generated by the forced labor of Black bodies financed the banks, the insurance industries, the textile mills, and railroads across the country. The slave plantation was not a pre-capitalist remnant it was capitalism’s first factory, and as discussed in Part 1 of this series, the labor that made it run was extracted from Black bodies that had been legally, scientifically, and theologically redefined as property.

So, when slavery was abolished, the capitalist economy did not stop requiring cheap, controllable, and extractable labor. Instead, it required an evolved system for managing who worked, who was compensated, and who was contained, which is where Deborah Stone’s foundational argument in The Disabled State (1984) becomes essential in understanding this intersection of capital, commodification, and disability. Stone argued that disability did not emerge as a neutral medical category (and we can see that clearly in Parts 1-6 of this series). She argues that disability emerged as a boundary category— a sorting mechanism created by eugenicists, industrialists and reformers to manage the labor supply in early industrial capitalism. People were allocated to either a work-based system of distribution (you are productive, you earn wages) or a needs-based system (you cannot produce, the state provides for you aka the welfare state).

Disability was the gateway between the two.

Stone also argues that the disability category was essential to the development of an exploitable workforce in early capitalism and remains indispensable as an instrument of the state in controlling the labor supply today. This can be seen most relevant through the prison industrial complex which Michelle Alexander defines in her book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness as a system of racial control that funnels Black bodies into a cycle of incarceration to maintain the racial hierarchy. The numbers make the racial dimension of this control explicit: according to an April 2026 report by the Prison Population Initiative, 40% of all incarcerated individuals have a disability, compared to 15% of the general population. The report also confirmed that although Black people make up roughly 13% of the U.S. population, they comprise approximately 37% of the total prison and jail population.

You see, the boundary of disability had to be contained. When we examine the intersection of race, the boundary then had to be policed. If too many people crossed into the needs-based system, the labor pool would shrink and the economy would suffer. If the "wrong" people crossed such as people who were actually capable of working, then the logic of the capitalist system would collapse.

Disability and Blackness are not incidental to the carceral system, just as they were not incidental to the plantation (as I traced in Parts 1 and 2 of this series), Blackness and disability were co-constructed to mean the same thing: to be Black was to be presumed physically, intellectually, and morally deficient to justify enslavement, and to be disabled was to be rendered as unproductive, containable, and Black. Today’s carceral system did not invent this logic, but it inherited it. Alexander further argues that the prison industrial complex is a profit driven system where those imprisoned are forced to work for pennies while their labor is extracted and sold to multinational corporations such as McDonalds, Target, and Walmart to name a few—which means that the Black body, first commodified on the slave auction block, later classified out of the labor market through disability, is now re-inserted into production through a prison cell.

And the school is now where that process begins.

Now bring that lens forward into a New York City public school building.

The special education classification system is that boundary, but updated. A child on the work-based side of the line is a general education student expected to produce grades, test scores, compliant behavior, and eventually labor through the workforce. A child sorted to the needs-based side carries an IEP, a disability label, low academic achievement, a restrictive educational placement, and additional per-pupil financial allocation. The disability category does not just describe the child, but it determines which economic system they belong to, and it generates the funding stream that makes their containment financially sustainable for the institution managing them, both in and outside the educational system.

And the funding data confirms it.

Researchers have been tracking this stream for decades. A 2002 study by the Manhattan Institute compared “bounty” states (which pay schools more per special education student) to “lump-sum” states (which do not). The results determined that bounty states saw special education enrollment grow twice as fast over a decade, adding approximately 390,000 students at a cost of over $2.3 billion per year. Ultimately, the study argued that the system rewards labeling, not need. Then, in 2005, Mahitivanichcha and Parrish reviewed evidence across multiple states and found that all funding formulas for special education contain incentives, but the effects of those incentives are inconsistent. The study concluded that since every funding formula has incentives, policymakers should choose the ones that promote inclusion, not segregation.

Those earlier studies established a pattern, but later research showed where the money actually flows.

A 2017 study of New York City looked directly at the money. The study confirmed that in 2015, the NYC DOE spent $91,000 per student in separate special education schools (like D75), which is nearly five times what it spent on general education students at the time, and almost double what is spent on students with the same disabilities in integrated classrooms. However, that extra money did not produce equal outcomes as students with disabilities still graduated at half the rate of their peers. Ultimately, the funding stream does not follow the child, instead it follows the building, and separate special education schools (aka non-public schools) get vastly more money. A 2018 analysis of special education funding found that NYC charter schools receive a base tuition of $14,527 per student. On top of that, schools receive additional funding based on the number of service minutes a student’s IEP requires. For example, a student who spends 20-60% percent of their week receiving services generates an extra $10,390 for the school. In city after city, from Atlanta to Washington D.C. to Los Angeles to New York the amount of money a school receives depends on the severity of the disability classification, not the cost of actually serving the child. Finally, a 2026 systematic review of special education funding research spanning 24 studies across Europe and the United States confirmed what earlier studies have predicted. Special education funding models create diagnostic incentives. So, more students identified with a disability means more money. As one research team put it, the system runs on "diagnosis for dollars."

However, the funding data does not reveal a broken system, instead it reveals a system that has simply updated its accounting software and mechanisms. Kopytoff's commodity-as-process framework helps us see what the budget lines actually are: a formalized mechanism for assigning exchange value to children with disabilities based on the severity of their perceived deficits. However, since Black students are overrepresented in special education in what is considered to be a "high incidence" disability category, meaning disabilities that are more common because they occur in approximately 1 in 10 school-age children, the more high-needs the label, the higher the per-pupil funding allocation. The more restrictive the placement, the larger the school building's budget. The child's singularity which includes their personhood, their potential, their irreplaceability disappears into a funding category. What remains is the exchange value the system has assigned to their diagnosed condition. This is commodification not as metaphor but as public policy. The slave plantation evaluated Black bodies by their capacity for labor, and that evaluation was codified in slave law, property rights, and the legal architecture of chattel slavery. The special education funding formula evaluates Black minds by the severity of their certified (in)ability, and that evaluation is codified in IDEA legislation, state funding formulas, and the procedural machinery of the IEP itself. Just as chattel slavery was codified by policy, special education is also codified by policy, and both systems function to evaluate, classify, and contain the Black body for economic ends.

That is not an accident, it is a designed outcome of the legislation and functioning of special education when you have a history of treating Black bodies as currency.

Disability Capital and the Interest That Converges

When a child's perceived deficits can be translated into a higher per-pupil funding allocation, those deficits are no longer just a diagnosis, they become a form of capital. This is what scholars call disability capital— a child’s perceived deficits transformed into institutional assets. Their “needs” are quantified, assigned a dollar value, and entered into a ledger which is precisely what Marta Russell called the money model of disability: the argument that disability oppression is driven not only by stigma but by financial measurement, and that the system's treatment of disabled people cannot be separated from what those people are worth to the institutions managing them.

The child’s disability becomes a revenue stream. In NYC alone, 20% of the student population has an IEP and receives special education services which is above the national average of 15%. During the 2015-2016 school year, 19% of the general student population identified as Black, however, Black students represented 31% of the population of students with disabilities. Black students who had an IEP were more than twice as likely to be labeled with an Emotional Disturbance and are more likely to be served in District 75 (an “illegal” school district that serves students with high incidence disabilities or students with highly specialized needs) at 11% of the population. During the 2023-2024 school year, here is the data from the three schools where I used to work as a school psychologist:

• School A—

  • Total enrollment: 486 students

  • 331 students (68%) are racialized as Black

  • 407 students (84%) are considered economically disadvantaged

  • 103 students (21%) have been identified with an educational disability and require an IEP

• School B—

  • Total enrollment: 229 students

  • 139 students (61%) are racialized as Black

  • 193 students (84%) are considered economically disadvantaged

  • 43 students (19%) have been identified with an educational disability and require an IEP

• School C—

  • Total enrollment: 367 students

  • 216 students (59%) are racialized as Black

  • 308 students (84%) are considered economically disadvantaged

  • 94 students (26%) have been identified with an educational disability and require an IEP

What these numbers tell me is simple: across all three schools, Black students made up 59–68% of enrollment, economic disadvantage sat at a staggering 84% in every single building, and disability identification rates ran between 19–26% which is above the national average of 15%. Many scholars have examined similar data, see the correlation to poverty, and will say Black students are overrepresented in special education because poverty creates need. However, need alone does not explain why Black students are twice as likely to be labeled with an Emotional Disturbance, nor does need explain why 84% of the students in those school buildings are economically disadvantaged, yet, the need for special education falls squarely on them, thus pathologizing their victimhood to circumstances created and perpetuated by public policy.

So if poverty does not explain it, what does?

This is also Derrick Bell's interest convergence at its most material. Only here, the interest that converges is financial. As mentioned in Part 5, Bell argued that Brown v. Board was only possible because ending formal segregation also served the interests of white policymakers. Integration, in other words, happened because it was convenient, not because it was fair. Today, that same logic produces a different outcome. Special education has become the new segregation, by financial design. But we must be precise about what is being preserved. As Jarvis R. Givens and Ashley Ison (2022) write in their review of 19th-century American education, the architects of that era expressed "a commitment to maintaining Black people as a distinguishable group to be superexploited for their labor and as living representations of all that was to be condemned." Once the 2004 reauthorization of IDEA mandated that local education agencies reserve the maximum amount of funds to provide early intervening services, particularly for children in groups that have been significantly over-identified, the system gained a direct financial incentive to find (aka Child find), label, and contain. When we consider the through-line we have been tracing and apply the historical lens of racialized disablement, the Black child's overrepresentation in special education is not just a racial harm. The harm is also a financial mechanism that serves the economic interests of the institution doing the labeling.

Suddenly, the clinical decision made in IEP meetings is not only a clinical decision, but a fiscal reality that the parent sitting across the table almost certainly knows nothing about.

The System In Its Own Words

I want to pause the theory here. Because sometimes the most precise thing is not a framework, but a voice.

What follows is a very condensed and anonymized interview with a veteran school administrator in a large urban school district, conducted with their permission. We spoke about the daily realities of supporting students classified with Emotional Disturbance, the role of race, and the invisible machinery of funding and compliance.

This is the system, speaking for itself:

There is no theorizing here, because this is the lived architecture of the system of special education.

This is what Kathie Snow calls the disability industrial complex— a money-driven system of disability services that treats people with disabilities as the “raw material.” And nowhere is this disability industrial complex more evident than in NYC where billions of dollars are spent on special education while Black students with ED are more than twice as likely as their peers to be placed in restrictive, self-contained classrooms, and represent more than 50% of suspended students with disabilities which funnels them into the school-to-prison pipeline. The raw material, in this case, is not cotton, nor is it the labor of a Black body in a field, factory or prison. Black students identified with educational disabilities are the raw material in NYC public schools.

Conclusion

Just as the 'fractional hand' system of American chattel slavery evaluated Black bodies by their labor potential for the plantation's profit and named drapetomania — the desire for freedom a mental illness, emancipation without land or labor rights became a new form of enslavement. Eugenics gave us the IQ test, which sustained the racial hierarchy created during chattel slavery that placed Blackness at the bottom. Private asylums became prisons that overwhelmingly contain Black bodies. Brown v. Board promised integration, but special education became the new segregation. And now, the special education funding formula evaluates Black minds by their “need” while expanding the school district’s budget.

So, if Black children are overrepresented in special education, and the data says they are, then Black children are also overrepresented in the revenue stream. Thus, when a system financially profits from labeling the Black body as deficient, have we actually left the plantation?

Until next time,
Alexandria

Next in The Anatomy of a System: How institutional documents continue historical logics of classification, surveillance, and containment for Black students in special education.

This is the seventh post in The Anatomy of a System: Special Education Edition, a series tracing the historical through-line of racialized disablement and commodification in special education.

© Alexandria Lockhart, 2026. All rights reserved. For permissions, see the permissions page.

With today marking the 55th anniversary of Bernard Coard's 'How the West Indian Child Is Made Educationally Subnormal' (1971) I felt it most appropriate to share this piece I wrote in 2023.

The patterning of labeling and displacement of Black students in special education is structured in oppression and its continuation represents a form of tacit intentionality. According to Gillborn (2005), tacit intentionality is a Gramscian view of the world based on knowing unknowingness. I posit that the racist outcomes apparent within special education may not be coldly calculated but are also far from accidental. Initially published in 1971, How the West Indian Child Is Made Educationally Sub-normal in the British School System (Bernard Coard) explains in clarity the disproportionately and wrongly enrolled Black children of West Indian descent in educationally subnormal schools (ESN). According to Coard (1971), educationally subnormal schools were schools for ‘Children with Learning Difficulties,’ schools for the ‘Emotionally and Behaviorally disturbed,’ (EBD), and ‘Pupil Referral Units (PRUs).

What is perhaps the most powerful about How the West Indian Child Is Made Educationally Sub-normal in the British School System is the principal term, ‘Weapons of Mass Suppression’(WMS) that the author describes as tools, such as placement in ESN schools and remedial classes in regular schools, assigning less resources and less experienced teachers as well as preventing students from being permitted to sit exams at a level which would open up more educational opportunities to suppress Black Caribbean children’s educational and life prospects. The consequences of these various weapons of mass suppression are displayed throughout the book both quantitatively and qualitatively as Coard shares anecdotes from teachers, parents and children and results from the 1967 Education of Immigrant Pupils in Special Schools for Educationally Subnormal Children (ILEA 657).

Coard’s voice is clearly heard and felt in the text’s various chapters. The first chapter of the book is what Coard has called, “West Indian Children in ESN (Special) Schools in Britain,” straight to the point: he breaks down how West Indian children have been placed in ESN schools, starting with discussing the various legislations that have engaged in Gillborn’s coined term, tacit intentionality— how racial inequities in education may not be explicitly planned or a deliberate goal of education policy, but nor is it accidental. ESN children were defined in the Education Act of 1921 as those who were not merely dull and backward, but who needed special education (Coard, 1971, p. 4). Local education authorities were directed by the 1944 Education Act to provide special educational treatment to children with disabilities of mind or body through special schools or other means (p. 4). Coard makes it evident that despite what the legislation intended, ESN schools are nothing more than a tool used to socialize West Indian children to survive instead of thrive.

In Chapter 2, Coard goes into detail about how West Indian children are wrongfully placed through three biases that are present during the assessment of the child for special education:

1. The Cultural Bias: The West Indian child’s choice of words, usage, and meaning of words, pronunciation, and intonation sometimes present tremendous difficulties in communication with the teacher, and vice versa.

2. The Middle Class Bias: The teacher and the Educational Psychologist are middle class, in a middle-class institution (which is what a school is), viewing the child through middle-class tinted glasses, the child being working class in most cases.

3. The Emotional Disturbance Bias: Many of the problem children are suffering a temporary emotional disturbance due to severe culture and family shock, resulting from their sudden removal from the West Indies to a half-forgotten family, and an unknown and generally hostile environment.

In addition to the three biases of assessment, the author heavily focuses on how the IQ test administered to West Indian children during special education assessment is just as much to blame for their wrongful placement in ESN schools. IQ tests are described by Coard as having a white middle class vocabulary and style. Coard states, “If white middle class people make up these IQ tests, and if they also do the testing, is it really any surprise that their own children score the highest? Does this have anything to do with the real abilities of the children? None.” Then, he goes further to explain that scores on an IQ test in many cases can decide and alter a child’s future, and especially for West Indian children, it has become a tragedy.

In Chapter 3, Coard indicates that teachers in schools can impact Black children’s performance in three different ways: by being openly prejudiced, patronizing, and having low expectations for the child. Due to society’s negative narrative about Black people, most school environments have absorbed the deficit view of Black children and culturally-biased IQ tests that reinforce the deficit narrative. The author then advocates for the removal of IQ tests altogether due to the adverse effects it can have on a child’s educational journey, asserting that IQ tests are influenced by the general state of race relations in the society at the time at which the test is conducted (p. 24).

“The Black Child’s Attitude: Anxiety and Hostility” chapter begins with an exploration of the potential emotions West Indian students feel when engaging in assessments for special education. Coard refers to a study that was conducted in both America and Britain that showed that Black children performed worse on tests that were administered by white examiners. The author argues that Black children are aware of how the tests have been used against them and may therefore perform poorly on the test in reaction. However, on the other hand, another study conducted in Britain concluded that black children performed better on tests when the tests were administered by Black examiners. Here, he mentions that Black children struggle under three crucial handicaps: low expectations on their part about their likely performances in a white-controlled system of education, low motivation to succeed academically because they feel the cards are stacked against them, and finally, low teacher-expectations which affect the amount of effort expended on their behalf by the teacher and also affect their own image of self and abilities.

In “What the British School System Does to the Black Child” and “Self-Hatred: The Black and White Doll Experiments,” Coard looks at how the Black child’s true identity is denied daily in the classroom. In schools, children are taught that most, if not all heroes were white men and that Blackness has been associated with evil, inferior, ugly, etc. (p. 31). Here, Coard describes that throughout school, the messaging about whiteness and Blackness allows people to accept these as truths and think this way on racial matters. He further explains that because of this shared narrative, Black children acquire two attitudes or beliefs of self: a low self-image and consequently, low self-expectations in life. Coard concludes that Black children are being prepared in schools for a life of self-contempt.

The last chapter of the book, “Why our Children get the Worst Education: The Immigrants’ Role in Britain” in which the author addresses the two reasons for the presence of Black immigrants in Britain: 1) an abundance of employment opportunities in Britain, and 2) Black immigrants were recruited to work the unskilled labor jobs. Coard notes that there are four major tasks immigrants in Britain perform: increase the supply of labor, perform menial and unwanted jobs, divide the working class and dampen their militancy, and are paid cheaply by the establishment. Coard closely analyzes the social hierarchy present in Britain stating, “One way to ensure there are no changes in the social hierarchy is to adopt and adapt the educational system to meet the needs of the situation: to prepare Black children for the society’s future unskilled and ill-paid jobs” (p. 38).

Throughout the book, the author nicely lays out the historical and social impacts that have led to the overrepresentation of Black children in ESN schools. It is apparent that the unjust outcomes of West Indian children within special education may not be coldly calculated, but are also far from accidental— it is seen through legislation, assessment, teacher perceptions, biased curriculum, cultural bias towards West Indian children, etc. Toward the end of the book, Coard provides recommendations for addressing these issues in school. Coard empowers parents within the West Indian community to ensure West Indian children are evaluated by West Indian examiners, students receive intensive interventions before being referred to ESN schools, and the recruitment of more West Indian teachers to name a few.

Although the recommendations are sound and justified, many of the recommendations do not account for the barriers produced within the macro-system of education. Ignoring the school policies, not addressing the corporations who produce the IQ tests, or the limited cultural training of educators only temporarily solves the issues the author discusses throughout the book. Then again, maybe that was the goal of the author, to create this book more so for the West Indian community to get more involved in their child’s education and empower the community to advocate for better treatment of their children.

Coard created the first of its kind handbook for the West Indian community in Britain to first, make them aware of the issues West Indian school children were being subjected to, and two, providing solutions to the West Indian community to resolve some of these issues. However, Coard's recommendations focused on the micro-environment such parents, examiners, and teachers. What he did not name was the macro-system: capitalism, empire, and the afterlife of slavery that produced the machinery in the first place.

Author’s note: After reading this book in 2023, I knew I wanted to expand the groundwork Coard laid. I wanted to move beyond the micro-environment to explore the macro-system – capitalism, empire, and the afterlife of slavery that continues to perpetuate the issues Coard named in 1971.

That work is coming. On June 11, I will publish Sugar, Slavery, and the Making of London’s Special Schools which traces the through-line from the sugar plantations of the West Indies to the ESN schools of 1970s London.

So, let’s get into it…

In 1957, a white psychologist named Eli Bower sat down to figure out how schools could identify children who were struggling emotionally. Based on a study led by Bower, the federal definition of emotionally disturbed (ED) emerged from an examination of the mental health functioning and academic outcomes of students with emotional and behavioral disorders in school. In his book, The Early Identification of Emotionally Handicapped Children in School, Bower focused on strategies for identifying young children who may be at risk for emotional disturbance, with an emphasis on early detection and intervention. A few of the early warning signs Bower articulated include withdrawal, aggression, or sudden academic decline, which can be identified before they escalate into more serious psychological or educational issues.

Bower’s intentions, by most accounts, were genuinely good because he wanted children who were suffering to get support before their pain became a crisis. However, as a white psychologist working in a predominantly white educational system, Bower’s framework reflected the cultural and racial norms of his time.

As a result, Bower’s definition of ED failed to take racial and cultural differences into account which created a trapdoor for Black students in schools.

Bower’s book paved the way for the first systematic screening tools for classroom teachers, which was later institutionalized in the California Education Code § 56339 and replicated nationally. Bower emphasized the importance of observation, behavioral checklists, and structured assessments to identify five core characteristics of emotional disturbance:

1. An inability to learn not explained by intellect.

2. An inability to build relationships.

3. Inappropriate behavior or feelings.

4. Pervasive unhappiness.

5. Physical symptoms linked to personal problems.

Read that list again slowly.

Every characteristic on the list locates the problem entirely within the child’s body and behavior, and then handed that framework to institutions that had already spent decades demonstrating they did not see Black children as fully human.

Just a few years before Bower's checklist became federal law, U.S. Congress commissioned one of the most significant educational studies in American history in 1966: Equality of Educational Opportunity, also known as the Coleman Report. James Coleman, a sociologist and his team analyzed data from over 600,000 students and 60,000 teachers and found that student socioeconomic status and school segregation were the primary drivers of the academic achievement gap between Black and white students. The results also made clear that educational achievement of Black students was far more influenced by the socioeconomic conditions of their families and the segregated, under-resourced nature of their schools than by any innate characteristic of the students themselves. However unsurprisingly, that part of the report was largely ignored by policymakers.

