TOLEDO, Ohio – The sound of his teacher smacking his desk jolted Marquan into consciousness, and his head jerked up. “Wake up,” his teacher said.
Marquan hadn’t slept much the night before, and the words came out before he was fully coherent. “Watch out before you make me mad,” he said.
His teacher asked if it was a serious threat. The 16-year-old said no, he was just startled, but it was too late – he was sent out of the classroom and given a two-day suspension.
Marquan’s instinctive response to what the teacher perceived as a danger was actually an automatic reaction. He had not been able to switch codes in that moment of grogginess.
“I wasn’t threatening him; it was just loud and all of a sudden,” said Marquan, now 17 and a sophomore at Jesup W. Scott High School in Toledo, Ohio. His last name has been withheld in order to protect his privacy. “That was the most unfair thing.”
In Ohio, Black Students like Marquan get suspended far more often than their white counterparts for incidents such as this. In the past six years, Ohio has issued close to 885,000 suspensions and expulsions for comments and misbehaviors tagged as disobedience or disruption. Nearly half of these dismissals were for Black Students, despite…
