About this item
Fifteen-year-old Diamond stopped going to school the day she was expelled for lashing out at peers who constantly harassed and teased her for something everyone on the staff had missed: she was being trafficked for sex. After months on the run, she was arrested and sent to a detention center for violating a court order to attend school.Black girls represent 16 percent of female students but almost half of all girls with a school-related arrest. The first trade book to tell these untold stories, Pushout exposes a world of confined potential and supports the growing movement to address the policies, practices, and cultural illiteracy that push countless students out of school and into unhealthy, unstable, and often unsafe futures.For four years Monique W.
About the Author
Monique W. Morris, Ed.D. is an award-winning author and social justice scholar with three decades of experience in the areas of education, civil rights, juvenile and criminal justice. In April 2020, Dr. Morris became the inaugural Executive Director of Grantmakers for Girls of Color, a philanthropic collaborative that supports a world in which all girls and young women of color are healthy, safe, thriving, and fully empowered to dream and shape their desired reality on their terms, while dismantling structural barriers created by racism, sexism and ageism and other forms of oppression that prevent their full participation in our country's future. Dr. Morris is an Executive Producer and co-writer of the documentary film, PUSHOUT: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools, which is based upon two of her books, Sing A Rhythm, Dance A Blues: Education for the Liberation of Black and Brown Girls (The New Press, 2019) and PUSHOUT: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools (The New Press, 2016) . She is also the author of Black Stats: African Americans by the Numbers in the Twenty-First Century (The New Press, 2014) , Too Beautiful for Words (MWM Books, 2012) , and she worked with Kemba Smith on her book, Poster Child: The Kemba Smith Story (IBJ Book Publishing, 2011) . Dr. Morris has written dozens of articles, book chapters, and other publications on social justice issues and lectured widely on research, policies, and practices associated with improving juvenile/criminal justice, educational, and socioeconomic conditions for girls and women of color. Her 2018 TED talk on how to stop the criminalization of Black girls in schools has received more than 1.7 million views and been translated into 18 languages. Dr. Morris is the Founder of the National Black Women's Justice Institute (NBWJI) , an organization that works to interrupt school-to-confinement pathways for girls, reduce the barriers to employment for formerly incarcerated women, and increase the capacity of organizations working to reduce sexual assault and domestic violence in African American communities. She served as an adjunct associate professor for Saint Mary's College of California between 2013-2018 and has taught at the University of San Francisco and California State University, Sacramento. Dr. Morris is a 2012 Soros Justice Fellow, the former Vice President for Economic Programs, Advocacy and Research at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the former Director of Research for the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice at the UC Berkeley Law School. She has also worked in partnership with and served as a consultant for federal, state and county agencies, national academic and research institutions, and communities throughout the nation to develop research, comprehensive approaches and training curricula to eliminate racial/ethnic and gender disparities in justice and educational systems. Her work in this area has infor