Congress and educational researchers had this information that said both segregation and poverty were producing measurable harm in Black children's educational outcomes. Yet, instead of funding the conditions that would repair that harm such as housing, healthcare, equitable school funding, and mental health supports (cue Blackfoot’s hierarchy of needs!), they doubled down on measuring and pathologizing the child.

Nine years later in 1975, Bower's five characteristics of ED were adopted almost word-for-word by Congress and codified into federal law through the 1975 Education for All Handicapped Children Act, which is still the legal definition of Emotional Disturbance (ED) in schools today. Yet, not a single mention of race, poverty, or structural inequality was considered.

But Congress added one more crucial, but devastating thing.

A clause.

The House version of the bill was assigned to a subcommittee that lacked experience with educational issues which was concerned about providing services to adjudicated juvenile delinquents, this subcommittee added a provision stating that the disability category of Emotional Disturbance, “does not apply to children who are socially maladjusted…unless it is determined that they have an emotional disturbance.” In other words: if a child’s behavioral problems were attributed to deliberate choices or environmental factors rather than a clinical emotional disturbance, they would not qualify for special education services.

This one moment of many where it all went wrong.

With a single clause, the law created a phantom category: “Social Maladjustment” (SM) which to this day has no federal definition, consequently leaving states and local education agencies (LEAs) to create their own definitions, which leads to inconsistencies in ED eligibility determinations. Specifically, the lack of a federal definition of “social maladjustment” (SM) is often conflated with trauma-driven behaviors that overlap clinically with Emotional Disturbance (ED), despite being defined as a deliberate choice (e.g., misconduct caused by environmental factors).

Even Bower himself explicitly stated that his original definition was meant to be inclusive, and that excluding children with social and behavioral difficulties was nonsensical, because the emotional and social domains of development are interrelated. His own research sample of students with emotional disturbance included children he described as socially maladjusted, but the clause was added without him, against the spirit of his framework, and by people who were afraid of the “wrong” children.

Nowhere is this more visible than in New York City’s Special Education Standard Operating Procedures Manual (NYC SOPM). It defines Social Maladjustment with phrases like “dysfunctional family background,” “lack of empathy,” “gang involvement,” and “using obscene and degrading language.”

What image comes to mind when you read those words?

These are not clinical descriptors. Instead, these descriptors describe not a disorder but a child whose background, community, and survival strategies do not conform to white, middle-class institutional or social norms.

NYC’s SOPM reverses Bower’s clinical framework into a tool of exclusion.

Bower's original intention was to cast a wider net of support to ensure that children whose struggles were rooted in environment and circumstance could still access school-based mental health services. Bower also saw behaviors as signs of unmet needs and believed the social maladjustment clause would disproportionately affect marginalized students (e.g., those in poverty, foster care, or juvenile justice systems).

You see, the five principal characteristics Bower created does not ask about loss and grief, or the effects of trauma but it asks about “inability to learn,” “inability to build relationships,” and “inappropriate behavior.”

An educator trying to use Bower’s characteristics:

• Inability to learn? Their grades are failing.

• Inability to build relationships? They’re isolated or withdrawn.

• Inappropriate behavior? They’ve been defiant or disruptive in the classroom.

• Pervasive unhappiness? They seem angry or shut down.

The educator checks the boxes, gathers the evidence, and the label gets applied.

And the system has another option available to it. It can point to the child’s neighborhood, their family structure, their “defiance” — and declare them not emotionally disturbed but socially maladjusted. Not a child in pain. A child making bad choices. Not in need of clinical support. In need of discipline.

Thus, a child becomes a wounded victim of their geography which we know is shaped by legislation. Then, the system uses evidence of the wound to deny the child care, and then blames the child for their own survival.

But I want to be precise about something here because it matters for everything being discussed in this series.

Trauma itself is not a disability. A child who has experienced racial violence, poverty, chronic over-policing, or generational loss is not, by virtue of that experience, disabled. But what trauma does to a body and a brain — the anxiety, the hypervigilance, the executive dysfunction, the PTSD that reorganizes a nervous system around survival can manifest as what IDEA would recognize as a disability. Through his book, The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk spent decades documenting what happens to a child does not stay in the past, noting that trauma lives in their responses, their attention, their relationships, and their behavior in classrooms. By conflating trauma responses with pathology and invoking the social maladjustment exclusion, IDEA's framework effectively criminalizes Black students' coping mechanisms while denying them meaningful support.

According to current data from New York City:

• New York City spends nearly half a billion dollars each year to employ the largest school police force in the country.

• Black students made up less than 20% of overall enrollment in 2024–25 but received 47% of all superintendent suspensions.

• Black students with disabilities, who comprise 22.4% of the student population, received 46.6% of superintendent suspensions in 2024–25.

We will go much deeper into what these numbers mean and how the disability label functions as the first page of the school-to-prison pipeline in Part 8.

These patterns of harm are not accidental, but they are the predictable outcome of a legal framework that was designed to pathologize the child, and not at the world the child endures.

Congress had the Coleman Report which wrote in plain language about what the environment was doing to Black children, and instead of responding to that evidence with structural supports or environmental remedies, they codified a framework that asked about the child’s behavior and said nothing about what was going on in the child’s world. Additionally, the criteria has not changed in any meaningful way since 1957, only the name change from Emotional Disturbance → Emotional Disability (in some states). The disproportionality numbers have not gone down and the research critiquing the cultural bias of these frameworks has been accumulating for decades and the institution keeps reaching for the same definition.

The definition of ED is not failing the institution.

The definition is doing exactly what a system built inside anti-Blackness needs it to do. It provides clinical language for decisions that were already being made and gives the appearance of objectivity to a process that was never objective. It also transforms a Black child’s rational response to an irrational and hostile environment into a disability diagnosis, and then uses that disability diagnosis to justify exactly the kind of removal/exclusion and containment that the hostile environment was producing in the first place.

So, without confronting the racialized foundations of disability classification, not reforming them, not renaming them, but confronting them schools will continue to do what they have always done. Schools will continue to look at a Black child surviving a system that was never built for them and call the survival disordered.

Schools will keep reaching for the ED definition, and consequently, Black children will keep falling through the trapdoor.

Until next time,
Alexandria

Between the Margins: A School Psychologist's Note
This is a regular feature where I connect the historical dots from the series to the lived practice of my work in schools. 

The Artifact: Trauma's effects disguised as a disability 

The Through-Line: A Black female high school student who had newly enrolled into the school I was working at and was referred for special education evaluation. She was described as withdrawn, would skip class, talk back, and be disruptive in class. I was tasked with evaluating this student and come to find out…this student had been sexually assaulted by a family member. She was not withdrawn because she had an emotional disturbance, she was withdrawn because she had been violated. She was not skipping class because she was being defiant, her nervous system was was refusing to attend classes with male teachers because she did not feel safe. And she was not talking back to be disruptive, she was talking back because she had been made to feel invisible. The school was more than willing to accept a label and an IEP on behalf of this student, but what he needed was intensive therapy and emotional support. 

The Question for My Field: When a Black girl's trauma looks like defiance, whose job is it to look closer? As school psychologists we are trained to assess, identify, and classify, but are we trained to ask what happened to you? Are we trained to sit with the answer when it implicates the institution or when the referral itself is the problem, when the evaluation process is the wrong response to the right crisis? If we know that Bower's ED criteria was not designed with Black children in mind, that the criteria does not account for the relationship between racism, poverty, and behavior, that the application of the criteria has produced racially disproportionate outcomes for nearly seventy years without meaningful change, what exactly are we doing when we keep using ED?

Next in The Anatomy of a System: We follow the money and examine how a disability label transforms from a diagnosis into a line item in a school budget.

This is the sixth post in The Anatomy of a System: Special Education Edition, a series tracing the historical through-line of racialized disablement and commodification in special education.

© Alexandria Lockhart, 2026. All rights reserved. For permissions, see the permissions page.

I think many would assert that integration was a profound and positive path forward for the Black community in the United States, but after much reading, writing, and living through this work, I am starting to question.

Integration, as an idea, I can hold, but what I am no longer sure I can hold is what integration actually was…And I’m not questioning whether integration was right in principle, but whether what we got was integration at all, or whether what we got was assimilation dressed in the language of justice?

Because what we rarely say out loud is that integration, as it was executed, required Black people to walk into spaces that did not want them, to absorb the violence of that un-wanting, and then to call the survival of that violence progress (FULL STOP). It also required Black children specifically, our most vulnerable to be the bodies through which a political ideal was tested.

However, Brown v. Board did not just promote integration. Consequently and unintentionally, the passing of Brown also led to the dismantling of Black institutions that had been built precisely because exclusion had forced a kind of self-determined excellence. It shuttered Black schools led by Black educators who were genuinely invested in the well-being of Black students. Before integration, bell hooks explained that education was a practice of cultivating intellectual growth so that Black students could become scholars, thinkers, and cultural workers. She also explained that Black educators understood that learning was an act of resistance to oppose and undermine the strategies of white racist colonization. Unfortunately, the act of integration would cause a loss of this Black institutional life that affirmed Black students and their existence, and instead, pathologize their beings.

As a result, the U.S. school environment became a disabling institution for Black children. Not just discovering disability in them, but creating it. Just like chattel slavery, Jim Crow, and the eugenics movement created disabling conditions, integration into hostile white institutions also created disabling conditions. Consequently, those conditions produced legitimate responses such as hyper-vigilance, anxiety, resistance, and behavioral adaptations that developed in direct response to environments that were never safe. In 1980, the American Psychiatric Association formalized a name for this dynamic when it introduced Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD), formerly known as Oppositional Disorder into the DSM-III. ODD was defined by "argumentative" and "defiant" behavior, which are terms that describe a child refusing to comply with authority. The diagnosis did not ask why the child was refusing, nor did it ask whether the authority was legitimate, whether the environment was safe, or whether the child had reason to resist. Instead, it simply named these rather normal emotional expressions as disorder. A 2024 study found that the diagnosis of ODD is 35% more prevalent in Black people than in white people. The system took the rational responses to a hostile environment, called them disorders, and used the labeling of disorder to justify removal. Then, removal produced more trauma, and trauma produced more responses which resulted in more labels. This cycle continued, generation after generation, while the law changed its language but the racist and ableist logic kept running underneath.

This systematic pathologization of Black bodies and minds created interlocking systems of segregation and control that would eventually face legal challenges in America's courts. As the civil rights movement gained momentum in the mid-20th century, activists increasingly recognized that dismantling educational segregation required confronting both racial and disability-based exclusion. The 1954 landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, though centered on racial segregation, affirmed the principle that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal"—a precedent that would later be pivotal for disability rights advocates. But what did Brown actually change for Black children in hostile white classrooms? And what did it leave untouched?

Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and its failures

The landmark Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education (1954) represents a pivotal legal shift in American educational policy that must be understood within the broader context of white supremacy and anti-Blackness.

On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court ruled that racially segregated public schools were unconstitutional. As a result, the country called it a victory, and in the most literal sense, it was because Black people had been fighting school segregation since at least 1850. In 1850, Black abolitionist Benjamin Roberts sued a Boston neighborhood school for refusing to admit his five-year-old daughter, Sarah. The Massachusetts Supreme Court rejected that case, ruling segregation a "reasonable" use of municipal authority, and that ruling was later cited in Plessy v. Ferguson, which codified "separate but equal" as the law of the land for another sixty years. So yes, Brown overturning that precedent mattered, because the legal architecture of formal segregation came down.

However, what is interesting to note is the talking points used to win this case included Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s doll studies. Their research was used to win Brown, citing that segregation caused Black children to develop feelings of inferiority and negative self-images. In his book, Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon introduced the concept of the "epidermalization of inferiority"— the act of being compelled to internalize the negative stereotypes associated with Black skin, which leads to self-hatred and an inferiority complex caused by colonial oppression. Additionally, Du Bois described the concept of "double consciousness" in his book, The Souls of Black Folk as a sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of a white racist society, which forces an internalization of the inferiority attributed to Black people by the dominant culture. Yet, the schools Brown desegregated became environments that continued to produce the exact psychological harm their research documented. Additional studies focusing on the lived experiences of Black students who transitioned to integrated schools found that these students faced what D.C. Matthew called, “relational devaluation” — the degree to which a person is affectively or non-instrumentally valued by others. In other words, Black students in integrated schools were not just segregated within the building, but actively made to feel that others did not want to be around them, include them, or form relationships with them.

However, there are scholars and many other people who would argue that integration was necessary. Dr. Anderson (2010), for example, argues that integration was necessary but an insufficient step toward justice, as it disrupts racial isolation and builds solidarity. And while I am not dismissing the importance of disrupting racial isolation, I cannot ignore that disruption is not transformation or equality. In her book, Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks testified about her own childhood experience of forced integration which meant leaving beloved all-black schools where education was "the practice of freedom" and entering white schools where obedience, not learning was expected, and where Black children were always seen as not really belonging. Ultimately, Black children were left isolated inside hostile classrooms, labeled as disturbed, and relationally devalued by peers and teachers who did not want them there.

Legal scholar Derrick Bell's concept of interest convergence in his 1980 Harvard Law Review article Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma is the most honest accounting we have of why Brown happened when it did:

Let’s be clear, Brown v. Board was not won because the U.S. had a moral awakening about the humanity of Black children. Instead, Bell argued it was won because:

• The United States was in the middle of the Cold War and needed to present itself to the world as the nation promoting both democracy and freedom to African, Asian, and Latin American nations.

• The American federal government needed to manage the civil unrest present during the Civil Rights Movement

• white moderate liberals had enough social and economic distance from Black communities that integration felt manageable rather than threatening to their material interests

Dr. Bettina Love (2024) also asserts that Brown failed to deliver true integration, and instead, created a public school system that is separate and unequal by design to not only appease white dissent but to ensure a racial caste. For instance, as of today, in 2026, NYC DOE is the most segregated school system in the United States. According to a recent report, building on a 2014 UCLA study, reveals how school segregation aligns with and mirrors patterns found in dozens of redlining maps from 1938. This pervasive segregation in schools can be attributed to not only what Love named as powerful resistance from white people and white rage, but also to the Supreme Court ordering desegregation to proceed "with all deliberate speed" — a phrase that became, in practice, a legal permission slip for delay. Southern school districts interpreted deliberate as the operative word and spent years doing as little as possible while courts just watched. Meanwhile, in the North and Northeast, courts ruled that segregation was "de facto" rather than "de jure" — meaning segregation existed by circumstance rather than by law, and therefore those states had no legal obligation to dismantle their segregated schools.

As a result, Black children in New York, Chicago, and Boston remained in overcrowded and underfunded schools while the ruling that was supposed to free them was used to explain why it didn't apply to them.

Then, Black children who were formally integrated and forced to walk through those doors, absorbed the violence of that un-wanting. The environment itself was hostile which also included the curriculum, the pedagogy, the discipline practices, the implicit expectations, and the cultural assumptions made about Black students. It may not have been explicit, but integration was asking Black children to enter institutions that had spent centuries not just excluding them but constructing elaborate scientific, legal, and moral justifications for why their exclusion was natural and right, not just in society, but in the world through the Transatlantic Slave Trade. As the timeline has shown, these institutions had never been forced to reckon with any of that. They were never made to apologize, dismantle, or rebuild. Unfortunately, a court ruling did not do that work either.

You cannot legislate a reckoning, but you can mandate proximity, but proximity, without transformation, is just a different form of harm.

The curriculum remained Eurocentric, the behavioral standards remained normed to whiteness, and the teachers and administrators did not suddenly develop the cultural competence or political will to see Black children as fully human and capable learners. The only thing that changed was the physical location of Black children and being in that kind of hostile environment over time, in a body with no escape, produces both measurable psychological and physiological harm as we touched upon in Part 3.

Consequently, their bodies had been integrated, but their minds would continue to be pathologized. These policies would later be codified and expanded under the Civil Rights Act, Education for All Handicapped Children Act, and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), masking ongoing segregation in legally permissible terms.

Civil Rights Act (1964) and its failures

Is it not strange that Brown declared segregation unconstitutional in 1954, but The Civil Rights Act did not make discrimination illegal until 1964? Why did America need ten years to decide if its own ruling it made a decade prior should mean anything?

The Civil Rights Act specifically promised no discrimination based on race, color, or national origin in any program receiving federal funding. Title VII specifically established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and Section 401 attempted to define and enforce school desegregation. Essentially, the Civil Rights Act was the muscle that Brown lacked that could compel compliance rather than simply declare principle.

Again, just like Brown, the Civil Rights Act could not legislate a dismantling of the racial logic that had Black people fighting for these legal rights in the first place.

The implementation of the Civil Rights Act dramatically transformed the landscape of American education, particularly as it intersected with the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, which aimed to bridge achievement gaps by providing equal educational opportunities. After integration, Black children in formerly all-white schools were often labeled "inferior," "at-risk," or disruptive, consequently experiencing what educational historian, Vanessa Siddle Walker called, “second-class integration”— a form of integration that provided Black children access to white schools and resources, but failed to deliver the transformative, empowering, and equitable education that Black educators had fought for, instead leaving both Black students and Black educators in a compromised and harmful position.

As a result, Black children’s presence in white classrooms was interpreted not as evidence of their intelligence and resilience but as a behavioral and cognitive problem to be managed. Just as pseudoscientific racism during slavery invented drapetomania — the supposed mental illness that caused enslaved Black people to desire freedom, post-integration America invented new clinical categories to explain why Black children didn’t fit, why they resisted, and why they were, in the language of the institution, disturbed.

As a result, they frequently faced systemic tracking into lower-level, remedial classes, ultimately enduring a school climate that ignored their cultural traditions and often targeted them with disproportionate disciplinary actions. As Du Bois (1935) concisely stated, “Public school systems in the North where Negroes are admitted and tolerated, but they are not educated; they are crucified.” His words point to something the system still refuses to name: the environment itself had been disabling Black children. Through hostile integration, cultural erasure, and the daily experience of sitting in institutions that did not see them as fully human, the schoolhouse produced conditions that generated entirely rational responses. One study that demonstrates this connection can be found in Jernigan and Daniel’s (2011) qualitative exploration of the experiences of African American students labeled with emotional and behavioral disorders. Their study found that the students’ emotional and behavioral challenges were often rooted in their experiences of racism, poverty, and community violence, rather than a true disability. The authors argued that the misdiagnosis of these students as emotionally disabled served to pathologize their emotional responses rather than addressing the root causes of their challenges.

The Civil Rights Act could only outlaw the sign on the door that said whites only. It could not outlaw the assumption held by the institution on the other side of that door that believed Black children who did not conform to white behavioral and academic standards were deficient rather than rational. Consequently, it was that continued assumption, untouched by legislation and unaddressed by policy, that became the engine of what came next.

The Education for All Handicapped Children Act (1975) and its failures

Before this law, school districts across the country could legally refuse to educate any child deemed uneducable, and the definition of uneducable was applied with particular enthusiasm to children with disabilities at the time. Specifically, in the state of New York, all children with IQ quotients below 50 were deemed uneducable and therefore permitted, but did not require school boards to create special classes for these children at their own discretion.

Consequently, parents formed advocacy groups to help bring the educational needs of children with disabilities to the public eye. As briefly mentioned in Part 4, the 1975 Education for All Handicapped Children Act centered largely white, middle-class families, and the implementation of that law reflected it. Under this law, disabilities that qualified for special education services included intellectual disability (formerly known as “mental retardation”), hearing impairment, visual impairment, speech or language impairment, specific learning disabilities, emotional disturbance, orthopedic impairment, other health impairment, and Deaf-blindness. Between 1975 and 1990, a series of legislative actions expanded the educational rights of children with disabilities. The Education for All Handicapped Children Act (EHA) of 1975 required states receiving federal funding to ensure equal access to education for children with disabilities. A 1976 amendment extended services to disabled children from birth, rather than age three. In 1986, the Handicapped Children's Protection Act gave parents more autonomy in IEP development. In 1990, EHA was reauthorized and renamed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), adding new disability categories, specifically traumatic brain injury and autism. That same year, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) prohibited discrimination against people with disabilities beyond education.

Despite being symbolically transformational, this legislative progress laid the foundation for new forms of segregation now mediated through special education programs.

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (2004)

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) served as a beacon of inclusivity and support for students with disabilities. It also strengthened procedural safeguards, and in its 2004 reauthorization required school districts to take corrective action if a disproportionate number of minority students were placed in special education for reasons unrelated to actual disability.

Under the 2004 reauthorization of IDEA, the law mandated a specific, multi-step process to correct disproportionality which included:

1. The school district to reserve the maximum amount of funds (15%) from its federal IDEA allocation to provide "Comprehensive Coordinated Early Intervening Services" (CCEIS).

2. A mandatory annual review of the district's "policies, practices, and procedures" to identify the root causes of the disproportionality.

3. The district was required to publicly report on any revisions they made to their policies, practices, and procedures as a result of their review.

4. The district was required to actually address and change any policy, practice, or procedure identified as a contributing factor to the disparity.

I’ll save the in-depth critique of this multi-step process for my formal dissertation, but what I will say now is that in spite of this multi-step process implemented in 2004, racial disproportionality has not only NOT disappeared, it has increased. According to Albrecht and colleagues (2012), federal interpretations of the 2004 requirements have created confusion at the state and local levels, and "high levels of disproportionality remain" despite Congress designating this concern among the top three priority areas for monitoring and enforcement

Isn't that something? In 1968 — just 14 years after Brown, 4 years after the Civil Rights Act, and 7 years before the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, Lloyd Dunn formally identified that Black students were disproportionately represented in segregated special education classrooms. It took 36 years for that finding to be written into law, and we are still here, 58 years later identifying racial disproportionality.

