Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools

While brief, Pushout’s Epilogue is significant to the overall text. Working largely in conjunction with Chapter 5, Morris reemphasizes the major goals of the book—namely, to shed new light on Black girls’ marginalized voices and to prompt a new, fully inclusive approach to social justice. However, the Epilogue’s importance is not necessarily in its content (it retreads familiar thematic territory) but rather in its manner of expression. Morris uses a deeply personal and reflective style in her final pages, creating significant reverberating effects on the whole of the text and strengthening its final impact.

The Epilogue’s tone is immediately distinct; Morris uses first-person narration. While Morris does sometimes employ the first-person in other parts of her book (for example, when recalling specific firsthand interviews), she maintains this voice throughout the entirety of her Epilogue as she reflects on herself, her approaches to and relationship with her research, and her work with Black girls. The Epilogue is Morris at her most intimate, trusting her readers with deeply personal information—such as the fact that she herself was a victim of sexual assault as a child—anchoring the whole of Pushout as a work of personal passion.

This final section champions the idea of collaboration in several ways. Pushout’s intimate Epilogue, along with its practical content, reaffirms the work as collaborative with its readers. Morris does not believe she alone can tackle the pushout phenomenon; nor does she want to. Rather, she wants her book to initiate discourse and, most importantly, action on a nationwide systemic scale. The Epilogue makes it clear that revolutionizing American education will require profound collective efforts. For example, when reflecting on her methodology, Morris concedes that she did not delve especially deep into media representations of Black femininity and their effects. She uses this concession as an opportunity to push for intellectual collaboration:

There is still so much to explore about the lives of Black girls. We need scholars to center Black girls in their research, [and] educators to immerse their pedagogy in intersectionality […] I sincerely hope that within the next five years, we are able to develop a robust and coordinated strategy to change the racial justice narrative in a way that authentically and earnestly includes girls and women (196).

The Epilogue thus reaffirms Pushout as an active text, encouraging readers to carry on their own research with Black girls in mind.

Morris also foregrounds collaboration with Black girls themselves. With her closing recollection of her interview with Jennifer, Morris evinces the book itself as an example of effective collaboration with Black girls and how adults can incorporate their voices into solutions. Instead of appropriating the girls’ stories and denying them agency in how their interviews would be used, Morris decided to work with her subjects and make her project truly collaborative. By allowing the girls to dictate what form Pushout would take—novel or nonfiction—the book exemplifies a solution to the pushout phenomenon. By using Jennifer’s request—that Morris simply “tell the truth” (197)—as her book’s final words, the Epilogue is among the book’s most powerful sections. It makes readers reflect upon the work through a different lens and gives them a working model for allyship. In her final words, Morris communicates to her readers that positive changes and solutions are possible through loving collaboration—a fact reaffirmed by Pushout itself.