They Got Me Trapped: Structural Inequality and Racism in Space and Place Within Urban School System Design

Abstract

It was the middle of his third-grade year when he rushed into his mother’s room after school. Excited, as if he had won something big, he told the story of how his school gave out candy and other goodies for a “test” that he had taken in class. His mother sat there and listened as he detailed the structure of this test. Questions such as future goals, socioeconomic status, and geographic location were central. While odd, it was not too much out of place for a test that gathers demographic data. As he continued, she realized that this “test” was actually an information-gathering survey on Black and Latino/a youth in the third-grade class. As his mother dug even deeper, she found that this was no test at all; it was a fact-finding mission for private prisons to build and design future prisons based on urban, Black, and Latino/a third-grade students’ responses.