Additionally, with the 2004 reauthorization, IDEA mandated that assessments must not be culturally or racially biased, must be administered in a student’s primary language when needed, and must include multiple measures, and that no single test can determine eligibility or placement. Also, once deemed eligible for special education, students have the right to be educated with non-disabled peers in the Least Restrictive Environment (LRE), which creates a presumption in favor of inclusion unless the severity of the disability prevents it. However, despite these procedural safeguards, racial bias continues to persist. As a result, Black students’ behaviors and communication styles are systematically misinterpreted by white normative standards, which contributes to disproportionate placement in restrictive environments under subjective categories like Emotional Disturbance (ED).

IDEA defines ED through inherently subjective criteria: “inappropriate behavior,” “inability to maintain relationships,” “pervasive mood of unhappiness” — while explicitly excluding “socially maladjusted” children unless they also meet ED criteria. This distinction creates a racialized loophole. According to the Office of Special Education Programs, as of 2024, Black students make up 16% of the total student with disabilities population and 20% of students classified with an emotional disturbance. Additionally, in school year 2023-24, when compared to all students with disabilities, Black students were more likely to be identified with emotional disturbance. In NYC, where the state renamed Emotional Disturbance to Emotional Disability in 2022, the disparity persists, suggesting labeling practices resist theoretical reform. However, we have to understand that the problem was never the name itself. Approximately 67% of students labeled with an Emotional Disability are placed in self-contained classrooms, and Black students are more than twice as likely to receive an IEP under this classification. New York spends $38,170 per special education student which totals to $18.7 billion statewide, and is 40% higher than the national average. This mirrors what Rosenthal (2018) and Boster (2011) describe as slavery’s “fractional hands” system, where Black bodies were economically valued based on labor potential. Through IDEA’s funding mechanisms, Black students become “disability capital” and their minds are rendered legible sites of fiscal utility, their classification and containment generating revenue.

The result is a fundamental paradox: IDEA, despite its stated commitment to equal educational opportunity, operates within what Leonardo and Broderick (2011) call “smartness as property”— a construct tied to whiteness that provides privilege, enables exclusion, requires a dispossessed other, and serves primarily to maintain hierarchy and oppression in both schooling and society. It also operates within what what Dumas (2016) calls “anti-blackness as policy”— education policies apparently designed to promote equity or diversity are fundamentally shaped by a cultural disregard for Black humanity. In dialogue with this perspective, Givens and Ison (2022) position whiteness as "an expression to commit to maintaining Black people as a distinguishable group to be super exploited for their labor and as living representations of all that was to be condemned.” Thus, IDEA becomes a mechanism that privileges white students while undermining equity for Black students with disabilities. We see that throughout the special education process as white parents/families use their cultural and economic capital to secure higher-status disability diagnoses and disability classifications that grant access to coveted resources, services, and segregated placements within specialized programs, effectively converting “smartness as property” into tangible educational advantages. Simultaneously, Black students with disabilities who are perceived with low status disabilities such as “behavioral” or “intellectual” disabilities are disproportionately funneled into restrictive, under-resourced settings, denied the presumption of competence, and positioned as threats to the normative center of schooling.

IDEA required corrective action of racial disproportionality, but it did not require that districts interrogate the ideological foundations of ability and disability themselves. IDEA also required that assessments not be biased, but it did not require that the institutions assigning the individuals administering those assessments be free of bias. IDEA mandated culturally responsive evaluation, but it did not mandate culturally responsive schools. IDEA also called for the least restrictive environment, but it did not dismantle the financial incentive to place Black children in the most restrictive one.

Legislation cannot outrun the logic it is built inside of, and IDEA was built inside an education system whose foundational logic has always been that Black children are the variable that needs to be corrected rather than the humanity that needs to be served.

What do these four legislations tell us?

Brown declared separation unconstitutional and watched Black schools close and Black children bussed into hostility. The Civil Rights Act outlawed discrimination and watched Black children get labeled the moment they sat down in white classrooms. The Education for All Handicapped Children Act promised inclusion for all and handed schools a new architecture for containment with a financial incentive built in. IDEA demanded equity with accountability and watched the racial disproportionality numbers hold steady across decades anyway.

This is not a story of good laws failing because implementation is hard. Instead, I’d argue that this is a story of a system that has consistently found new language for the same logic we’ve been tracing since Part 1 of this series— that Black bodies are to be managed, sorted, and classified.

And I keep returning to what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said privately to Harry Belafonte near the end of his life: “I fear I am integrating my people into a burning house.”

We guided our Black children into a burning schoolhouse, and called the burns “racial disproportionality.” We have also spent the last seventy years debating the temperature of that fire, how much damage the fire has caused, and which buckets we should use (legislative reform, a PD training, a bias-free assessment mandate, a restorative justice circle, a corrective action plan, etc.) to put out the fire, instead of asking ourselves why we never built a new house.

Until next time,
Alexandria

Between the Margins: A School Psychologist's Note
This is a regular feature where I connect the historical dots from the series to the lived practice of my work in schools. 

The Artifact: A referral for a 16-year-old Black Jamaican student who had been in the United States for less than four months.

The Through-Line: This student arrived in the US that summer, and by September he was sitting in an American high school in NYC for the first time in his life. Although this school educated a majority of Black students, the school itself had a culture, behavioral norms, classroom expectations, and social codes that had been built around assumptions this student had never been asked to learn. By December, 3 months later, a request had been submitted to evaluate him for special education classification and assign him a behavior 1:1 paraprofessional. His behaviors? Talking aloud in class without being called on, using profanity, and using language offensive to LGBTQ students and staff.

It's important to note that this student was born and raised in Jamaica for sixteen years. Jamaica, where homosexuality remains criminalized and where anti-LGBTQ sentiment is not a personal failing but a culturally transmitted norm enforced by law, religion, and the community. This student did not arrive with a behavior disorder, instead, he had arrived with a culture, and the school looked at his culture and called it a disability.

The referral also noted one physical altercation resulting in suspension, but there was no documentation of that incident provided to the school psychologist for review. When the IEP meeting arrived, the principal — who did not attend IEP meetings attended this one and attempted to pressure the school psychologist into not only labeling the student, but giving the student a 1:1 behavioral para. The student did not qualify and no 1:1 behavioral paraprofessional was assigned.

A Black child arrives in a white institution. The institution does not ask what he knows, what he has survived, what his world taught him before he arrived at its door. The institution looks at the gap between his behavior and its norms and locates the problem entirely within him. His speech patterns are inappropriate, his values are offensive, and he got into one fight and was labeled physically aggressive. The system did not ask — what does this child need to understand about this new cultural context? It asked — how do we classify what his presence is costing us? That is the cycle made visible in real time. An environment creates conditions that produce a response, then the response gets medicalized, the label justifies removal, and then the child becomes a case number before he becomes a student.

The Question for My Field: When we refer a child for special education evaluation within their first semester in a new country, what are we actually assessing? Are we measuring the child's capacity to learn? Or are we measuring the institution's tolerance for difference?

Next in The Anatomy of a System: How a well-intentioned psychologist’s checklist from 1961 became a trapdoor for Black children to be placed in special education with a specific disability label.

This is the fifth post in The Anatomy of a System: Special Education Edition, a series tracing the historical through-line of racialized disablement and commodification in special education.

© Alexandria Lockhart, 2026. All rights reserved. For permissions, see the permissions page.

We’re now four posts deep into The Anatomy of a System, and I need to pause here with you for a moment. Not because we’re done, we’re not even close, but because I want to make sure we’re still walking this path together?

How ya’ll doing?

This is just a check-in—moment to sit with what we’ve uncovered so far and talk about what it’s stirring up.

When I started this series, I knew the history would be heavy.

Every time I sit down to draft the next post, I’m pulling from my dissertation as well as new sources, and from archives that weren’t designed to protect the people they’re about. I’m reading 19th-century medical journals and slave narratives that describe Black bodies like livestock and the sheer brutality of what it was like for those treated as less than human. I’m also reading and tracing policy language that sounds neutral but was written either so broadly that it could mean anything and allows loopholes, or so narrowly that it was never meant to apply to everyone.

And then, I’m translating all of that into something you can read over your morning coffee or evening glass of wine without breaking.

Some days, I wonder if I’m doing this right, the posting, the writing, and if I’m being too academic, or not academic enough. I’m also constantly wondering if I should add more context or if I’m over-explaining, or if what I’ve shared is just enough that it leaves you wanting more, or if anyone even cares about a 160-year-old fake disease when there are IEP meetings happening right now.

But then I receive your comments, your text messages, emails, and even the likes and am reminded that this work doesn’t live alone in the abyss and that it is worth sharing.

A Few Things I’ve Read

(and think you might want to, too):

If you’re feeling like you want to go deeper, or if you just need to know you’re not alone in sitting with this, here are some books that have held me through this work:

• Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

• Jennifer Barclacy, The Mark of Slavery: Disability, Race, and Gender in Antebellum America

• Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-eduction of the Negro

• Dea Boster, African American Slavery and Disability

• Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth

• Dr. Joy Degruy, Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome

• Keith Mayes, The Unteachables: Disability Rights and the Invention of Black Special Education

• Annamma, Connor, & Ferri, DisCrit―Disability Studies and Critical Race Theory in Education

• Jay Timothy Dolmage, Disabled Upon Arrival

• Subini Annamma, The Pedagogy of Pathologization

• Michael Foucault, Madness and Civilization

And some scholarly articles:

• Ferri, B. A., & Connor, D. J. (2005). In the Shadow of Brown: Special Education and Overrepresentation of Students of Color.

• Subini Ancy Annamma, David Connor & Beth Ferri (2013) Dis/ability critical race studies (DisCrit): theorizing at the intersections of race and dis/ability

• Downs, J. (2008). The continuation of slavery: the experience of disabled slaves

  During Emancipation.

• Alnoor Ladha & Martin Kirk (2016). Seeing Wetiko: On Capitalism, Mind Viruses, and Antidotes for a World in Transition

• Wagner, J. (2019). “Weakness of the Soul”: The special education tradition at the

  intersection of eugenic discourses, race hygiene and education policies.

• Bell, C. (2006). Introduction to White disability studies.

• Reynolds, J.M. (2022). Disability and White Supremacy.

• Smith, P. (2004). Whiteness, normal theory, and disability studies.

• Connor, D. (2017). Who is responsible for the racialized practices evident

  within (special) education and what can be done to change them?

• Annamma, S. & Morrison, D. (2018). Identifying dysfunctional education ecologies:

  A DisCrit analysis of bias in the classroom.

*Please feel free to share any books and/or resources in the comments of this post!

What’s Coming Next:

We’re about to shift gears in the series.

If you’re just joining us now (welcome!), I’d encourage you to go back and read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4. Not because I’m precious about chronology, but because the through line only makes sense when you see how each piece builds on the last.

Parts 1 through 4 built the historical architecture — chattel slavery, eugenics, the pseudoscience of racialized pathology, and how the asylum’s architecture of segregation became the blueprint for the “special” school.

Part 5-10 are about how that history became infrastructure. Specifically, Part 5 is going to take us through four laws that promised equity and delivered new mechanisms for the same logic of containment (my favorite part thus far!). It will be live on April 9th.

But before we go there, I want to hear from you.

What’s sitting with you right now?
What questions are you holding?
What is this series making you want to do, say, or change?

You can reply to this post or drop a comment, whatever feels right. I read everything, even if I can’t respond to all of it.

Thank you for being here. For reading, and staying, and for letting this work sit in your body, mind, and heart even when it’s uncomfortable.

This is not easy material, but I think it’s necessary material. So, the fact that you’re willing to sit with it in hopes that we can build something better, I think that matters.

As they say in Spanish (a language I’m currently learning), P'alante!

With so much love and a little bit of rage,
-Alexandria

We don’t do the version where institutions had good intentions but made mistakes or the version of history where the harm was minor, the bias was unconscious, and the solution is better training. Here, we follow the evidence wherever it leads, even when it leads somewhere that makes people uncomfortable, including me.

This is Part 4 of The Anatomy of a System: Special Education Edition, a series tracing the historical through-line of racialized disablement and commodification in special education. In Part 1, we named how slavery disabled Black bodies by design. In Part 2, we looked at how the first "disability" diagnosed in a Black person in America was the desire for freedom. In Part 3, we traced how the pseudoscience of eugenics and how the IQ test became the "objective" measuring tool.

Now, Part 4 will answer the following question, “Once you’ve determined whose “feebleminded” or labeled racially as an “other,” where do you put them?

Understanding the Asylum

When it comes to the 19th-century asylum, we tend to think of it as a medical institution — a place of treatment, however misguided, for those suffering from mental illness. But, to read the asylum primarily as a medical space is to miss its primary social function, which was not healing but sorting, containment, and control.

The asylum sorted the population into the legible and the illegible, the productive and the unproductive, the normal and the deviant. It organized society's relationship to difference through removal. As a result, this growing emphasis on control and institutionalization was further accelerated by the industrialization era in the United States.

As industrialization progressed along with the urbanization of American cities, there became a demand for a more standardized and productive workforce. As a result, jobs that had never existed before were created, which resulted in the reduction of many families’ capacity to care for their relatives with disabilities who could not fully participate in society as an exploited worker. Consequently, the economy's emphasis on machine-like efficiency systematically excluded those who couldn't meet rigid workplace expectations.

As a result of the industrialized economy and the the medical model of disability, disabilities were framed as individual defects, rather than societal problems, justifying institutionalization as a solution. Also because of this, asylums and prisons were increasingly used as institutions of segregation, confinement, and social control, designed to remove them from public life and enforce norms of productivity and normality.

Michel Foucault called this shift in society the ‘great confinement’ — the moment Western society decided that certain kinds of difference were not to be managed within the social fabric but extracted from it entirely.

The first public mental institution in the United States was the Public Hospital for Persons of Insane and Disordered Minds, which opened in Williamsburg, Virginia, on October 12, 1773. It was founded to treat, “persons who are so unhappy as to be deprived of their reason.”

But reason alone in 18th and 19th century America, was never a racially neutral category.

The asylum was not merely a building, but more so a pedagogy of exclusion because it taught society what to do with bodies it had decided were undesirable.

That curriculum had three lessons:

1. Separation is care. The removal of deviant bodies from public life was framed not as punishment or containment but as treatment and protection of society. This reframing was essential because it made confinement legible as compassion.

2. Separate space requires its own infrastructure. Once you have decided that certain bodies cannot remain in general society, you must build the institutions to hold them which requires the staff, the curriculum, the administrative apparatus, the funding mechanisms.

3. The body that cannot be normalized must be managed. The asylum did not primarily seek to return its inhabitants to general society, instead, it sought to manage them within the separate space and to make the confinement orderly.

In conjunction with the eugenics movement, separate facilities and programs for children deemed slow or retarded flourished. In 1848, the Experimental School for Teaching and Training Idiotic Children was established in Boston by Samuel Gridley Howe which aimed to teach people with physical and intellectual disabilities basic life lessons so they could survive independently in society. In 1852, the Elwyn School in Pennsylvania focused on educating individuals with intellectual disabilities in practical skills, with the aim of promoting self-sufficiency. The year prior, in 1851, the New York State Asylum for Idiots opened — a public institution for people with cognitive disabilities for the purpose “of separating feeble-minded individuals who were imposed on society as a threat.”

This shift from education to segregation was epitomized by French psychiatrist Édouard Séguin (1866), who theorized that intellectual disability stemmed from a “flawed relationship between a person’s will and their nervous system” (p. 34)—a defect he claimed could be “cured” through physiological training. After bringing his methods from France to the U.S. in 1850, Séguin helped found schools nationwide, medicalizing disability as a condition to be fixed rather than accommodated. In 1866, Séguin helped found the “Idiot School” on Randall’s Island in New York.

At the height of the eugenics movement in 1927, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision of Buck v. Bell, upheld a Virginia statute allowing the compulsory sterilization of people deemed "unfit." However, the state of California already had the California Asexualization Act of 1909 that allowed state institutions to sterilize inmates considered "unfit" or "feeble-minded.” Additionally, New York passed the New York Eugenics law of 1912 that allowed sterilization of inmates in state hospitals for the insane, prisons, and charitable institutions. As a result of these legislations, the majority of people effected were people with disabilities, racialized minorities, and those living in poverty.

As medicine emerged as a dominant social and political power structure, it weaponized the medical model of disability to frame difference as intrinsic deficit, while racial science and eugenics provided the ideological scaffolding for segregating Black and disabled bodies. These systems converged to transform medicalization into a technology of control, legitimizing the exclusion and surveillance of marginalized populations under the guise of benevolence and scientific progress.

Scholar Liat Ben-Moshe calls this carceral benevolence — an approach that employs educational rationales to legitimize segregation while presenting it as compassionate care. However, despite being framed as benevolent efforts, these institutions ended up reinforcing racial and ableist hierarchies by segregating and controlling the bodies placed inside them. The language of helping became the architecture of containment, and the two have never been fully separated in the history of American special education.

But, eugenics did not land on Black bodies the way it landed on white ones. For instance, for Black Americans, the infrastructure of confinement required no new scientific justification, because the presumption of deficiency had been the foundational logic of slavery itself, and the asylum simply gave it a new address.

The Asylum and Race

However, what Foucault did not fully reckon with, and what this series requires us to name, is that race was never contingent to who got confined. Consequently, the asylum was disproportionately populated by the poor, by immigrants, by people whose labor was no longer extractable, and by Black people whose very existence in post-emancipation America posed a problem the nation had no honest language to address.

Remember: emancipation occurred in 1865, and then Jim Crow laws became introduced in 1877, and the eugenics area started in the early 1900s.

The pathologization of Black disability rooted in slavery’s pseudoscientific racial hierarchies became institutionalized in the 19th and 20th centuries through the rising authority of medicine, the eugenics movement, and the carceral logics of early special education, mirroring a process Frantz Fanon defined as the imposition of ‘colonial pathology,’ where oppression manufactures ‘abnormality’ to justify control and suppress resistance.

Unfortunately, for Black Americans navigating the post-emancipation landscape, medicalization represented a continuation of the commodification logic that had for multiple decades defined slavery. Now, physicians replaced the enslavers as judges of Black bodily value and capability.

The Central Lunatic Asylum for Colored Insane was the first U.S. mental institution in Petersburg, Virginia that was established in 1870 exclusively for African Americans, specifically, formerly enslaved Africans. While this mental institution aimed at providing care, it actually functioned as a segregated institution until 1968. Cherry Hospital in Goldsboro, North Carolina, was founded in 1880 as the “Asylum for the Colored Insane and was, “exclusively for the accommodation, maintenance, care, and treatment of the colored insane of the state.” In 1919, the Lakin State Hospital was established in West Columbia, WV, and was the state’s first mental institution for African Americans, staffed entirely by Black professionals during segregation.

There was also the Hospital for the Negro Insane that opened in 1911, and until 2004 was known as the Crownsville Hospital Center in Maryland. Journalist and author Antonia Hylton documented this in her 2024 book Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum. Throughout this book, Hylton races how a facility built exclusively for Black patients became less a place of treatment, and more like a place of disposal. Black individuals who resisted the social order, who grieved too loudly, who could not or would not perform the docility that post-emancipation white America demanded were sent to Crownsville.

This history in Maryland mirrors Jonathan Metzl’s findings in his book, The Protest Psychosis — where schizophrenia was effectively redefined in the 1960s as a Black disease marked by hostility, which became a diagnostic trope used specifically to pathologize demands for racial justice. This diagnostic weaponization was later transformed during the postwar era, when psychiatrists deployed the label of schizophrenia to pathologize and delegitimize civil rights activists. Facilities like Virginia’s Central State Hospital became dumping grounds for Black individuals deemed unfit for freedom, medicalizing racial resistance as insanity.

The diagnosis was the mechanism and as a result, the institution was the destination.

Both of these histories laid out in Hylton and Metzl’s book provide the understanding that the asylum was not a response to Black mental illness. Instead, the asylum was a response to Black existence in a society that had no honest framework for Black freedom and needed somewhere to put what it could no longer contain.

Consequently, the medical authority cemented whiteness and Eurocentric development as the benchmark of ‘normal’ development. This framework positioned both Blackness and disability as deviations from this norm. Drawing on Yancy’s (2008) work, we can understand how whiteness framed Black bodies as ‘deformed,’ ‘morally disabled,’ and ‘monstrous.’ whiteness functioned as a baseline that defined acceptable behaviors, emotions, and responses across society Therefore, whiteness was not a biological reality but rather a ‘perceptual practice’ that constructed Black bodies as objects of fear and disgust, particularly when they entered spaces considered ‘white,’ thereby ‘disrupting the harmony and symmetry’ of these spaces. As a result, this perceptual framework laid the groundwork for institutionalization as a new frontier for racialized control.

The institutionalization of Black Americans in psychiatric institutions, supposedly for their “care” exemplified the intersection of medical and carceral systems that simultaneously medicalized racial resistance and exploited patient labor while maintaining a facade of therapeutic intervention. Following Fanon’s analysis of colonial psychiatry, this ‘deviance’ was a political construct exposed in colonial psychiatry: a political construct that pathologized Black survival, where resistance to oppression is recast as ‘insanity,’ ‘criminality,’ or ‘disability’ to justify control.

Delinquency and the School

The term delinquency, particularly in early 20th century legal frameworks was routinely applied to Black children and youth in ways that reinforced stereotypes about Black criminality. In her book, The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander argues that the criminal justice system, including juvenile courts, used this framing to funnel Black youth into carceral institutions under the language of rehabilitation. Behaviors deemed criminal were often assumed to be the result of mental deficiencies without the need for further evidence or justification.

In 1932, New York established the State Institution for Defective Delinquents, operated by the Department of Corrections and overseen by the Department of Mental Hygiene was designed to serve juvenile offenders with intellectual disabilities through academic and industrial training, positive habit formation, and discipline. However, it operated more like a prison.

