Anti-Blackness and Attendance Policy Implementation: Evidence From a Midwestern School District

Abstract

This study considers the degree to which attendance policies and practices to address chronic absenteeism in a large Midwestern urban school district create suffering in Black parents’ experiences. In a secondary analysis of longitudinal qualitative data conducted through Afro-pessimist conceptualizations of anti-Blackness, we found that the district’s attendance policies antagonize Black parents in ways that create psychological and material distress; and that educators characterize Black parents as problems they must overcome. These findings demonstrate how attendance policies and practices are imbricated in anti-Black social processes, inviting social death into Black family life. In the ongoing struggle to realize Black freedom, the paper calls for abandoning incentivize-and-punish approaches that assume Black parents and students are inadequately committed to schooling.