by Kyle Rogers

The Oakland School Board voted to cease suspending students for “willful defiance.” This can include swearing/yelling at teachers, refusing direct orders, texting, and storming out of class, and more. The reason is because black students engage in these behaviors at higher rates than students of other races. By eliminating suspensions for these offenses, the school board hopes to close the racial gap in suspensions.

Los Angeles and San Francisco have already ended suspensions for willful defiance for the same reason. Oakland also banned involuntary transfers of students to different schools for habitual willful defiance.

In 2011, the Oakland School District was targeted by the Federal government to be a testing ground for reducing the number of blacks who get suspended. In 2012 Oakland initiated “Manhood Development” classes for it’s Middle Schools. The main purpose of these classes are to teach black males how not to get into trouble at school. The new class is said to cost the district over two million dollars a year.

Oakland also began to implement what the Obama administration calls “restorative justice.” This means that when a black student gets in trouble, the school is supposed to take into account that the black student is allegedly the victim of “injustice” at the hands of society. In other words, they are supposed to punish black students less severely than students of other races. This race based discipline is intended to create an illusion, on paper, that black misbehavior occurs at rates more similar to other races.

Since 2011, the percentage of black students getting suspended has dropped 40%. This appears to be largely because the district has simply raised the bar on what a black student can be suspended for. Rather than address black behavior problems, the district is just making the consequences less severe under a program of race based “restorative justice.”

Several obvious flaws exist in this model of “justice.” First, blacks are given an incentive to misbehavior even more. Some black students will only be emboldened to commit even worse misbehavior if they are not punished.

Second, the policy of “restorative justice” actively discriminates and persecutes whites, Asians, and Latinos. If other races are punished more severely for the same offense, something I witnessed first hand at my own High school, than that is institutionalized persecution of non-blacks.