Where slavery had auction blocks, post-emancipation America had IQ tests and psychiatric diagnoses which became tools that recast Black people’s resistance to oppression as emotional disturbance or mental deficiency, thus justifying their removal from mainstream schools. This is what Washington (2006) describes as diagnostic violence: the medical field’s long-standing pattern of equating Blackness with pathology, from 19th-century physicians diagnosing runaway slave syndrome to 20th-century schools labeling defiance as a behavioral disorder.

In New York City for example, they did not just leave Black children in separate, unequal schools. They invented a new way to segregate them that did not require a law declaring “separate but equal,” because the segregation would be justified by clinical language, instead of racial language.

Although it was before the passing of Brown, in 1947, New York City created the “600 Schools.” Their official purpose? To serve “delinquent and maladjusted youth.” Almost immediately, these schools became a dumping ground for Black and Puerto Rican boys, because their behavior was pathologized as “emotional maladjustment.” These schools, which would later evolve into what we call today in NYC’s separate school district, ‘D75’ system, were not an accident. They were a policy innovation to legally segregate “troublesome” students of color under a clinical, rather than a racial, label.

The Asylum Moves Into the School

And then came 1975. The Education for All Handicapped Children Act provided the following:

• Ensured children with disabilities could not be excluded from public schools and were provided services from ages 3–21.

• Required customized education plans for each student.

• Promoted educating students with disabilities alongside their typical peers to the maximum extent appropriate.

• Supported early intervention services for infants and toddlers

However, this law did not descend from institutional benevolence because it was won by white parents, largely white, middle-class parents of children with disabilities who organized, lobbied, and litigated for their children's right to be educated.

But Foucault describes this shift as biopower — where institutions gained authority to regulate bodies through classification rather than through explicit violence.

The building changed, but the logic didn’t.

Just as the asylum didn’t disappear, the disability rights movement that produced the 1975 Education for All Handicapped Children Act centered largely white, middle-class families, and the implementation of that law reflected it. Its implementation reproduced the racial sorting that had always structured these systems, only now the mechanism was self-contained classroom, the restrictive placement, and the behavior management plan. Each placement is justified through the language of help and intervention, but justification of these are not neutrality. The sequence remains: special education referral, evaluation, disability label, placement. And unfortunately, placement, whether down the hall or in another building is the outcome the process was designed to produce.

This racial and ableist logic we’ve been tracing continued to adapt itself into the school system, and did more than isolate disabled bodies, it actively framed disability as a danger to educational spaces just like the justification of asylums, using the myth of protection as a tool to justify exclusion.

Although the right to education was a great step forward for children with disabilities legislatively, in practice the innovative changes associated with the 1975 Education for All Handicapped Children Act of is what some scholars identify as the re-segregation of American public education through disability classification. Through this re-segregation, using neutral scientific language of special education eligibility accomplishes the racial sorting that explicit segregation could no longer legally perform after Brown v. Board.

But if separate is inherently unequal, what do we call the separate classrooms, the separate schools, the separate placements that we built after Brown? And if we built them anyway and still have them today, what and who are we protecting?

This is the lesson that traveled most directly into special education.

The language of helping became the architecture of containment, and the two have never been fully separated in the history of American special education.

Until next time,
Alexandria

Between the Margins: A School Psychologist’s Notes
This is a regular feature where I connect the historical dots from the series to the lived practice of my work in schools. These are the notes from the field.

The Artifact: The padded room in D.C.

The Through-Line: At a charter school in Washington, D.C. a second grade Black boy talked aloud in class, refused to do work, pushed chairs, threw papers and pencils. And when the teachers had enough, they sent him to the padded room. His 1:1 para would go in with him. He would stand against the wall while the student threw himself against the padding, yelling to be let out, crying, pacing, escalating. The 1:1 para was there to monitor, not to soothe, but to contain. When I asked why he was sent to the room, the answer was always some version of: "He was disrupting the class." 

The asylum taught us that separation is care, and that the body that cannot be contained must be managed. 

The Question for My Field: What would it have looked like to ask him what he needed? Not to manage him or contain him, but to sit with him and say: "Something is happening to you. Tell us what it is." Why was that the one question no one asked?

Next in The Anatomy of a System: How Brown v. Board opened school doors, but hostile integration became a disabling environment.

This is the fourth post in The Anatomy of a System: Special Education Edition, a series tracing the historical through-line of racialized disablement and commodification in special education.

© Alexandria Lockhart, 2026. All rights reserved. For permissions, see the permissions page.

I am publishing it here rather than waiting for a journal because the practitioners who need this framework are sitting across from these children today.

— Alexandria

Introduction

This paper aims to examine the misinterpretation of intergenerational trauma as an Emotional Disability (ED) amongst Black students in the United States and the Social, Emotional, Mental Health (SEMH) needs of Black Caribbean students in the United Kingdom. Intergenerational trauma refers to the transmission of trauma effects across generations, often stemming from experiences of systemic oppression, racism, and violence (Degruy, 2005; Sotero, 2006). Racial trauma can be caused by macro-aggressions like discriminatory policies or events at a societal level (Helms et al., 2010), such as the murders of Trayvon Martin in 2012, Sandra Bland in 2015, George Floyd in 2020, and many others in the United States; and in the United Kingdom, the 2022 fatal police shooting of unarmed 24-year-old Chris Kaba in Streatham Hill, London, and the killing of Mark Duggan by armed police in 2011 which sparked riots across London.

The overrepresentation of Black students in special education in both the United States and United Kingdom has been a persistent and distressing trend in the public education system. Despite immense research and policy initiatives directed at addressing this issue, Black students continue to be disproportionately identified as having disabilities under the U.S. Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) 2004 and UK Children and Families Act 2014. The question now is not whether this overrepresentation exists because the data has confirmed that for decades. The question now is what we are willing to name as its cause? Many scholars before me have identified several key factors driving the overrepresentation such as bias in assessments, school culture, institutional racism, and low-socioeconomic status. However, none of these factors can fully explain the overrepresentation alone because they are interconnected symptoms of a broader, systemic issue where racial bias and inequality are embedded within the very structure and practices of the education system itself.

This parallel between two empires are not coincidental, but architectural. The United States and the United Kingdom did not independently arrive at systems that pathologize Black children’s responses to racial harm, instead, they built those systems from the same colonial blueprint, through the same pseudoscientific logic of racial hierarchy, toward the same institutional end: the management and containment of Black bodies that neither empire has ever been structurally committed to liberating (Blum & Burkholder, 2021; Givens & Ison, 2023; Kehinde, 2021). For Black students in both U.S. public schools and the UK educational institution, the historical trauma of chattel slavery and ongoing racial discrimination may manifest as both emotional and behavioral challenges that are misinterpreted as signs of an Emotional Disability (ED) or Social, Emotional, Mental Health (SEMH) need. In the context of special education disability classifications and educational placement, the significant impact of intergenerational trauma has been largely overlooked. Consequently, understanding how intergenerational trauma is misinterpreted as an Emotional Disability (ED) or Social, Emotional, Mental Health (SEMH) need is critical to ensuring equitable access to education and appropriate support for Black students in schools.

Under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) 2004, Emotional Disability is defined as a condition exhibiting one or more of the following characteristics over a long period of time and to a marked degree that adversely affects a child’s educational performance:

• An inability to learn that cannot be explained by intellectual, sensory, or health factors;
  b. An inability to build or maintain satisfactory interpersonal relationships with peers and teachers;

• Inappropriate types of behavior or feelings under normal circumstances; d. A general pervasive mood of unhappiness or depression; or

• A tendency to develop physical symptoms or fears associated with personal or school problems (IDEA, 2004).

*Emotional Disability includes schizophrenia. The term does not apply to children who are socially maladjusted, unless it is determined that they have an Emotional Disability.

In the U.K., the SEND Code of Practice (DfE/DoH, 2015), defines Social, Emotional and Mental Health (SEMH) needs as a wide range of emotional, behavioral, and social challenges that can impact learning, engagement and participation, mental health, and wellbeing for children and young people. As the definition makes clear, SEMH needs does not refer to a specific diagnosis but to a broad category of need that may be expressed through externalizing behavior’s (e.g., aggression, oppositionality) or internalizing behaviors (e.g., anxiety, withdrawal), often in combination.

However, the range of the SEMH definition warrants scrutiny that several scholars such as (Hickinbotham et al., 2021; Martin-Denham, 2021; Blanco-Bayo, & Reraki, 2025) have argued that the category's breadth functions less as clinical precision and more as the pathologization and medicalization of behavior. In the United States, the Emotional Disability category under IDEA explicitly excludes social maladjustment as a basis for classification — a recognition, however imperfect in practice, that behaviors that depart from school norms is not equivalent to disability. The SEMH definition in the UK SEND Code of Practice contains no equivalent exclusion. Consequently, by explicitly including social challenges within its definition, the SEMH category captures not only children experiencing genuine mental health difficulties but potentially any child whose social behavior departs from the expectations of the school environment which is predicated on white norms. For Black Caribbean children whose cultural expressions, relational styles, and responses to racial hostility may all be legible to white practitioners as social challenges, this definitional breadth is not clinically neutral. Instead, it is racially permissive and allows the interpretation of the definition to transform Black children's rational navigation of an anti-Black environment both in and outside of the classroom into evidence of individual pathology requiring behavioral intervention. As a result, racial assumptions become clinical determinations and the practitioner's gaze becomes diagnostic authority.

According to a 2009 study on disproportionality conducted by Strand & Lindsay, Black Caribbean and Mixed white and Black Caribbean (MWBC) students were twice as likely to be identified with Social, Emotional and Mental Health (SEMH) as their white British peers. According to the another study conducted in 2018 by Strand & Lindorff Black Caribbean and Mixed white & Black Caribbean students continued to be substantially overrepresented for SEMH. In the United States, Black students account for approximately 18.5% of the total student population but represent 26.1% of students identified with Emotional Disability (U.S. Department of Education, 2020). According to the National Center for Learning Disabilities, Black students are 40% more likely to be identified with a disability versus all other students. Specifically, Black students are more than twice as likely to be identified with an Emotional Disability (ED) as their peers.

This systemic issue manifests most acutely at the point of diagnosis, where the behaviors and needs of Black students are frequently misinterpreted through a clinical lens that overlooks context. The misdiagnosis of trauma-related emotional and behavioral challenges as a disability can lead to the unnecessary placement of Black students in more restrictive special education settings, denying them the opportunity to learn alongside their peers in general education classrooms.

While this pattern of misdiagnosis is often framed as a correctable error evidenced by decades of risk data, correlation studies, and key factors identified in the literature, that framing is itself a function of the system's self-preservation. The data does not document an error, but a consistent pattern that overtime has proven to be racialized. This resistance to correction across decades of research, policy reform, and professional development is not a flaw in an otherwise equitable structure, but instead, is the structure producing its intended outcome while wearing the language of concern. As a result, this paper does not advocate for policy reform. Reform, as this analysis will demonstrate, has proven insufficient and arriving only when the interests of those in power temporarily converge with the interests of those being harmed, and receding when that convergence passes. What this paper advocates for is reckoning: an honest naming of what these systems were built to do, who they were built to contain, and why the diagnostic categories at their center have never been required to examine their own racial foundations. By bringing together research, policy analysis, and the author's own decade of experience as a school psychologist inside these systems, this inquiry seeks to address two key questions: How does existing literature describe the impact of intergenerational trauma, specifically from racial violence, on the educational experiences of Black students in the United States and the United Kingdom? And what do the policy frameworks governing special education in both nations reveal about the institutional interests that the misidentification of Black children's trauma as disability has served?

Background

The legacy of racial violence has profound implications for the Black community, manifesting as intergenerational trauma that can affect students’ behavior and learning. Intergenerational trauma refers to the transmission of trauma effects across generations, often stemming from experiences of systemic oppression, racism, and violence. According to the American Psychological Association, trauma is defined as any disturbing experience that results in significant fear, helplessness, dissociation, confusion, or other disruptive feelings intense enough to have a long-lasting negative effect on a person’s attitudes, behavior, and other aspects of functioning. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition defines trauma, specifically Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) through eight different criteria (A-H) requiring that an individual was exposed to actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence as well as subsequent experiences with persistent symptoms including intrusive re-experiencing, avoidance, negative alterations in cognition and mood, and heightened arousal and reactivity. These symptoms must persist for more than one month, cause significant distress or functional impairment, and must not be attributable to medication, substance use, or other illness.

When the cumulative weight of racial violence which is both historical and ongoing is understood as a legitimate source of trauma, then the behavioral and emotional responses it produces in Black children are not signs of disorder but rational adaptations to chronically threatening environments. The effects of trauma can cause significant challenges in both behavioral and emotional regulation, contributing to a higher risk of involvement in special education programs, out-of-school suspension, and referrals into the juvenile court system. As a result of the traumatic experiences, children and adolescents often exhibit a range of behaviors that can be observed in the school setting such as fear, hyperactivity, hypoactivity (inability to generate energy for interaction), aggression, somatic problems, depression, and self-harm.

Many educators, however, misunderstand trauma-induced behaviors as signs of inherent educational disabilities instead of protective responses rooted in intergenerational traumas and systemic oppression. Research confirms that teachers often conflate these trauma-related behaviors with disciplinary issues, leading to special education referrals that disproportionately impact students of color. This pattern of misinterpretation is not race-neutral and is often exacerbated by provider and/or educator bias and systemic inequities that make Black children significantly more likely to be misdiagnosed or mislabeled. For example, a Black student maybe misdiagnosed as having attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) and thus labeled with Other Health Impairment (OHI), by displaying hypervigilance and heightened anxiety in the classroom, which are also behaviors that may be linked to racial trauma experiences. In the same way, a student who dissociates or has difficulty self-regulating due to intergenerational trauma may be pathologized with an Emotional Disability, Social, Emotional Mental Health need, or even an Intellectual Disability. These misdiagnoses lead to inappropriate educational placements and interventions that fail to address the student's true needs, ultimately undermining their educational experience and perpetuating systemic inequalities. Addressing this critical issue requires a paradigm shift in how educators and school psychologists approach assessment and support, moving toward trauma-informed practices that foster healing and empowerment rather than marginalization and re-traumatization.

To identify and intervene effectively, trauma-informed, and culturally responsive frameworks need to be integrated. In some districts, like Oakland Unified School District in California, trauma-informed practices have begun to be implemented to address ongoing racial trauma that disproportionately impacts Black and Brown students. As a result of Ginwright’s (2018) research in Oakland USD, disciplinary referrals and suspensions were reduced, especially for Black students, and the school climate improved where students felt safer and more supported. Similar outcomes have been documented in the UK context. The Alex Timpson Attachment and Trauma Awareness in Schools Programme, a large-scale study conducted by the University of Oxford between 2017 and 2022, evaluated the impact of whole-school attachment and trauma awareness training across 305 schools in 26 local authorities in England. The results indicated that after whole-school trauma training, 78% of headteachers reported improved attainment for vulnerable children, 81% perceived a decline in sanctions and exclusions, and 72% reported improvements in attendance.

By adopting a holistic, healing-centered teaching approach that recognizes the sociocultural context of student behaviors, schools can provide Black students with learning opportunities that will help them succeed. This may involve collaborating with mental health professionals’ community organizations, and families to provide wraparound services and support. Additionally, mandatory training for all school personnel on recognizing and appropriately responding to trauma responses can enhance their ability to foster inclusive empowering environments. Ultimately, addressing the misclassification of trauma as disability is vital for dismantling the systemic barriers that have long impeded the educational success and social-emotional well-being of Black students. Understanding why these practices remain the exception rather than the rule requires examining not just what practitioners do but what the law permits, enables, and sequesters.

Literature Review

What follows draws on two bodies of evidence — a literature review on the impact of intergenerational trauma from racial violence on Black students' educational experiences, and a policy analysis of the gaps in IDEA's assessment framework that allow trauma to be misread as disability. The first research question addressed in this study is: How does existing literature describe the impact of intergenerational trauma, specifically from racial violence on the educational experiences of Black students?

Among the social determinants of health (SODH) identified by the Department of Health and Human Services, racism, discrimination, and violence are all examples of social determinants of health, and racial trauma refers to the mental and emotional injury caused by experiences of racism and racial discrimination (Comas-Díaz et al., 2019). Unfortunately, the physiological consequences of this trauma are severe and measurable. According to Brody, et al. (2014), Black youth who have experienced racial trauma have been linked to obesity, high blood pressure, and more stress hormones in their bodies by age 20. Unlike isolated traumatic events, racial trauma is chronic and intergenerational, producing continuous stress reactions that compound across generations and cause more pervasive damage than other types of trauma.

Building on this foundation, Historical Trauma Theory, developed by maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart through her work with Native American communities, hypothesizes that the cumulative, emotional, and psychological wounding experienced by a specific group spanning generations, often due to colonialism, slavery, and other forms of oppression, can lead to ongoing trauma responses and disparate health outcomes. According to this theory, the unconscious and preconscious play a significant role in shaping present-day reality. For example, Bombay et al. (2014) found that the trauma experienced by survivors of Indigenous residential schools in Canada had significant negative impacts on their mental health, as well as the mental health of their descendants. Research on Palestinian families has shown that the trauma suffered by parents, such as exposure to violence, imprisonment, and land loss, and a significant impact on their children’s mental health and well-being. Studies on Holocaust survivors and their descendants have also demonstrated transmission of trauma through epigenetics, with children of survivors exhibiting altered stress hormone profiles and increased vulnerability to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other mental health challenges. Refugee communities have likewise experienced significant historical trauma because of war, persecution, and displacement, with lasting intergenerational effects. Building on this work, Frantz Fanon’s seminal analysis in “The Wretched of the Earth,” explored how the psychological impacts of colonization and systemic racism, including feelings of inferiority and internalized oppression, can manifest in the behavior and educational experiences of marginalized populations.

Historical Trauma Theory has since expanded to understand the intergenerational impact of trauma in the African American community. Degruy (2005) introduced the concept of Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome (PTSS), which draws on Historical Trauma Theory to explain the intergenerational impact of slavery and ongoing oppression on the mental health and well-being of African Americans. Sotero (2006) applied this theoretical framework to the experiences of African Americans, making connections to how the aggregate effects of slavery, Jim Crow laws, and ongoing discrimination have led to intergenerational trauma and health disparities. School segregation, in particular, functioned as a form of racial violence against African Americans. Through the formalization of Jim Crow many schools established by African Americans were closed, as southern whites adamantly opposed education for Black youth. This denial of education served a specific purpose: it reinforced Black inferiority in the racial hierarchy and ensured that generations of African Americans would be denied the psychological, economic, and social benefits of formal learning.

This pattern of educational exclusion, evolving from overt segregation into more subtle forms of institutional pathologization, is not unique to the United States. As early as 1971, Bernard Coard documented how the British school system was systematically classifying West Indian children as educationally subnormal — an act of institutional pathologization that Gillborn and others have since argued established the logic that continues to govern how Black children’s behavior is read and responded to in UK schools today. Suman Fernando's foundational work on race and mental health in Britain demonstrated that Black Caribbean patients were disproportionately diagnosed with conditions marked by behavioral dysregulation — not because of higher prevalence of those conditions but because of the racial assumptions embedded in the diagnostic frameworks clinicians used. In the educational context, research by Strand (2012) documented how Black Caribbean students in British schools were systematically tracked into lower attainment pathways through assessment and placement practices that encoded racial bias as professional judgment. Additional research conducted by Gillborn et al., (2017) found that each time academic achievement benchmarks were redefined in the UK, the effect was to reproduce existing racial inequities as some policies were framed as raising academic standards resulted in consistently widening the gap and sustaining Black educational disadvantage rather than closing it.

Now, the question is not whether trauma is being misread in classrooms as the literature confirms that it is, but how the law itself facilitates this misreading by failing to require that trauma be considered before a disability classification is made.

Policy Analysis

To address the second research question – what do the policy frameworks governing special education in both nations reveal about the institutional interests that the misidentification of Black children’s trauma as disability has always served? This section will examine the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) of 2004 that stands as a pivotal federal policy designed to ensure that children with disabilities receive a Free Appropriate Public Education (FAPE) tailored to their individual needs in the United States. This section will also examine the Children and Families Act 2014 in the United Kingdom that serves as the legislative equivalent of IDEA. The Children and Families Act 2014 governs how children with special educational needs and disabilities are identified, assessed, and supported within the education system. While both lawful frameworks serve as equitable access to education through inclusivity for students with disabilities, their implementation requires scrutiny, particularly concerning the intersection of trauma, race, and educational assessments.

Under IDEA, students identified with Emotional Disability are those who display behaviors including an inability to learn unexplained by other factors and inappropriate emotional responses — criteria that, without a trauma lens, describe the symptomology of trauma as readily as they describe disability. Upon receiving a disability classification, students are evaluated with various standardized measures of assessments that include intelligence testing, social-emotional questionnaires, and academic testing conducted by school psychologists. Students who meet the criteria for an Emotional Disability include an ‘inability to learn that cannot be explained by intellectual, sensory, or health factors” and display “inappropriate types of behavior or feelings under normal circumstances” (IDEA, 2004). While this category aims to provide support for students for students experiencing emotional and behavioral challenges, it fails to adequately account for the influence of racial trauma and intergenerational trauma on student behavior and learning.

A key concern with IDEA’s implementation is the reliance on standardized assessments for the identification and evaluation of disabilities. These assessments, such as intelligence tests and social-emotional questionnaires often lack cultural responsiveness and fail to contextualize student behaviors within broader sociocultural experiences of marginalized communities. Consider a Black student who exhibits frequent outbursts of anger or aggression in the school setting may be categorized as having an Emotional Disability, when in reality, these behaviors could be manifestations of the student’s experience with trauma. For example, during my tenure as a school psychologist in Washington, D.C., a young Black male student was referred for a special education evaluation for Emotional Disability following a series of physically and verbally aggressive outbursts in the classroom. The referral was initiated, assessments were selected, and the evaluation process was underway before anyone had asked a single question about what was happening in the student's life outside of school. It was only through a conversation during the assessment process that I discovered that the student had recently witnessed a shooting directly outside of his home.

Another concerning consequence of the misinterpretation of trauma responses as educational disabilities is the increased risk of Black students being funneled into the school-to-prison pipeline. For instance, that same Black student who exhibits aggressive or defiant behaviors in the classroom as a result of a racial trauma may be repeatedly disciplined through measures like out-of-school suspensions or expulsions, rather than receiving trauma-informed support. During my time as a school psychologist at a charter school in New York City, a young Black girl who had been formally identified with an Emotional Disability experienced a significant behavioral episode in the classroom that included knocking over desks, displacing materials, and ultimately fleeing the classroom before regulating in an empty classroom down the hall. My understanding of the cycle of behavior involving the behavioral extinction burst allowed me to not only engage in de-escalation practices but advocate for them because the school administration wanted to contact law enforcement. Unfortunately, despite my multiple objections, the school administration contacted law enforcement, which resulted in the student being escorted and admitted to the hospital. This student was not failed by an absence of support. She had a diagnosis, a school psychologist, and a plan, but was ultimately failed by a system that, when faced with a Black girl in distress, reached for containment before it reached for care.

A study by Sullivan and Bal (2013) found that the subjective nature of IDEA’s eligibility criteria, which rely heavily on teacher referrals and clinical assessments, can lead to the overrepresentation of minority students in special education. In the absence of contextual analysis, Black students may be directed into programs that are inappropriate or even re-traumatizing. For example, during my work as a school psychologist in NYC DOE, a Black male student was referred for a special education evaluation after teachers described him as “aggressive” and “withdrawn” — descriptors that, without context, can be misinterpreted as behavioral criteria for an Emotional Disability. It was only through direct conversation with the student during the evaluation process I discovered he had recently relocated across state lines, leaving his mother's home to live with his father and his father's new family in an unfamiliar environment, had lost his paternal grandfather who he was exceptionally close to and unable to say goodbye prior to his death. As a result, the student began using marijuana as a means of coping with compounded grief and displacement. None of these factors were surfaced by the referral because IDEA's evaluation framework had created a pathway from teacher perception to disability classification without ever mandating that a single question be asked about what this child had lost.

However, some state educational agencies have begun to recognize what IDEA has failed to require. For example, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, has developed a supplementary resource titled Trauma and Comprehensive Special Education Evaluation, which explicitly instructs IEP teams to consider the effects of trauma before making eligibility determinations for Emotional Disability (ED). The resource states that IEP teams must consider the effects of any known history of trauma or mental health disorder on the child’s functioning. However, the guidance also further specifies that teams may not identify or refuse to identify a child as having an emotional disability based solely on a known history of trauma or mental health disorder. This is interesting because this guidance acknowledged the problem clearly enough to write supplementary guidance about it, but stopped short of the only logical conclusion that guidance points toward: that trauma responses should not be classified as disability. As a result, this guidance essentially preserves the ambiguity that allows racial bias to operate by refusing to say that a documented trauma history should preclude an ED classification.

The New York City Department of Education, one of the largest school districts in the United States and a district whose overrepresentation data is among the most documented in the country, did not provide school psychologists with formal guidance on considering trauma during special education evaluations until after the COVID-19 pandemic. This gap was so apparent that Advocates for Children of New York publicly called for such guidance in August 2020 urging the NYC DOE to develop a comprehensive plan ensuring students received trauma-informed and culturally responsive mental health support and explicitly naming COVID-19, systemic racism, and police brutality as sources of trauma requiring urgent educational response. As a school psychologist employed by the NYC DOE prior to and during this period, I received no such guidance during the years I was conducting psycho-educational evaluations and making eligibility recommendations for Black students while the research on intergenerational trauma, on the manifestation of trauma responses in school settings, and on the specific overrepresentation of Black students in the Emotional Disability already existed before the pandemic.

Unfortunately, when the trauma is chronic, racialized, and concentrated in Black communities, it remains invisible to the evaluation framework, but when it becomes impossible to ignore, the guidance arrives. The absence of this particular guidance was not a gap in the literature, but a choice that left school psychologists and educators alike without institutional direction prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. This is the interest convergence Bell argues about operating at the level of administrative policy.

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) provides guidelines for the evaluation process used to determine a student’s eligibility for special education services. IDEA Section 1414 requires that evaluations be conducted in a nondiscriminatory manner, using a variety of assessment tools administered by qualified professionals across all areas related to the suspected disability. However, the problem is not the language of Section 1414, but more so that none of its provisions require evaluators to consider whether the behaviors triggering a referral are rooted in trauma, leaving the most consequential question in a Black student's educational life entirely to the discretion of the individual conducting the evaluation.

While IDEA Section 1414 provides a framework for the evaluation process, there are concerns about how these guidelines are implemented in practice, particularly when assessing Black students who may be experiencing intergenerational trauma. One potential issue is the over reliance on standardized assessments, such as intelligence tests and rating scales, in the evaluation process. While IDEA mandates the use of a variety of assessment tools, school psychologists may still place undue emphasis on scores from standardized measures. These assessments often lack cultural sensitivity and may not adequately capture the impact of trauma on a student’s functioning. As a result, Black students who are exhibiting trauma responses may be misidentified as having an Emotional Disability based on their scores on these measures.

In the United Kingdom, the Children and Families Act 2014 serves as the legislative equivalent of IDEA — the statutory framework governing how children with special educational needs and disabilities are identified, assessed, and supported within the education system. The Act's most significant reform was the replacement of the previous Statement of Special Educational Needs with the Education, Health and Care Plan, extending statutory provision from birth to age 25 and creating a duty for local authorities to publish a Local Offer of available services. Like IDEA, the Children and Families Act 2014 represents a genuine attempt to center children's welfare and ensure that those with identified needs receive integrated, coordinated support. And yet, as with IDEA, it contains a fundamental silence at its core: nowhere in its framework does the Act require practitioners to consider whether a child's Social, Emotional and Mental Health needs designation reflects a genuine disability or a trauma response rooted in experiences of racial violence, discrimination, and intergenerational oppression.

The Children and Families Act 2014 provides the statutory framework for the EHC needs assessment process in England. Section 36 of the Act establishes that an EHC needs assessment may be requested by a parent, young person, or school representative, and must be secured by the local authority if it determines the child has or may have special educational needs requiring provision through an EHC plan. The assessment framework is multi-domain, drawing on educational, health, and social care advice from a range of professionals, with parents and young people afforded consultation rights throughout the process and the ability to submit evidence before any determination is made. On its face, this is a comprehensive framework, but the problem, as with IDEA, lies in what it does not require.

While Section 36 provides a framework for identifying and assessing children with special educational needs, there are significant concerns about how these provisions operate in practice when the child being assessed is Black and the presenting behaviors are rooted in trauma rather than intrinsic disability. First, there are no provisions requiring assessors to first consider whether the behaviors prompting the referral reflect a trauma response to racial violence, discrimination, or intergenerational oppression before initiating the assessment process. Although the multi-domain assessment framework outlined draws on educational, health, and social care advice, none of these domains are required to include a racial trauma analysis. Specifically, the consultation provisions give parents and young people the right to submit evidence, but there is no corresponding obligation on the local authority to consider racial and cultural context in interpreting that evidence. Thus, the integration of information across assessments, while practically useful, risks compounding existing biases which can lead to carrying a racially inflected school observation into a health assessment and back again without any mechanism for interrogating whether the original referral reflected the child’s needs or the the assumptions of the clinical gaze. The Children and Families Act 2014, like IDEA before it, created a more sophisticated architecture for SEND (Special Educational Needs and Disabilities) assessment without requiring that architecture to examine its own racial foundations.

In 2015, the SEMH category replaced the previous Behavioural, Emotional and Social Difficulties designation in part to reduce stigma and broaden the understanding of what drives children's emotional and behavioral presentations. Similarly, in the U.S. what was once known as Emotional Disturbance was changed to Emotional Disability in some states such as California, New York, and Texas. Yet the renaming of the disability category itself did not produce a a change in the overrepresentation of Black students under these subjective disability categories. The answer for that is because the problem is the diagnostic gaze itself — the educational system through educators and practitioner's eyes trained to see disorder in Black children's bodies rather than the conditions those bodies are navigating (Annamma, et al., 2013; Fanon, 1952; Foucault, 1963; Goff at et al., 2014). The Children and Families Act 2014, like IDEA before it, built its framework for inclusion on a foundation that never required its practitioners to ask whether the categories they were applying had been designed, historically, to contain the very children they were now claiming to support.

The policy gap this paper attempts to identify is not confined to the United States. In February 2026, the UK government published Every Child Achieving and Thriving, with the most significant SEND reform in over a decade. The document proposes sweeping changes to how children with SEND are identified, supported, and educated. The document acknowledges explicitly that Black Caribbean children face disproportionate exclusion rates and among the lowest educational outcomes of any ethnic group, but contains no race-specific analysis of SEND identification or placement. The continued overrepresentation of Black Caribbean children in Social, Emotional and Mental Health needs categories which is the UK equivalent of the Emotional Disability designation this paper examines does not appear in its reform framework. However, a Race Equality Unit has been tasked with researching exclusion disparities, but not with examining whether the diagnostic apparatus itself produces racially disproportionate outcomes. The UK is reforming its SEND system without requiring that system to interrogate its own racial foundations, and instead, is now expanding with a £1.8 billion new investment that was never equipped to distinguish between a Black child's disability and a Black child's survival.

The policy analysis of IDEA reveals three critical and interconnected gaps. First, the framework provides no guidance for ruling out trauma-induced behaviors before a disability classification is made which leaves the most consequential determination in a Black student's educational life to the unchecked discretion of the individual evaluator. Second, the assessment tools IDEA relies upon lack the cultural responsiveness necessary to distinguish between disability and the behavioral manifestations of trauma. Third, school personnel are not required to receive trauma-informed training as a condition of conducting evaluations, meaning the framework does not just permit misidentification, but it structurally enables it, whether consciously or not.

The policy gaps identified in the United Kingdom’s Children and Families Act 2014 and the recently published Every Child Achieving and Thriving white paper reveal a parallel set of failures. The EHC needs assessment process places the locus of need inside the child without requiring assessors to first consider whether the presenting behaviors reflect a trauma response to racial violence or intergenerational oppression. The white paper applies race-specific analysis to exclusions but not to the SEMH identification process that precedes and often produces them, addressing the endpoint of a racially biased pipeline without examining its intake mechanism. The replacement of the Behavioral, Emotional and Social Difficulties (BESD) disability designation with Social, Emotional and Mental Health needs in 2015 was framed as conceptual progress, but Black Caribbean children's overrepresentation has not meaningfully changed, because renaming a diagnostic category does not alter the racial assumptions of the system and the educators who consciously or unconsciously reproduce it. Neither the Act nor the white paper requires that assessments account for a child's racial and cultural context or the history of racial pathologization in British psychiatry and education, and the £1.8 billion in new SEND investment contains no race-specific allocation directed at addressing Black Caribbean children's overrepresentation in SEMH categories. The overrepresentation has been researched and documented and the data has confirmed it since Bernard Coard’s revelation in 1971, and yet, the system remains structurally intact.

The pattern documented in this paper — across two nations, two legislative frameworks, and more than a decade of research is not a pattern of failure, but a function by design. Both IDEA in the United States and the Children and Families Act 2014 in the United Kingdom do not inadequately account for racial trauma because its architects lacked the research, and nor do they do they fail to require trauma consideration because these are not oversights. These decisions are consistently made within systems that have always understood, at some level, that naming the racial function of their diagnostic categories would require dismantling them. And in order for dismantling to take place, that would mean the surrendering of institutional power, professional authority, and funding streams that depend on these disability categories to remain intact.

This is not cynicism, but the application of the analytical framework this paper has attempted to use throughout. Derrick Bell argued that racial progress in America occurs when and only when it converges with the interests of white institutional power. This same logic of interest convergence also governs educational policy in the United Kingdom. Reform is offered in the precise amount necessary to maintain the system’s legitimacy, and withheld in the precise amount necessary to maintain its function. The children bearing the cost of that calculus are not distributed randomly. They are Black. They have always been Black. And the system has always known exactly what it was doing.

From Reform to Reckoning: Why Policy Recommendations Are Not Enough

The standard response to a policy analysis such as this one is a list of recommendations — revise the evaluation criteria, mandate trauma-informed training, develop culturally responsive tools, allocate funding. This paper has made those arguments before, and they are not wrong, but they are insufficient. Therefore, naming why they are insufficient is, at this point, the more honest and more urgent contribution.

Reform, as Derrick Bell’s interest convergence makes plain, does not occur because evidence demands it, it occurs when the interests of those in power temporarily align with the interests of those being harmed. The NYC DOE did not issue trauma-informed evaluation guidance because decades of research on racial trauma and overrepresentation of Black students in special education finally reached a tipping point. Instead, this guidance was issued because a pandemic made the trauma of all children, including white children impossible to ignore. Thus, when the trauma became universal, the guidance arrived, and when the trauma returns to being racialized and concentrated in Black communities, the guidance will recede in practice if not in policy.

This same logic pf interest convergence applies to the United Kingdom. The Every Child Achieving and Thriving white paper proposes the most significant SEND reforms in over a decade by acknowledging racial disparities in exclusions, committing £1.8 billion to improving outcomes, but it does not once name the racial function of the SEMH category or require the diagnostic structure to examine its own origins. The reforms are real, and the gaps they leave are also real, but the system is only committed to reforming itself just enough to maintain legitimacy, not reform itself enough to dismantle.

Black children in both the United States and the United Kingdom don’t require a better version of a system designed to contain them, they require what Liat Ben-Moshe calls decarcerating disability where she argues that true decarceration for disabled people involves the dismantling of both the institutional and societal logics that produce confinement. The system does not need new language, renamed disability categories, the reform of exclusion or more money being thrown to tell us what we already know. Instead, the system needs abolition and the structuring of something new in its place that begins from the premise that Black children’s emotional lives are not disorders to be managed but inheritances to be honored.

This paper was written inside an academic tradition that typically ends with recommendations, but instead it ends instead with a demand: that the field of special education and the legislative frameworks that govern its practice on both sides of the Atlantic, stop asking how to fix the symptoms of the system and start asking who the system was built for, and whether those children can afford to wait any longer for the answer.

Conclusion

This paper has attempted to trace a single argument across two nations, two legislative frameworks, and more than a century of institutional history: that the misidentification of Black children’s trauma as disability is not a correctable error within an otherwise sound system but a predictable outcome of systems designed to produce exactly this result. The overrepresentation of Black students in the Emotional Disability category in the United States and the Social, Emotional and Mental Health needs category in the United Kingdom is not a gap in implementation, but a systemic mechanism wired to sort, contain, and manage Black children whose emotional responses to racial harm have never been recognized by these systems as rational, because doing so would require the systems to name themselves as the source of that harm.

The research reviewed in this paper confirms what may have long been known but has rarely been permitted to say officially: that the behavioral and emotional presentations of Black students are being read through a diagnostic gaze that was never designed to see them clearly, by frameworks that were never required to ask whether what they were classifying as disorder might instead be survival. The personal accounts documented here in my experience as a school psychologist where students referred for special education evaluation before anyone asked what was happening in their lives are not exceptional, but proof of how the system manifests.

The Every Child Achieving and Thriving white paper, published by the UK government in February 2026, offers the most recent evidence that this gap is not a failure of knowledge but a failure of political will. And until the educational systems on both sides of the Atlantic name the racial function of its own diagnostic categories and commits to dismantling them, the children this system was built to contain will continue to pay the price of its silence.

This paper is a living document. References are being finalized and will be updated, but the arguments are fully supported by the literature cited within the text.

We’re back.

If the 19th century’s tool for pathologizing Blackness was the medical diagnosis of drapetomania and dysaesthesia aethiopica as discussed in part 2, then, the 20th century’s tool was a number. And thanks to William Stern, that number (aka IQ) can be calculated by using the formula: (Mental Age / Chronological Age) × 100.

But first, we’re just going to pause here for a moment before I get into the nitty gritty of eugenics, IQ testing, and the proceeding outcomes of it. Because I want to make sure we account for the time of these very significant events that we’ve been discussing in this series thus far. From 1619, chattel slavery in the U.S. became a global money making machine, then, 1865 marked the emancipation of chattel slavery. That is 246 years of brutal enslavement. 12 years after emancipation, Jim Crow laws began to be introduced, and just 35-42 years after emancipation the eugenics movement started to gain traction in the United States.

I also want us to take notice of the gap between the passage of emancipation, the enactment of Jim Crow, and the emergence of eugenics because it is not a neutral time of historical events. It is, in fact, a time in which a new kind of story was being written about Black bodies—one that swapped the language of property for the language of pathology, and resulted in creating a pseudo-scientific justification for continued subjugation that would itself become a source of enduring, intergenerational wounding.

To speak of this endured intergenerational wounding is to speak of intergenerational trauma. Trauma is not merely a difficult experience or a painful memory, but when in the context of intergenerational — it refers to the transmission of trauma’s effects from one generation to the next, often resulting from experiences of systemic oppression, violence, and discrimination. Dr. Joy DeGruy (2005) coined the term, "post-traumatic slave syndrome" (PTSS) to describe the multigenerational trauma experienced by African Americans as a result of chattel slavery and ongoing oppression.

Additionally, recent research in the field of epigenetics has provided further evidence for the transmission of intergenerational trauma. Epigenetics refers to the study of heritable changes in gene expression that do not involve alterations to the underlying DNA sequence. In other words, environmental factors and experiences can cause certain genes to become "switched on" or "off," and these modifications can potentially be passed down to future generations, influencing how they respond to both stress and trauma.

Yet, we are taught that time heals all things, but for healing to take place the following needs to happen:

• Truth-telling (what happened, who did it, who benefited, who was harmed)

• Material repair (land, resources, restitution, reparations)

• Structural transformation (new systems, not rebranded old ones through reforms)

• Spiritual processing (what Patricia Williams calls "spirit murder" requires spirit repair)

For the Black community in the United States, there was only 12 years until Jim Crow, and 35 to 42 years until the rise of the eugenics movement after the formal end of chattel slavery. There was not nearly enough time for that healing. There was no truth-telling about what had been done, no national reckoning, no reparations, no acknowledgment that more than four hundred years of trafficking, kidnapping, raping, forced labor, and family destruction might leave a mark.

When the gap is this short, it suggests the machinery of racial control was both deliberate and adaptive. The wound was never meant to heal because it was meant to be managed. As a result, we are left with the body remembering what the nation refuses to. It is why a collective emotional outcry occurs amongst the Black community when we witness another Black person murdered by police, or a 'mysterious' lynching, or a courtroom verdict that tells Black people, again, what they have always been worth.

When the wound is being touched in the same place, by the same hand, but wearing a different glove it doesn’t heal…it cannot heal.

It simply gets covered over, buried alive, and left to fester.

So, while eugenics is often viewed as a 20th-century, “progressive” scientific movement, it was more of a continuation of the racial logic rooted in chattel slavery.

History of Eugenics and IQ Testing in the U.S.

Eugenics was first introduced through Darwinism in 1859. Charles Darwin, both a naturalist and geologist published his landmark scientific work titled, “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.” His work in this book would become popular and reverberate across nations to justify the idea that individuals with advantageous inherited traits were more prone to survival. His cousin, Francis Galton, would build off that work and create the field of eugenics in 1883.

But Galton did not build eugenics in a vacuum. There was already a world that spent centuries not only racializing bodies, but deciding which bodies were valuable and disposable. That world had the slave plantation, the medical diagnosis for wanting freedom from enslavement, and the skull measurement just waiting for a “scientific” framework to legitimize what it had already always practiced. Ultimately, Darwin gave Galton the language and it would be Galton’s loyalists who would transform this logic with an answer sheet and percentile rank.

The U.S. eugenics movement of the early 1900s evolved to focus on eliminating supposedly negative heritable traits, using IQ tests to identify "idiots," "imbeciles," and those who exhibited below-average intelligence. However, this quest to measure the mind created the perfect, “objective” machine for racial sorting. It begins not in a school, but on Ellis Island, and its first targets were not Black children, but immigrants.

In 1912 an assistant surgeon by the name of Howard Knox created the Jigsaw Intelligence test, meant to serve as an objective method to measure a person’s fitness of ability for the U.S. labor force. Given the time period, this seemed like a reasonable practical solution to a practical problem. However, this measurement of immigrants shifted in the late 19th century from assessing health and/or ability to judging their race, as growing economic inequality, anti-immigrant sentiment, and the rise of eugenics painted immigrants as a threat to American society. Sound familiar to today?

As a result, formalized IQ tests were first introduced between 1905-1913 by French psychologist Alfred Binet and French psychiatrist, Theodore Simon to identify French schoolchildren needing special educational assistance. The Binet-Simon IQ test aimed to identify students with learning difficulties to provide them with remedial work, rather than classifying them as “uneducable” or sending them to institutions.

However, in the U.S., Henry Herbert Goddard, a self-proclaimed eugenicist and strong proponent of eugenics believed that “feeble-mindedness” was a hereditary trait. Unlike Binet and Simon, Goddard’s mission was to identify “feeble-mindedness” among the arriving masses of immigrants in the U.S. As a result, he administered the test in English (smart guy, huh?), a language many of his subjects did not speak. The results, he claimed, were: a high percentage of immigrants were “morons.” His conclusion was not that the test was flawed, but that America was being flooded with “inferior stock.”

This was not real science.

This was racism disguised as a valid ‘scientific’ measurement.

But, Goddard wasn’t the only one. Lewis Terman of Stanford University, would go on to adapt the Binet-Simon test into the famous 1916 Stanford-Binet (ahem, and it’s still used today by school psychologists!). Additionally, psychologist and ethologist, Robert Yerkes would also go on to develop IQ tests called the Army Alpha and Army Beta tests to administer to U.S. Army recruits during World War I. Through these tests, literate recruits would be given a written examination, called the Army Alpha, while illiterates and men who had failed Alpha would be given a pictorial test, called the Army Beta. Failures on the Beta test would often result in a recall for an individual examination, which was usually some version of the Binet test.

With these tests, their shared belief was that intelligence was a fixed, hereditary trait, and that certain races, notably Black and immigrant populations, possessed less of it and the test was meant to be the “proof.”

But there’s one more name that belongs in this lineage, not as a eugenicist, but more so as a consequence of the eugenic era. In 1939, David Wechsler, a Romanian-born Jewish psychologist, developed the Wechsler-Bellevue Intelligence Scale, which is the predecessor to the Wechsler scales that school psychologists use most widely today (i.e., WISC, WAIS, and the WPPSI). Although there is no evidence that Wechsler held eugenic beliefs, he was himself a member of a racialized group that eugenicists had explicitly targeted as inferior stock. But it’s important to note that Wechsler developed his tests within an intellectual ecosystem that had already been thoroughly organized by eugenic assumptions about what intelligence is, how it should be measured, whose cognitive profile counts as the norm, and whose deviation from that norm counts as a deficit. Wechsler’s work proves that you don’t need to be a eugenicist to build a tool inside a eugenicist field because the instrument itself inherits the logic of the era that produced it.

By the mid-1900s, this logic of intelligence was institutionalized.

Now armed with “objective” test scores, eugenicists advocated for and carried out the forced sterilization of thousands deemed “unfit,” effecting disproportionately Black, Indigenous, and poor women. These same IQ tests used to measure intelligence were also used as “proof” for the biologically determined genesis of African American women’s physically deviant behaviors.

Ultimately, the goal was to stop the “bad stock” from reproducing.

In August 1964, the North Carolina Eugenics Board met to decide if a 20-year-old Black woman should be sterilized. At the time, she was a single mother with one child who lived in a segregated facility for African American adults with intellectual disabilities. According to the North Carolina Eugenics Board, the woman had an IQ score of 62 and exhibited “aggressive behavior and sexual promiscuity.” Due to her “low IQ” score, the board deemed her incapable of rehabilitation and therefore recommended sterilization.

Also, in North Carolina, a woman by the name of Jessie had a recorded IQ score of 75 which was determined to be above North Carolina’s instituted cut-off of 70 for “feeblemindedness,” yet this test did not save her from being sterilized. What Jessie's case makes clear is that IQ scores functioned less as fixed scientific measurements and more as flexible instruments that could be raised or lowered, interpreted or reinterpreted in service of a racial and eugenic logic that had already decided the outcome.

What these cases reveal, taken together, is not a series of isolated tragedies but a systematic pattern — one in which the Black body was rendered perpetually deficient and perpetually in need of management/control. The IQ score was never the point; it was merely the justification because the decision had already been made through the logic of white supremacy long before any test was administered. But this was not a closed chapter because as we’ve been tracing in this series, this logic once again migrated, found new institutions, new language, and new professionals to carry it forward.

Now, fast forward to the schoolhouse.

In 1911, the prominent eugenicist, Henry Herbert Goddard shows up again to advocate for the use of these same IQ tests in schools to identify children with intellectual disabilities or those needing special education. As a result, he used the Binet-Simon test to label children (creating categories like “moron,” “imbecile,” and “idiot”) and advocated for the segregation.

This resulted in students being slotted into tracks based on their IQ score.

After several years of the IQ tests introduction and implementation along with the passing of the The Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975 (Public Law 94-142), the label, “Educable Mentally Retarded” (now Intellectual Disability) was born here, in this marriage of an IQ number and a eugenic belief.

And who was overwhelmingly sorted into this category? You guessed it! Black kids.

Coincidence? I think not, but I’m just here to share the facts.

By the 1960s and 70s, as schools were finally being forced to desegregate, the data showed a stark pattern: Black children, especially from low-income communities, were being disproportionately labeled “EMR” and funneled into segregated, restrictive classrooms. (but we will go more in depth in part 5). The “feeble-minded” immigrant of 1913 had become the “Educable Mentally Retarded” Black child of 1963. The prevalence of this became so undeniable that the case of Larry P. v Riles in the state of California came into the fold and resulted in the ultimate ban of IQ tests for Black students:

A U.S. District Judge by the name of Robert Peckham agreed and called the tests “racially and culturally biased” and “discriminatory.” He ordered a permanent ban on IQ testing of Black students across California for purposes of special education placement.

And to this day, California remains the only state in the U.S. to have this law.

Then, in 1972, Dr. Robert Williams, a professor of psychology de-bunked traditional IQ tests with the creation of the Black Intelligence Test of Cultural Homogeneity, aka the BITCH test. When administered, the test showed that Black students scored significantly higher than their white peers, demonstrating the profound cultural bias in traditional IQ tests. It was in this moment that we had an opportunity at what testing could look like when we center Black children instead of making them a permanent occupant of the “other,” and using tests to justify that position.

This act of re-centering the test around Black cultural knowledge directly challenges what Frank Wilderson III’s Afro-pessimism theorizes. Afro-pessimism explains how anti-Blackness is not simply one form of discrimination among many but the very foundation upon which the category of the human is constructed. In other words, Black people do not just occupy the bottom of a racial hierarchy, they are positioned outside of humanity itself, as the necessary contrast against which everyone else's humanity is then measured. From an Afro-pessimist lens, traditional IQ tests are not merely biased instruments but rather technologies of social death, which functions to affirm the “humanity” of whiteness by numerically classifying Black intellectual and cultural deviation from white norm as a form of lack or pathology. By flipping the script and making Black cultural fluency the measure of intelligence, Williams's BITCH test exposed that the "deficit" was never located in Black minds or communities, but was instead a structural property of the testing apparatus itself which reflected the biased standards of whiteness and consistently produced Blackness as the negative space of ability.

But, Dr. Robert Williams was not alone in naming what the field refused to see.

In 1976, Robert V. Guthrie, an African American psychologist and historian, published his book, Even the Rat Was White: A Historical View of Psychology. In his book, Guthrie documented the history of psychology by exposing the field's long history of racism and bias against African Americans. He demonstrated how whiteness was so thoroughly the assumed universal norm that psychology’s foundations, including behavioral experiments used white rats by default. Through this historical tracing, Guthrie revealed how scientific racism was embedded both within the discipline's very methodology and theory, while also recovering the overlooked contributions of Black psychologists who had been systematically erased from the field of psychology’s history.

Together, Williams and Guthrie were doing in the 70s what the field of school psychology is still struggling to do for itself today, which is naming the whiteness built into the tools, the theories, and methodologies regardless of the “evidence-based” claim.

And sure, the field heard them.

But the field also heard Larry P. v. Riles and the California ban, as well as Kenneth and Mamie Clark whose doll studies provided the psychological evidence underlying Brown v. Board by demonstrating that segregation caused measurable psychological harm to Black children (which we will also go more in depth in part 5). The field also received the counter-instruments and the counter-histories and produced position statements and diversity committees and revised editions of the same tests with updated norm samples that still centered whiteness as the cognitive standard.

And yet, reform without redistribution of power is pacification.

The tool of racial oppression had changed hands, from the plantation owner to Cartwright, from the eugenicist to the school psychologist, but the outcome produced the same results.

So, where does that leave us today?

As a school psychologist myself, it’s difficult to reconcile with the history of IQ tests while the field itself also heavily relies on them to assess students for special education placement. The assessment most widely used today, the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, known as the WISC is currently in its fifth edition is administered by school psychologists across the U.S., yet the overrepresentation data of Black students in special education has not meaningfully changed. Although current cognitive assessments provide significant information when it comes to understanding how a student’s brain processes information, specifically in the areas of Verbal Comprehension, Visual Spatial Reasoning, Fluid Reasoning, Working Memory and Processing speed, it doesn’t negate the fact that the origins of IQ tests are inherently racist against Black students and inherently ableist towards students deemed (dis)abled.

So, how can we effectively advocate and support Black students and other students of color with disabilities during the special education process when the racist and ableist origins of IQ tests are used in the name of helping the students the tests were intended to discriminate against?

Ok, this took a lot out of me to put together so I will end here (with a glass of wine in hand), and pick this up again soon.

Until next time.
- Alexandria

Between the Margins: A School Psychologist’s Notes
This is a regular feature where I connect the historical dots from the series to the lived practice of my work in schools. These are the notes from the field.

The Artifact: The psycho-educational report excerpt that legal told me to remove.

The Through-Line: A white psychiatrist sent a referral letter labeling a Black girl with ADHD and specifying which tests I should use for the evaluation. I administered the tests I had access to and during the evaluation, the 3rd grade student showed none of the behaviors the referral described. After the testing session, her mother asked my opinion on special education and I told her the truth — that Black children are overrepresented in special education at rates disability labels alone cannot explain.
When I documented that the scores should be interpreted with caution because of the history of IQ testing, I received a call from the psychologist supervisor telling me that legal wanted me to remove it because I shouldn't be including my opinion. I said it wasn't my opinion, but it was the truth. My supervisor offered me an exit: "you could have chosen a different test". I said: "but all of the tests are rooted in eugenics." Ultimately, I ended up re-uploading the report without the excerpt.

The Question for My Field: If truth is too dangerous for an official report, we have to ask what the official report is actually for and whose record we are keeping when we write it. Is it a clinical document designed to serve the child? Or is it an institutional document designed to protect the system that produces the child's label?

Next in The Anatomy of a System: How this logic of intelligence justified the asylum’s architecture of segregation and became the blueprint for the “special” school.

This is the third post in The Anatomy of a System: Special Education Edition, a series tracing the historical through-line of racialized disablement and commodification in special education.

You weren't expecting this. Neither was I, honestly.

But after publishing Part 2 of The Anatomy of a System this week, I couldn’t stop thinking about this piece I wrote when I was still a school psychologist back in New York City (with a few current updates), still inside the machine, still trying to figure out how to do right by children inside a system designed to do them harm. I am struck by how clearly I could see the outline of the argument I'm still making — just with more historical and theoretical scaffolding now. I'm sharing it today as a companion to the Anatomy of a System series, because the questions I was asking then are the same ones driving my dissertation now.

The segregation of students with disabilities, like the segregation of Black children (something we’re tracing in the series here), has a very long history in the U.S. and the effects of that history continuously linger. Despite the IDEA — special education policy’s original intent as a legacy of Brown and a lever to give disabled students a greater educational opportunity, it too has played a role in the insidious process of racial segregation.

The harms of western psychology also known as traditional psychology are pervasive and have been documented for decades. Western psychology is understood as Eurocentric and is critiqued for ignoring the unique experiences of disabled individuals, often blaming disabled individuals for their conditions, and placing emphasis on the psychologist to solve or heal the disabled conditions. However, what happens when psychologists don’t do any healing, and instead perpetuate harm? Although the field of psychology, specifically the subfield of school psychology has taken steps to address these harms, the field sustains and maintains it through its practices of evaluating for special education.

One harm in particular that stands out to me is this notion of special education being used as a tool for racial segregation.

According to NASP, school psychologists are uniquely qualified members of school teams that support students’ ability to learn and teachers’ ability to teach. However, whether we like it or not, school psychologists are also inadvertently trained to maintain the status quo. Our training in 'objective' assessment and 'evidence-based' interventions often masks the subjective, Western, and ableist assumptions underlying these practices, allowing inequity to persist under the guise of scientific neutrality. Additionally, the very schools we work in and manage high caseloads for uphold and reinforce the dominant beliefs of society.

Since starting my Ph.D. program and learning about the unsurprising blatantly racist history of public education and its formation, I often ask myself if schools can ever be a place of liberation for Black students. If the formation of education was to create the ever loyal workforce to the maintain the structure of capitalism, then can the same institution ever truly dismantle the very systems it was built to serve? If if I turn to Audre Lorde’s words, “For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change,” the answer would be a resounding “NO.”

And yet here we are — school psychologists, educators, and advocates alike returning to the same house every August/September, carrying the same tools, and wondering why the walls haven't moved.

It also makes me think about the work of both national and local conferences where we school psychologists go to share our work, listen to others, and leave feeling inspired, yet return to schools that remain fundamentally unchanged because not only are we are met with administrators who don’t answer to NASP, caseload deadlines that don’t bend for conscience, the very sessions we attend rarely ask us to examine the racial and ableist foundations of the institutions we serve, (let alone our own field!).

The conference room and the school hallway are two different countries that rarely, if ever acknowledge each other's existence—one where decisions are made about children, and one where children actually live.

This is the paradox I sit with often.

School psychologists are trained in interventions, data-based decision-making, and mental health support—all framed within the context of “helping” students adapt and succeed. But succeed in what? In a system that was never designed for them? We teach Black students to navigate spaces that were explicitly designed to exclude them, and we call that resilience. We teach teachers to manage behaviors that are often culturally appropriate emotional expressions, expressions of the effects of trauma or resistance to oppressive structures, and we call that classroom management. If our role is to remove barriers to learning, but the foundation of the school itself is the biggest barrier, then what are we really doing? Are we supporting students, or are we just making an unjust system run more smoothly?

These systems and practices that we engage in on a daily basis continue to perpetuate this cycle of exclusion. Technologies of exclusion, including ability testing, tracking, labeling, and special education, have played a major part in the resegregation of our schools. In the 1970s school officials argued that children with disabilities were uneducable and needed to be kept apart from their peers.

For example, in NYC, District 75 formally known as the “600 schools” is said to provide highly specialized instructional support for students with significant challenges (aka disabilities). However, its historical past is anything but highly specialized. In 1947, the Board of Education announced the first centralized program for delinquent and maladjusted youth known as the “600” schools. According to the Oxford Dictionary, a delinquent is defined as a young person showing or characterized by a tendency to commit a crime, particularly a minor crime. A delinquent student is deviant, fails to cooperate in school, and also fails to work hard; such behaviors would lead to failure. According to the American Psychological Association (APA) Dictionary of Psychology maladjusted is defined as an inability to maintain effective relationships, function successfully in various domains, or cope with difficulties and stresses.

However, the federal definition of emotional disturbance (ED) includes a social maladjustment (SM) exclusion clause (but, not formally defined) that stipulates that students are not eligible for special education services if they are determined to be “socially maladjusted” which has been criticized for its ambiguity.

According to the Special Education Operating Manual Procedures, this is how NYC DOE defines social maladjustment:

Social Maladjustment refers to behavioral manifestations that negatively affect educational performance, such as where the student has:

• A dysfunctional family background; the tendency to respond more quickly to negative sanctions than to positive rewards; and/or gang involvement and truancy.

• Irritability or anger, which are used manipulatively to control people and situations. Obscene and degrading language and gestures are common. A student who is socially maladjusted will often exhibit explosive verbal and physical aggression toward both peers and adults.

• Unusually high self-esteem but fragile. If distress occurs, it is situational and usually related to being held accountable or experiencing a loss of power or control.

• Refusal to take personal responsibility and tendency to project blame onto others or events. The student sees him/herself as faultless or as having reacted justifably to perceived transgressions against him/her.

• Values and morality that are determined by the situation and by whatever s/he wants at the moment (i.e. immediate gratifcation).

• Substance and alcohol abuse. • Lack of empathy or remorse; may be described as having no conscience.

• Closed thinking pattern; that is, the student is not interested in others’ opinions and judgments in areas such as responsible living…

Reading this definition, it is impossible not to notice how its criteria: dysfunctional family background, gang involvement, projecting blame, lack of remorse read less like clinical descriptors and more like a coded profile of a particular kind of child the system has already decided is disposable.

However, as the demographics in NYC shifted during the Great Migration 1910-1970; the amount of Black and Latino students assigned to the 600 schools increased. Several years later, the NYC Department of Education published the results of a 5-year long study involving the 600 schools. Their results indicated that psychiatric evaluations conducted for all participating “600” school students found no signs of the reported emotional disturbances that had caused their transfers to the “600” schools to begin with. Additionally, some students had undiagnosed learning disabilities and high-average cognitive functioning which did not warrant their placement at the 600 schools.

You see, NYC schools never officially desegregated after the Brown 1954 decision (we will discuss more in Part 5) that rested on the distinction in constitutional law between “de jure” segregation—resulting from purposeful discrimination by the government—and “de facto” racial imbalance derived from unintentional or “fortuitous” actions by state and private entities. However, NYC asserted that they had “de facto” segregation. Consequently, the Supreme Court held that de facto school districts could not voluntarily assign students to schools according to their race for purposes of promoting integration.

Yes, you read that correctly. NYC did not have to legally de-segregate their schools and so, they didn’t. To this day, NYC schools remain the most segregated school system in America.

With this history in mind, I am constantly questioning how can I make a difference? How can I be the change I want to see in this field? A few years ago, Dr. Janie Ward came to guest lecture in my class and we discussed the various ways we can engage in resistance. Resistance does not have to look a particular way and pushing back can occur on the front lines or behind the scenes. It all matters. This talk from her couldn’t have come at a better time because just a few days prior I had questioned whether or not I should personally contact a school psychologist and make them aware of the potential harm they may have caused in their report and wrongfully labeling a child with an educational disability. Instead, I thought, what would I say? How would I say it? But only anger and frustration filled me and I wasn’t able to say anything...until now.

Personal Case Study

I came across a case and wondered why a student who had arrived from Jamaica was evaluated for special education just 4 months after their arrival. I was astonished. Within the next 6 months, I read that they were also evaluated for speech and recommended to receive speech services as stated in the report, “Student has a very thick Jamaican accent.” I couldn’t help but examine this notion of assimilation through language where schools were historically a tool of settler colonialism, forcing both Indigenous and Mexican communities to speak English. Here is a child who had their entire life uprooted from them and are away from the only home they’ve ever known...most likely experiencing culture shock. I sat there questioning why any educator sitting on that IEP team never thought to stop and say maybe this is not appropriate given the context of the situation. Then, I imagined what would’ve happened if this student was white...would they have given the student more time to acclimate to their new environment? Would they have paired the student with someone of a similar cultural background to support them in this transition? Given them tier 1 interventions? Would they? Based on what history says, I would say yes, it would have been different.

Labeling a child with an educational disability in schools can change the entire trajectory of their life...that is not lost on me.

It shouldn’t be lost on any of us who hold this power.

As school psychologists, we have a responsibility to do what is best for children and to resist the practices we have been trained to implement that cause harm to communities that have been targeted, chronically disenfranchised, and oppressed. We work in a system that was designed to segregate, whether that is because of race or dis/ability and it is up to us to consistently challenge that system if we are doing what NASP says we do which is help children and youth succeed academically, socially, behaviorally, and emotionally.

*I wrote this piece as a practitioner sitting inside a system I had already begun to distrust. I am writing this note to you now as someone who has since stepped outside of it…not because I gave up, but because I finally understood that you cannot see the architecture of a house clearly from inside its walls. The questions I was asking then have not been answered yet, but they have only become more urgent, more specific, and more historical. That is what the Anatomy of a System series is. It is my attempt to stop asking the questions in isolation and start tracing the blueprint. Because before we can build the room I keep looking for, we have to understand, fully and without flinching, what was built in its place and whose labor, whose bodies, and whose erasure made that construction possible.

Welcome back ya’ll.

In the first part of this series, we traced how the plantation built an entire economic and ideological system on a lie — that Black people were not fully human, that Blackness and disability were made to mean each other, and that the category of “monster” was invented to justify what the system of chattel slavery was doing to the bodies it owned. Then, we ended with a formula: declare a deficit, engineer the conditions to produce it, then use the tools of science and policy to codify the result, transform violence into data, and consequently turn oppression into diagnosis.

Today we meet the first diagnosis.

But first, let me share that it wasn’t until several years ago that I took a disability studies course where we explored the history of race and ability in the U.S. We learned about DisCrit (Disability Studies and Critical Race Theory), and discussed the range of social, material, and psychological consequences of being labeled both “raced” and disabled.

So, there I was with very minimal knowledge about the social construction of disability as a school psychologist nonetheless (go figure!) and I’m sitting there taking it all in.

Suddenly, I understood what people meant by the institutional/medical gaze and how, as a school psychologist, I was a primary agent of it. Although as a school psychologist I was trained to “look at the whole child,” the special education process itself, predicated on the medical model of disability, doesn’t allow for that gaze to be neutral. It is a power to pathologize, to sort, and to label—ultimately, a power whose outcomes are profoundly shaped by race.

The “standardized and normed,” and therefore beyond questionable assessments I was administering weren't just measuring a child to label them with a disability; they were applying a raced and ableist script that could alter a student’s educational trajectory forever.

It was an ah-ha moment at its finest.

From that point on, any new awareness, any new discovery in my work as a school psychologist became an “ohhhhh, I get it!” and “I don’t like that” moment.

Because what I was starting to see wasn't a glitch in the system.

As we know, the pathologizing of Black minds and bodies isn’t new; it is a foundational American tradition, dressed up as “science” and medicine that the field of psychology and consequently special education, has inherited.

So, to understand how deep that inheritance runs, we need to go back to 1851.

An American physician by the name of Dr. Samuel Cartwright who studied medicine under one of U.S. Founding Father’s Benjamin Rush built his career in both Mississippi and Louisiana during the Antebellum period. Having been born into a slaveholding family and married into another, it is safe to say that Dr. Cartwright had both personal and financial interests in preserving the institution of slavery. Consequently, these interests would later shape his work where he constructed elaborate pseudo-scientific arguments and claims about supposed physiological differences and innate inferiority among Black people to justify the continued enslavement of the enslaved.

In 1851, Dr. Cartwright published a report in the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal, that made it official. He gave this fabricated disability a name.

He called it drapetomania.

It is unknown to our medical authorities, although its diagnostic symptom, the absconding from service, is well known to our planters and overseers...The cause in the most of cases, that induces the negro to run away from service, is as much a disease of the mind as any other species of mental alienation, and much more curable, as a general rule.

In other words, the enslaved African’s desire for freedom wasn’t resistance to captivity, instead, it was a curable mental illness requiring “medical” intervention.

Let me state that plainly: The first medical diagnosis specifically created for Black people in the United States was for the desire to be free.

However, this was not a fringe idea at the time.

This diagnosis was published in a reputable journal and it was a diagnosis that made perfect sense within the logic of its time: a time that required Black bodies to be property could not tolerate Black minds that longed for liberty. So, it pathologized that desire and instead, relocated the problem from the brutal institution of chattel slavery to the “disordered” mind of the enslaved.

Dr. Cartwright also described dysaesthesia aethiopica—a supposed condition of laziness and insensitivity, often treated with whipping. The message was consistent between these two diagnoses: Black resistance to exploitation, whether active (running) or passive (slowing down), was not a political act, but a curable mental illness requiring medical intervention.

Dysaesthesia Aethiopica is a disease peculiar to negroes, affecting both mind and body in a manner…There is a partial insensibility of the skin, and so great a hebetude of the intellectual faculties, as to be like a person half asleep, that is with difficulty aroused and kept awake. It differs from every other species of mental disease, as it is accompanied with physical signs or lesions of the body discoverable to the medical observer…It is much more prevalent among free negroes living in clusters by themselves, than among slaves on our plantations, and attacks only such slaves as live like free negroes in regard to diet, drinks, exercise, etc….

In other words, enslaved Africans who worked slowly, resisted orders, or appeared unresponsive to demanding and arduous labor weren’t exercising agency, instead, they were suffering from a racialized neurological disorder that made them biologically incapable of self-direction without the “structure” that chattel slavery provided.

Again, it was what Cartwright claimed to be a clinical symptom that needed to be treated and controlled. However, Dr. Cartwright’s diagnoses were not just a matter of opinion, these diagnoses were also economically functional.

Drapetomania provided slaveholders with a medical explanation that preserved the institution of chattel slavery’s legitimacy: the problem wasn’t slavery’s violence, it was the enslave’s “mental disorder.”

The economic logic was clear: treat the diagnosed individual, restore them to productivity, and most importantly, protect the investment.

And as we discussed in the first post, slave owners needed to protect their investment and did so through the meticulous classification of bodies — fraction of a hand systems, plantation ledgers, and insurance policies. They created an entire apparatus of valuation designed to extract maximum productivity from every person they owned.

You see, when an enslaved African ran away from the plantation, they weren't just escaping, they were removing themselves as an economic asset from the system of chattel slavery. An enslaved African valued as “three-quarters of a hand” on the plantation ledger represented quantifiable financial loss when they ran away.

Thus, disability became capital.

And slave owners were not in the business of losing money from their investment. So much so that the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was passed to force the return of those who escaped and the passing of the Compensated Emancipation Act of 1862 ensured that slave owners who were loyal to the union would receive up to $300 for every formerly enslaved African.

Dysaesthesia aethiopica also performed similar economic incentive because enslaved Africans who worked slowly, resisted orders, or appeared unresponsive ultimately threatened plantation productivity. Rather than attributing this behavior to rational resistance against brutal exploitation, violence, and control, Dr. Cartwright framed both diagnoses as a treatable medical condition whose cure was pandering to the enslaved as if they were children and increased violence.

Dr. Samuel Cartwright’s cure:

If the white man…keeps him (Negro) in the position that we learn from the Scriptures he was intended to occupy, that is, the position of submission; and if his master or overseer be kind and gracious in his hearing towards him, without condescension, and at the sane time ministers to his physical wants, and protects him from abuses, the negro is spell-bound, and cannot run away…

…The awe and reverence, must be exacted from them, or they will despise their masters, become rude and ungovernable, and run away…When sulky and dissatisfied without cause…I was decidedly in favor of whipping them out of it, as a preventive measure against absconding, or other bad conduct. It was called whipping the devil out of them.

If treated kindly, well fed and clothed, with fuel enough to keep a small fire burning all night—separated into families, each family having its own house—not permitted to run about at night to visit their neighbors, to receive visits or use intoxicating liquors, and not overworked or exposed too much to the weather, they are very easily governed —more so than any other people in the world. When all this is done, if any one or more of them, at any time, are inclined to raise their heads to a level with their master or overseer…they should be punished until they fall into that submissive state…They have only to be kept in that state and treated like children, with care, kindness, attention and humanity, to prevent and cure them from running away.

Both drapetomania and dysaesthesia aethiopica served the same economic logic: they pathologized any behavior whether active or passive, flight or refusal that threatened the extraction of value from Black bodies.

By medicalizing Black resistance and/or Black emotional expression, Dr. Cartwright made it a treatable condition rather than evidence of slavery’s intentional violence.

The institution didn’t need to change because the ones managing it benefited from it, and it was intentionally made so that it was the diagnosed individuals who needed to change.

Ultimately, the system needed more than ledgers and fractions. It needed authority with the stamp of science, for someone to arrive with credentials and diagnostic language, and ultimately, with the power to make oppression sound like medicine.

It needed a doctor.

And that doctor came, examined, diagnosed, and left his findings. And when he left, the plantation continued on the authority of what Dr. Cartwright wrote.

That pattern of the credentialed outsider arriving with instruments, measuring bodies against norms they had no part in creating, documenting deficiency in clinical language, then leaving the institution to act on those findings didn’t end with Dr. Cartwright.

It evolved.

So when we look at the overrepresentation of Black students in special education with the Emotional Disturbance classification today in the U.S., we are looking at the afterlife of an idea older than this country itself: that Black resistance and/or Black emotional expression in all its forms, is a defect to be diagnosed, managed, and suppressed.

Today, that idea lives inside a definition.

The criteria for Emotional Disturbance sounds neutral: a disability category defined as a condition exhibiting exhibiting one or more of the following characteristics over a long period of time, to a marked degree, that adversely affects educational performance.

• An inability to learn that cannot be explained by intellectual, sensory, or health factors.

• An inability to build or maintain satisfactory interpersonal relationships with peers and teachers.

• Inappropriate types of behavior or feelings under normal circumstances.

• A general pervasive mood of unhappiness or depression.

• A tendency to develop physical symptoms or fears associated with personal or school problems.

*Emotional disturbance includes schizophrenia. The term does not apply to children who are socially maladjusted, unless it is determined that they have an emotional disturbance (c)(4)(i).

But who defines “inappropriate”? Who defines “normal”? What does it mean to be socially maladjusted?

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. answered that question on social maladjustment in 1963:

“There are some things concerning which we must always be maladjusted if we are to be people of good will. We must never adjust ourselves to racial discrimination and racial segregation. We must never adjust ourselves to religious bigotry. We must never adjust ourselves to economic conditions that take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. We must never adjust ourselves to the madness of militarism, and the self-defeating effects of physical violence.”

So, I have to wonder, when a Black child is placed in a hostile or under-resourced classroom/school or is arriving to school while carrying the weight of systemic failures that aren’t accidents but policy choices responds with anger, withdrawal, or refusal — is that a disorder? Or is that a rational response to what we have decided to call pathology?

Dr. Cartwright didn’t ask what kind of system requires the dehumanization of a group of people to keep them enslaved.

We (school psychologists and educators alike) don’t ask what kind of system requires labeling and sorting children to make them fit or removing and isolating children just to maintain order.

Instead, we accept the environment as fixed and treat the child as the problem to be solved. We prescribe labels, place students in separate classrooms, create individualized plans that establish hierarchies of who deserves support and what that support should look like, and modify expectations not to transform the system, but to manage those who cannot conform to it.

This is the original diagnosis, and unfortunately, our schools are still writing the prescription.

However, Dr. Cartwright’s pseudoscience needed a partner. It needed a way to measure not just behavior, but intelligence. It needed a technology that could rank human worth with numbers instead of fallible diagnoses. It needed something that looked even more objective than pseudoscientific medicine.

It needed a test.

Ok, that’s it for now.
Until next time!
- Alexandria

Between the Margins: A School Psychologist's Note
This is a regular feature where I connect the historical dots from the series to the lived practice of my work in schools. These are notes from the field.

The Artifact: A Functional Behavior Assessment I wrote as a school psychologist intern for a 7-year-old Black boy whose "behaviors of concern" included noncompliance, off-task behavior, and verbal disruptions. 

The Through-Line: I documented his behaviors meticulously: frequency, duration, antecedents, consequences. I identified the "function" of his behavior: escape/avoidance of non-preferred tasks. I recommended interventions: a token economy, social skills training, teaching him to request breaks "appropriately."

What I didn't document: that the classroom had 28 students. Or that the teacher moved through material too quickly for him to process. That the tasks required reading skills he didn't have yet. That he was one of three Black boys in a predominantly white classroom where "appropriate" behavior meant sitting still, being quiet, and complying without question.

Dr. Samuel Cartwright, in 1851, diagnosed enslaved people who fled as having "drapetomania"—a disease of the mind characterized by an irrational desire for freedom. The prescribed cure: make them incapable of fleeing by whipping them or confining them. I didn't use physical violence. I used behavior charts and token economies, but the logic was identical: when a body refuses an environment built to contain it, we diagnose the body's refusal. We prescribe interventions to make the body comply and never question the environment itself.

The Question for My Field: What if his "noncompliance" was the most rational response to a classroom that couldn't hold him? What if "off-task" simply meant the tasks were wrong, not that he was deficient? What if every behavior I labeled "inappropriate" was actually his body's accurate assessment that this environment was harming him? My FBA identified his behaviors as the problem. But what if the classroom was the pathology? What if I was playing Cartwright—using clinical language to justify the system's demand that he adapt to conditions designed to disable him?

Next in The Anatomy of a System: How this logic of ranking human worth moved from the plantation to the laboratory, with the invention of the IQ test.

This is the second post in The Anatomy of a System: Special Education Edition, a series tracing the historical through-line of racialized disablement and commodification in special education.

© Alexandria Lockhart, 2026. All rights reserved. For permissions, see the permissions page.

I know the title - “The Disabling Plantation” - is heavy. But, I want to be honest with you upfront: this series is going to ask a lot of you. It's going to ask you to sit with discomfort. To question things you were taught. To see systems you thought were helping in a completely different light. If you're an educator or psychologist like I am, it might ask you to reckon with your own role in perpetuating harm, even when you had good intentions.

So, before we go deep, I want to set some intentions for this space:

1. This is not about guilt. If you’re an educator, a psychologist, a parent - you’re not the villain. Most of us entered this work because we genuinely wanted to help. The system is the problem, not you (well maybe some of you who are committed to the status quo and unfortunately, there are many).

2. This is not academic jargon. I’m not going to make you read like you’re in a graduate seminar. I’m going to break this down in plain language because this knowledge belongs to everyone, not just people with PhDs.

3. This is an invitation to see differently. Once you see what I’m about to show you, you can’t unsee it. And that’s the point. We need people who can see the truth and are willing to do something about it.

4. This is my intellectual property. This content originates from my doctoral dissertation research at CUNY Graduate Center. I ask that you please engage with respect as this material is shared to ignite a movement/conversation to transform a system that fails Black students, not to be co-opted.

So before we dive in, take a breath. Pour some tea or cafe. Get comfortable.

As Carter G. Woodson stated in his book, The Mis-Education of the Negro, “The conditions of today have been determined by what has taken place in the past…”

And so, we will start with what has taken place in the past.

Let’s talk about The Disabling Plantation.

Chattel slavery by way of the Transatlantic Slave Trade required a “lie they couched in language,” as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stated “and made everything black, ugly and evil.” A lie that the enslaved were not fully human, that they were, in a sense, disabled. Not by nature, but by design: disabled for freedom, disabled for personhood, disabled for self-possession.

As we know and understand what history has told us is that during the mid-16th century, Africans were enslaved and trafficked from Africa to the United States by English capitalists — people who prioritize private ownership, competition, and individual wealth accumulation. However, when you factor the social construction of race, you have what Dr. Cedric Robinson called, racial capitalism which is dependent on slavery, violence, imperialism, and genocide to accumulate financial capital.

Consequently, when enslaved Africans stepped on those ships, they entered an economic calculation that would follow them until death.

Enslaved Africans were treated as financial assets, bought and sold in markets much like livestock or land. Additionally, the enslaved economic value was meticulously recorded in plantation ledgers, insurance policies, and probate records, demonstrating how Black bodies generated wealth for both individuals and institutions alike. By the mid-19th century, the total value of enslaved Africans in the United States was estimated to be over $3 billion. Today, studies on reparations often estimate the economic value of slavery in the trillions.

As if trafficking a human being into chattel slavery wasn’t enough, the system of chattel slavery actively produced disability as a category of control.

To further maximize profits, plantation owners in the U.S. South developed a semi-formal classification system to determine the economic value based on an individual’s perceived physical and intellectual capabilities. This resulted in a brutal calculus that reduced human beings to percentages of productivity. Take, for example, Berry’s description of Joseph in The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: a seventeen-year-old sold for $1,450 at a Louisiana auction block on the eve of the Civil War, a sum worth roughly $50,000–$60,000 today according to a CPI calculator and whose auction entry recorded him as a “strong, healthy, fine-looking, intelligent boy.”

This system rated individuals as fractions of a hand based on their perceived labor capabilities.

Were you strong? Physically and intellectually able? Then, you were considered “prime field hand” material and worth top dollar, destined for the brutal labor of cotton and tobacco fields where your body would be used until it gave out whether by exhaustion, physical abuse, or death.

Were you a child learning to work, or a breastfeeding mother? Then, you might be labeled as a half a hand, or three-quarters of a full hand.

Did you have a limp? A chronic illness? An injury from the Middle Passage? You were recategorized. Not worthless, oh never that, because even broken bodies could be extracted for value, even if worth less.

Old age and can’t work the fields anymore? Suddenly you’re reassigned to drive carts, tend kitchens, watch children, care for livestock, or make clothes. The plantation always found ways to extract value.

Disabled didn’t mean useless, it meant differently useful.

Elderly people became herbalists, drivers, spiritual leaders, and oral historians. Those with mobility limitations were repurposed as skilled artisans, blacksmiths, cobblers, or seamstresses. The labor still flowed, just in different forms.

However, others were sold off entirely because their enslavers were unwilling to bear the “burden” of caring for someone they could no longer fully exploit. But, this flexibility in who is abled vs. (dis)abled revealed the lie at slavery’s core: disabled people absolutely could contribute, work, and create value. The category of disability was never really about capacity, it was more about control and devaluation.

Ultimately, the system of chattel slavery shifted these labels based on what the system needed.

The Material Conditions: How the Plantation Created Disability

The plantation didn’t just categorize disability, it manufactured it:

• Forced migration across an ocean in conditions so horrific millions died.

• Malnutrition as a constant state.

• Disease spreading in cramped quarters.

• Brutal physical punishment—whippings, beatings, and mutilations consequently leaving permanent impairments on the mind, body, and spirit.

• Enslaved women forced into repeated childbirth with no medical care or recovery.

• Elderly people whose bodies were “weathered” and used up by decades of labor.

Forced migration, malnutrition, disease, relentless physical punishment, the trauma of family separation—all of this was spirit murder, a term coined by legal scholar Patricia Williams. Spirit murder is not a metaphor, but the systematic denial of one's humanity through violent acts so relentless they attack not just the body, but the soul's capacity to imagine itself free.

Additionally, in 1712 a law in South Carolina titled,"An Act for the better ordering and governing of Negroes and Slaves” prescribed increasingly severe and permanently disabling punishments for enslaved Africans who attempted to escape. These escalations included whipping, branding, mutilation (cutting off an ear), castration, and finally the severing of a leg tendon.

Further dehumanization and disablement was also evident through medical experimentation. Enslaved Africans classified as “damaged” or disabled became ideal test subjects because they were already considered “broken property,” and white physicians felt free to practice experimental surgeries, amputations, and procedures on them. For example, American surgeon, Dr. J. Marion Sims built modern gynecology by performing brutal experiments on enslaved Black women without anesthesia, operating under the racist myth that Black people felt less pain.

Consequently, disability was not an accident of the system.

Chattel slavery created disability through its very operation, then used those disabilities to further devalue the people it had impaired.

But the plantation's logic wasn't only recorded in financial documents. It was recorded in flesh, and the people who survived it left us testimony.

Consider the Narratives

Frederick Douglass wrote about a disabled enslaved woman who was rendered "almost helpless" after a childhood burn.

“Henny.” He wrote, and stated that he saw his master,"tie up a lame young woman, and whip her with a heavy cowskin upon her naked shoulders, causing the warm red blood to drip," a brutal act religiously sanctioned by his master quoting scripture. Her disability…made her a target, as she was seen as a "bill of expense."

Lewis Clarke, enslaved for more than 25 years in Kentucky described instruments of torture used upon him by the plantation mistress:

“One instrument of torture is worthy of particular description. This was an oak club, a foot and a half in length and an inch and a half square. With this delicate weapon she would beat us upon the hands and upon the feet until they were blistered. This instrument was carefully preserved for a period of four years. Every day, for that time, I was compelled to see that hated tool of cruelty lying in the chair by my side. The least degree of delinquency either in not doing all the appointed work, or in look or behavior, was visited with a beating from this oak club. That club will always be a prominent object in the picture of horrors of my life of more than twenty years of bitter bondage.”

Solomon Northup, kidnapped into slavery for 12 years, recounts the direct link between forced labor and physical disablement:

“While suffering from severe chills and fever, becoming "weak and emaciated, and frequently so dizzy that it caused me to reel and stagger like a drunken man," he was "compelled to keep up my row." The driver's lash was used to inflict "a little temporary energy" into his "sick and drooping body," a brutal practice that "continued until at length the whip became entirely ineffectual."

This narrative demonstrates how the system deliberately worked and punished enslaved Africans to the point of physical collapse.

This wasn’t only about extracting labor. It was also about constructing Blackness itself as an inherent deficit.

Think about what that required ideologically. If you are going to build an entire economic system on the labor of people you have kidnapped, you need a story.

The story was this: Black people are not fully human.

As scholar Hortense Spillers argued, the violence of slavery didn't just injure Black people, it worked to reduce them from bodies to what she called "flesh": unprotected, un-gendered, and available for whatever the system required. In other words, flesh, unlike a body, has no rights to violate. Thus, the flesh can be categorized, priced, redistributed, and discarded. But flesh alone wasn't enough. The system also needed a monster. As Christina Sharpe writes in Monstrous Intimacies, pro-slavery ideology worked to make Blackness itself appear monstrous, not because Black people were monstrous, but because the system needed to hide the actual monstrosity of what it was doing. Thus resulting in the plantation projecting its own violence outward, onto the bodies it was destroying. And Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks, described how the colonized Black subject is forced to encounter themselves through a white gaze that renders them an object rather than a subject— a body without interiority, presence without personhood.

Consequently, disability and Blackness were not just linked by the plantation — they were made to mean each other. Because the construction of flesh is precisely what makes the disability label stick differently on Black bodies. The label doesn’t just categorize them, it re-fleshes them inside a system that never fully granted them body-hood or personhood to begin with.

To be Black was to be presumed cognitively and morally deficient and to be disabled was to be, in the racial imagination of the time, more Black. Both categories marked a body as requiring supervision, management, and containment rather than freedom, education, or self-determination.

This is why the feedback loop was so effective.

If the lie was that the Black body was inherently broken and/or disabled, the system then proceeded to break that body through the whip, the forced labor, the malnutrition, and the calculated terror that left bodies, minds, and souls with wounds, scars, and impairments.

Enslavers declared a people unfit for liberty, then used violence to produce disability as a material reality, thereby “proving” the original claim.

And, unfortunately, we’re still using the same method.

Declare a deficit. Engineer the conditions to produce it. Then, use the tools of science and policy to codify the result, consequently transforming violence into data, and oppression into diagnosis.

Whew.
Thank you for sitting with me through this.
I know it’s heavy, and the history we’re tracing isn’t easy to face.

So, take a breath, pour yourself another glass (or two), and pull up a chair again soon.

We’ll keep unpacking this story together.
- Alexandria

Between the Margins: A School Psychologist's Note
This is a regular feature where I connect the historical dots from the series to the lived practice of my work in schools. These are notes from the field.

The Artifact: A schoolhouse as a plantation (aka, a high school I worked at).

The Through-Line: The school’s hierarchy and resource flow were a modern plantation blueprint. The leadership was white (the plantation owners). Most teachers were white (the managers).There was one Black administrator—the modern "overseer," mediating between the system and the bodies it managed. Lastly, the 1:1 aides, tasked with the intimate, physical work of behavior management, were overwhelmingly Black (the domestic and field labor). 

The most "valuable" students on campus were Black boys with IEPs (on my caseload) who played football. Their value wasn't measured in reading scores (which teetered between 3rd-5th grade level), but in their athletic (physical) capital. Funds attached to their disability labels (their "fraction of a hand" valuation) flowed not into intensive literacy intervention, but into new gym equipment—investing in the maintenance of their physical utility, not their intellectual liberation.

The system had categorized them not as academic scholars, but as athletic assets. Their IEPs, meant to be documents of support, functioned as the modern plantation ledger entry that justified a targeted investment in the school's prestige (winning seasons) and the staff's overtime pay, not the child's mind.

The Question for My Field: When we allocate resources based on a label, what are we truly valuing? Are we funding a child’s future, or are we maintaining a system’s most efficient output? At that school, the answer was in the weight room and football field. We weren't educating the "whole child." We were curating a product to be further exploited for their physical utility, consequently funneling them toward college football or the NFL as the only escape from the poverty the system helped create.

Next in The Anatomy of a System: How the first “disability” diagnosed in a Black person in America was the desire for freedom.

This is the second post in The Anatomy of a System: Special Education Edition, a series tracing the historical through-line of racialized disablement and commodification in special education.

© Alexandria Lockhart, 2026. All rights reserved. For permissions, see the permissions page.

But I’m so glad you’re here. Really. Because what I’m about to share with you has been seven years in the making (not the writing part, but the experience and connecting the dots part), and it’s finally ready to see the light of day.

For the past seven years, first in classrooms and school psychologists’ offices and IEP meetings, now in archives and my current doctoral program, I have been tracing one specific through line. You know, that hidden thread connecting seemingly separate events? It’s the logic that explains why a system produces the same result, year after year, despite new laws, new trainings, new guidelines and new promises that this time will be different.

Spoiler alert: it's never different.

It’s a thread that begins in the field of a slave plantation, gets stamped with the approval of a eugenicist, and arrives, today, in the pages of a Black child’s IEP.

Yes, we’re going there.

This is the work I came here to do. And starting on February 12th, I’m bringing it to you in a serialized form.

Introducing: The Anatomy of a System: Special Education Edition

This will be a multi-part series, published over the coming months. You can expect a post every two weeks on Thursdays. Think of it as your bi-weekly dose of truth-telling with receipts, or an invitation to question what you've been told, and a map to see the connections hiding in plain sight.

It is the backbone of my dissertation, “Black Bodies as Currency: Examining the Commodification of the ‘Emotionally Disabled’ Black Body from Slavery to Special Education in NYC Schools.”

(I know, I know—dissertation titles are never short or sexy. But stick with me.)

And the core argument of my work: that the overrepresentation of Black students in special education, particularly under the label of Emotional Disturbance (now Emotional Disability in some states) continues the logic of chattel slavery’s economic exploitation of Black bodies.

It is the latest entry in a very old archive.

And I'm going to show you exactly how we got here.

What to expect?

Each part of the series will trace how one mechanism of racialized control evolved into the next. Think of it like a map that shows you how we ended up so lost, and maybe, just maybe, how we find our way out:

• Part 1: How slavery didn’t just exploit Black bodies, it disabled them by design.

• Part 2: How the first “disability” diagnosed in a Black person in America was the desire for freedom.

• Part 3: How the pseudoscience of measuring skulls became the “objective” science of measuring IQ.

• Part 4: How the asylum’s architecture of segregation became the blueprint for the “special” school.

• Part 5: How Brown v. Board opened school doors, but hostile integration became a disabling environment.

• Part 6: How a well-intentioned psychologist’s checklist from 1961 became a trapdoor for Black children to be placed in special education.

• Part 7: How a disability label transforms from a diagnosis into a line item in a school budget.

• Part 8: How institutional documents continue historical logics of classification, surveillance, and containment for Black students in special education.

• Part 9: How this is not an American story, but a global one.

• Part 10: What comes after we let it break? We build for liberation.

  ---

Why a series? Why now?

Because a truth this layered can’t be absorbed in a single essay. It needs to be unfolded, piece by piece, until the pattern becomes undeniable. This is the slow, deep work of understanding how we got here, so we can truly imagine what comes after.

And fair warning: once you see it, you can't unsee it. But that's kind of the point.

So mark your calendar and send a personal reminder to yourself because the first post, “The Disabling Plantation,” will be in your inbox Thursday, February 12, 2026 (if you’re subscribed!).

If you know someone who needs to understand the history behind the headlines such as an educator, an advocate, a parent, or a concerned citizen—please share this post with them. This is a conversation we need to have together.

With gratitude and fierce anticipation,

-Alexandria

© Alexandria Lockhart, 2026. All rights reserved. For permissions, see the permissions page.

Last year, on October 13, 2025, it was announced that the new administration, the one that shall not be named has gutted the federal special education department.

This is the department that oversees approximately $15 billion in funding and is responsible for protecting the rights of infants, children, and youth with disabilities.

As someone who has worked in special education since 2013, first as an ABA behavioral technician for a non-public school serving students with moderate to severe Autism, then as an assistant teacher in a mild-to-moderate special education class, and now as a school psychologist, I am deeply familiar with both the harm and the potential of this system.

I expected the administration to make this move; I know their capacity for destruction (because history has told me so), but ultimately, it is white supremacy’s destruction at work, a violence that Fanon (1961) described as not simply individual, but structural, a system built to maintain power by erasing and controlling those deemed “other.” Fanon demonstrated how colonization operates as a system that is designed to deny resources and dignity to entire populations, and we see this clearly in how the federal government has NEVER, and I mean never, fulfilled their initial commitment to supply 40% of the average per-pupil expenditure to pay for the costs of special education nationwide.

And why would they, when America’s history is predicated on sorting people into those worthy of humanity and those who are not?

Legally, the requirement to fund became merely an authorization, a linguistic maneuver that reveals how language itself operates as a tool of control. And overtime, I’ve realized that the law is not about justice or equality, it is about power. And the powers that be, wield it strategically.

States, districts, and schools have perpetually operated under chronic underfunding, a calculated scarcity that ensures inequality persists.

However, this announcement is still a BIG deal.

At the same time, as someone who critiques the system critically, I also see this moment as a crossroads.

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, IDEA 2004, has long been idealized as a promise of inclusion. But the reality is far more complicated because the system has only ever functioned fully for some students. As the DisCrit framework illustrates, students of color labeled with disabilities experience qualitatively different educational experiences and outcomes than their white peers with identical disability labels. Black students and other students of color are more likely to be segregated, less likely to access general education classrooms, and face compounded marginalization where racism and ableism work together to deny them equitable access (Beratan, 2006).

Consider the research: Scientists have attempted to prove the inferiority of African Americans in order to justify slavery, segregation and inequitable treatment (Boster, 2011; Owens, 2017; Washington, 2017). IDEA’s original promise of inclusion was to provide children with disabilities the same educational opportunities as those without disabilities. Instead, it morphed into a racialized tracking system. The disability industrial complex has continuously protected white privilege while punishing Black and Brown children (Skiba et al., 2002).

I saw two posts on Instagram from two adults who shared their experiences of being in special education that crystallized what I have already been thinking about this system:

1. The first was from a white woman who described how the gutting of the federal department feels like an attack on her younger self. She was tested extensively by a school psychologist, diagnosed with two learning disabilities, and ultimately came home to herself through her disability. Special education, for her, was healing. Sourcing note: I’m referencing an Instagram video from months ago that I can no longer locate, though I saved the Black creator’s response linked below. The critique reflects a recurring pattern, but this also serves as a reminder of sourcing limits in digital spaces.)

2. The second was from a Black man who shared that he never learned to read, that he was in a small class where teachers physically abused him, and that he remained in special education until he graduated high school. He stated that he may never realize his full potential because of this experience.

These are two real, lived experiences. They are at opposite ends of the spectrum, yet both are American. Both reflect what I have witnessed working in schools, and they highlight the system’s fundamental inequity.

And yet, we still hear arguments that this system must be preserved, that gutting the federal department is catastrophic because it will harm students (and yes, it will, there’s no denying that). But what about the students this system has consistently harmed since its inception? Are we really expected to continue to “sacrifice” one group of children for another? To uphold a system that benefits some while systematically failing others? This logic, the survival-of-the-fittest logic is not neutral, and in fact is rooted in eugenics and ableism.

The “a few for all” mentality is a lie, one that has justified segregation, exclusion, and systemic harm for generations.

As a Black woman and a school psychologist, I cannot, in good conscience, say yes to a system that continues to dehumanize children who look like me. I cannot call it inclusion when it functions as racial segregation by another name.

But that does not mean nothing is possible. What is liberation if we cannot imagine something beyond what exists? Perhaps this is the opportunity to imagine something radically new, not just in theory, but in practice. We could look to other nations: South Africa’s inclusive education framework, and Brazil’s constitutional approach to disability rights.

• Abolish the Special/General Education Binary: End credentialing that separates "special" from "general" educators. All teachers need to learn to teach all students through the social model of disability, as well as anti-oppressive & trauma-informed pedagogy. The idea that some children need "specialized" educators is itself a segregation tool.

• Abolish Labels as Gatekeepers: Children shouldn’t need a disability classification to access support. We must build a system so flexible and well-resourced that the question,"What category does this child belong in?" becomes obsolete.

• Abolish Psychometric Gatekeeping: The entire framework of standardized is rooted in eugenics and designed to rank human worth. The use of IQ tests themselves demands students demonstrate they're "broken enough" to deserve help. Replace this deficit/one-dimensional model with an ecological, relational assessment that honors the full spectrum of human capability, such as Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences. This shifts the goal from ranking a narrow set of skills to collaboratively mapping a student's unique strengths and identifying the specific environmental and relational supports needed for them to thrive.

• Center Black Family Sovereignty: Abolish professional monopolies on defining needs. Black families know what their children need, just as the Black parents of the 1968 Ocean Hill-Brownsville movement paved the way for us to listen to them. Direct reparative funding to Black communities to build their own educational structures. Abolish the IEP as surveillance; replace it with living learning plans co-created by students, families, and educators.

• Recognize Linguistic Sovereignty: Emulate Brazil’s recognition of Libras (Brazilian Sign Language) by validating the language and culture of disabled communities. Black students learn in AAVE without pathologization. Deaf students receive sign-language-first education from Deaf educators. Non-speaking students communicate in chosen modalities without "competency" tests. All students should learn multiple languages and modalities because linguistic diversity is human diversity.

• Defund Segregation, Fund Transformation: Following Brazil’s constitutional model, mandate a ‘Duty to Include’ as the absolute default, with no segregated “placements.” This requires a full financial divestment from the segregation infrastructure. The billions spent on separate classrooms, separate schools (like NYC’s District 75), and separate administrations must be legally redirected into mainstream schools. This isn’t just more funding; it’s a legally enforced transfer of wealth from the machinery of isolation to the resources for belonging: hiring more teachers, therapists, and community liaisons, and creating in-school support hubs.

And that’s not to negate the critique of Brazil and South Africa’s systems as nothing is perfect, especially when the legacy of slavery intertwines with a strong disability rights movement in Brazil. Black families navigate special education systems that mirror America’s racialized sorting. According to the Ministry of Education data, 85% of special education schools in Brazil are public, with 31.2% of students with disabilities enrolled being white and 42.9% being Black (Minority Rights Group International, 2023).

Similarly, despite its post-apartheid framework, South Africa’s special education system continues to pathologize Black students’ responses to educational spaces still shaped by colonial theories of knowledge and their violence (Human Rights Watch, 2015). These parallels are not coincidental; they are evidence of a shared afterlife of slavery, one that demands research unafraid to name the global enterprise of Black disablement.

Our path forward must be guided by a fundamental truth of American history: when systems are designed to center and uplift Black people, the most marginalized, the most targeted by these interlocking systems of failure, everyone benefits.

Equity is not a zero-sum game. When we build systems that see, support, and celebrate Black and Brown people, we build systems capable of seeing, supporting, and celebrating all children in their full humanity.

The alternative, which involves designing for a mythical “average” (white, abled) child has always been the recipe for exclusion and failure.

So, to that I say, let the broken parts stay broken.

Let us dismantle what refuses to serve all children. Let the system be forced to confront its patterns of institutional violence until it can no longer hide behind its own benevolence. And from those ruins, let us imagine an education that truly sees, supports, and celebrates Black and Brown children. The blueprint for that future is found not in exclusion, but in centering those we have failed most profoundly.

The question is no longer whether we can build something better, but whether we have the courage to build it for everyone, by finally building it for them.

Ok, just a little something (albeit uncomfortable) to simmer on while you prep your next cup of tea or cafe.

I’ll meet you back here soon.
- Alexandria

I hope it’s starting gently for you. With rest, if you need it. With clarity, if you’ve been searching for it. And with the kind of intentions that feel like possibilities rather than pressure.

In my first post, I hinted at what the system does, how it sorts and labels and segregates. But I didn’t tell you why I’m spending years of my life unraveling it. Why I left a stable job to chase an idea across archives and continents. Why I moved to Spain to write a dissertation that most people will never read.

The academic answer involves theory and frameworks and a very long bibliography. But the real answer, the one I’d tell you over wine at a corner table where no one’s listening, starts with a door.

It’s 2017, and I just got hired to be a school psychologist at a charter school in D.C. I was being shown around the school by the head of special education. We’re walking through hallways, talking about programs and interventions, and then we stop.

Outside a small door. Unmarked. Just a little glass window in the middle.

“That’s the calming room,” she says, like she’s showing me the art supplies.

She opens the door.

Vinyl padding. Thick, institutional padding covering every wall, floor to ceiling. A padded room. The kind you see in old photographs of asylums we’re supposed to have abolished. Except this is an elementary school. In the 21st century. For children.

In Baltimore, I evaluated Black children for Intellectual Disabilities—children whose brains had been damaged by lead poisoning the city allowed. We measured their intelligence against standards that pretended the poisoned water didn't matter. We were calling the result of systemic and environmental harm a disability inherent to them.

But the turning point came when the system demanded my complicity, my signature, my clinical language to enact a quieter, more bureaucratic violence.

The student was a tenth-grade Black boy in New York City, grieving his grandfather while navigating a monumental shift in his life. He was smoking weed to cope. Quiet in some classes, and “reactive” in others. Grieving, in the way teenagers grieve when they don’t have the language or the support or the space. But his teachers didn’t see grief. They saw a deficit: “aggressive,” “withdrawn,” and “lacking empathy.”

When I met him one-on-one for testing, he spoke with clarity about his loss. And when I asked about the claims in the referral, he looked at me and said quietly, “That’s not true. I’ve never gotten into a fight with anyone.” (he had no documented disciplinary records either).

Prior to the IEP meeting, I advocated for him. I argued that his behavior was a human response to loss and upheaval, not evidence of an “Emotional Disturbance.” I insisted the referral was not only wrong, but inappropriate. What happened next wasn’t about the student anymore.

Instead, it was about me.

The principal, a white woman, turned the full force of the institution on the only Black school psychologist in the room, and school.

My professionalism was questioned. My tenure, threatened. My tone was policed. I was told, “You need to learn how to speak.” The final, chilling instruction: “When you walk into a classroom, you need to tiptoe.”

Tiptoe.

The word hung in the air. It was not a suggestion about noise. It was a mandate to make myself small, harmless, and invisible. To not disrupt the racial order of the school building (where majority teaching staff and school administration were white and the student body was majority Black). Do not use your voice, your expertise, or your shared humanity with a student to challenge the pathologizing gaze of the system.

In that moment, the veil fell completely. I was in the beginning stages of my PhD program learning the true and unpopular history about the U.S. public education system. Consequently, I became convinced that system wasn’t broken, but instead, operating intentionally. It was designed to sort, to label, to control, and to neutralize anyone, even its own agents, who threatened that control. My advocacy was recast as anger; my analysis as insubordination. I was no longer just a witness to the pathologizing of Black childhood. I was experiencing it myself.

I was experiencing what many scholars name so precisely: white rage and white fragility, weaponized to protect the status quo.

Each of those stories: the padded room, the lead-poisoned children, the grieving boy are not separate incidents. They’re different faces of the same system The system that produces harm and relocates it into individual bodies.

The effects of trauma becomes a “behavior problem.”
Environmental poisoning becomes an “intellectual deficit.”
Advocacy becomes a personality flaw.

The cause is social, historical, and political. But the diagnosis is personal, clinical, and individual.

We treat the symptom, but we never touch the source.

But this dynamic didn’t just appear overnight. This is the evolved instrument of a much older logic that has always been designed to locate the problem in the Black body, rather than in the conditions surrounding it.

Just think about it. The U.S. is a country that once scientifically pathologized the desire for freedom itself. Enslaved people who ran away were diagnosed with “drapetomania”— a supposed mental illness that made them want to escape. Their pursuit of liberation was literally classified as a disability. Their resistance was medicalized, and turned into evidence of deficiency rather than proof of their humanity.

That language has since evolved, but the logic hasn’t.

“Drapetomania” becomes “Schizophrenia” in the mid-20th century, a diagnosis redefined to pathologize Black political anger as psychosis. Then, as that clinical framing filtered into schools, “Schizophrenia” in adults became “Emotional Disturbance” in children, and “Insubordination” became “Oppositional Defiant Disorder.”

You see where I’m going with this? The label itself became a tool of social control, a way to discredit and incarcerate Black thought and rebellion.

It’s about asking why, when a Black child is grieving, the system’s first response is a behavioral checklist, and not an empathetic conversation?
Or why a Black child’s anger in an unjust classroom becomes a symptom of “Emotional Disturbance,” and not a question about the classroom?
It’s about asking why a Black child’s use of Ebonics in a writing assignment triggers a speech and language evaluation, and not a discussion about code-switching or recognition of their linguistic heritage?

These aren’t isolated failures. They are the modern receipts from a very old transaction.

So, I decided to look at that long historical receipt and ask…

I think the question matters as much as the answer. Maybe more.

But a question alone is a lonely artifact. It needs a space to breathe, to be held by others who recognize its shape. That’s why I’m writing this here, and not just in a dissertation.

And you reading this? You’re part of building that space. You’re witnessing the making of a map—one that connects the padded room to the plantation ledger, the “calming room” to the asylum, the “Emotional Disturbance” checkbox to the diagnosis of drapetomania.

This is the work of producing knowledge that doesn’t yet exist: the wisdom that comes from stitching personal testimony to historical evidence, and refusing to let either be forgotten.

So take that question above with you. Let it sit. See what it stirs up.

And know this: I’m not just here to talk about it.

I’m here to build the conversation that makes “tiptoeing” obsolete.

Until next time,
- Alexandria

If we were sitting across from each other right now, maybe at a café here in Madrid, Spain where I’m currently living and writing, or back at my favorite wine bar on a Brooklyn corner in NYC, I’d lean in a little and tell you something that’s been sitting with me for years:

Several years ago, as a brand-new school psychologist, I wrote my first psycho-educational report. I’d spent hours with this kid, searching for the problem the system required me to find. We talked, we played games, I watched them think through problems and solve puzzles. And then I went back to my office and did what I was trained to do: I turned all of that, this entire human being, someone’s pride and joy, into a list of deficits. And yes, I assigned scores from a manual. I checked boxes that would determine where they’d be placed, what services they’d get, and how teachers would see them.

But here’s the part they don’t tell you in grad school: for all the talk about looking at the whole child, in those high-stakes IEP meetings, the only thing that ever truly mattered to people, were the scores.

People nodded at my observations, and interview answers from the child’s caregivers, but their eyes were on the bottom line: Did the numbers cross the threshold? Did the child qualify? The story, the context, the wholeness of the kid became background noise in the world of compliance. It wasn’t about whether the child needed help, but whether they fit the category that unlocked it.

Because that’s how the system works. It’s rooted in what’s called the medical model of disability—this idea that when something’s not working, the problem is inside the person. They’re broken. They need to be fixed. Never mind that the classroom might be too loud, or the curriculum too narrow, or the expectations completely disconnected from who this child actually is. The system says: the child is deficient. And I was the one writing it down, making it official, sealing it with scores and signatures.

After experiencing many of those moments, I started questioning, wondering, and realizing. You know the feeling, when scattered pieces suddenly connect and the picture becomes unmistakably clear? Over time, those moments became my real “Through Line” moments.

It was about seeing the thread.
And once you see that thread, you start seeing it everywhere.

• You see it when a child who doesn’t speak English is placed in special education to receive “speech therapy,” not because they have a disability, but because the system would rather diagnose a learning problem than provide a real language education.

• You see it when you read about a 19th-century diagnosis like “drapetomania” (the “mental illness” of wanting freedom) and then open a modern IEP for a Black child labeled “Emotionally Disturbed”

• You see it when you discover a school’s budget grows with every special education classification, and you realize: this is just a new version of an old plantation ledger. Different spreadsheet, same math. Bodies as budget lines.

This realization didn’t just make me want to critique the system. It made me want to understand how it came to be, so we could imagine what comes after.

Something better.

So what is this space and why am I telling you this?

Well, after spending over a decade working in education, I’m now finishing a PhD that traces the afterlife of colonial educational policy in special education systems across the Black diaspora. What I’m tracing isn’t just an American story. These same patterns like pathologizing Blackness, turning it into a “disability,” using that label to justify segregation and control show up everywhere.

Different countries, different languages, same system.

My dissertation, “Black Bodies as Currency: Examining the Commodification of the ‘Emotionally Disabled’ Black Body from Slavery to Special Education in NYC” is my long, footnoted attempt to follow that system’s blueprint, from the slave ship to today’s IEP meeting.

This space is where that work lives in public, not in an ivory tower.

Here, you’ll find:

• 📚 Critical essays on education and history: How history still shapes the way we label and segregate students today in schools.

• ✍️ Research you can actually read: I’ll be translating the academic stuff into language that makes sense outside a journal article.

• 🧠 Stories and reflections: From classrooms, from archives, and the messy middle of trying to make sense of all this.

• 🔥 A space for people who refuse to settle: For “good enough,” for harm disguised as help, for anything less than justice.

So, take your time here. Read slowly. Question generously. Take what resonates, challenge what doesn’t, and let the rest unsettle you.

This isn’t meant to be a lecture hall. It’s a conversation I’ve been longing to have with people who believe that education should liberate rather than confine, and dignify rather than diminish.

So, thank you for being here. For whatever brought you—curiosity, rage, hope, or all three.

More soon.
- Alexandria