What’s up fam!  Tonya here, and I am one of the visionaries behind Code Switch:  Restorative Justice for Girls of Color.  If you have a little bit of time on your hands, I’d love to share our origin story with you.  You see, it all began as a volunteer effort in 2017. That year,  I was invited by a former colleague of mine, Assemblywoman, Ms. Kasina Boone, to host a Kwanzaa circle for girls at Peterson Academic Center.  Peterson is an alternative school here in Las Vegas for students who have been expelled from their comprehensive K-12s.  I was serving as an Assistant Professor at Touro University Nevada at the time, so I hadn’t been in the K-12 space in a minute. I was eager to return though, and I desperately needed to commune with young people, so I accepted the invitation.  To my surprise, what began as what I thought would be a one-time guest speaking opportunity, morphed into a year of building the amazing Code Switch, and three years of freedom dreaming with some of the most amazing Black girls and women I have ever met, and to think it was all made possible by a collaboration forged between three Black Women educators – myself, former Assembly Woman Kasina, and my mentee at the time, Erica Reid.  We began our work to curate a racially just school space where all girls would thrive!

Working across these relationships and years,  I was able to actualize my dream of providing an alternative to punitive discipline by facilitating restorative peace circles for girls in a K-12 school setting.  The circles were designed to provide girls with spaces to heal, as well as to interrogate the exclusionary and punitive discipline policies that pushed them out of their schools and into prison and poverty pathways.  My contribution to the restorative peace circles was to root them in the African principles Ubuntu and Sankofa because these principles gave us a framework to help girls who were primarily Black, develop deeply connected mentored relationships with each other and ourselves.  We also relied on a curriculum centered in anti-racist teachings, as well as a culturally and historically affirming, restorative justice education approach.  This helped the girls develop a social justice consciousness, as well as leadership, communication, and self-advocacy skills.  Finally, recognizing a need to heal, we incorporated mindfulness and other healing engaged practices like storysharing.  Almost immediately, we began to notice a pattern in the stories the girls told–that they were being pushed out of their schools and away from their education for traits indicative of their identities and lived circumstances, rather than their actions or behaviors. In short, they were recipients of punishment rather than discipline, and their stories represented pushout stories, highlighting the school induced trauma, racial violence, and unjust practices school administrators conflated with discipline.

Recognizing the transformative power for racial healing and resistance, not to mention policy advocacy, that the girls and their stories embodied, I invited Kasina, Erica, and four of the girls participating in our circle to accompany me, to the 2017 Free Minds Free People Conference in Baltimore, MD, where together, we led a workshop called, “Code Switchin’ and Switchin’ the Code:  How Black Girls Pushed Out Push Back”.  This experience formed the inspiration for starting Code Switch.  The resulting freedom dream was to build with Black girls impacted by over policing, exclusionary discipline, and racial discrimination in K-12 spaces, so that they would be equipped with the knowledge, skills, consciousness, resources, and strength to fight back when pushed out.  I also knew that I wanted to open space for them to self-advocate, as well as engage youth-led advocacy in the community.  Transforming the way discipline is conceptualized and carried out in U.S. districts and schools, starting in our state would be the overarching theme!  After three years of exploring this work as part of a school-community-university partnership project formed between Kasina’s mentorship organization, my university, and the school where our circles were first conceptualized, the dream was born, and on April 4, 2020, I had the privilege and honor to join 10 Black women and three Black girls on a lifelong journey to advance girls rights as part of this amazing multigenerational, multicultural, racial justice community that we affectionately call Code Switch!

But, don’t be fooled! Though code switchin’ in communities of color has become synonymous with the respectability politics of changing one’s behavior and modes of verbal engagement to assimilate and fit in, particularly when one is seeking success, this is not at all what the term means for us.  As Black girls and women, we are no longer interested in changing who we are to fit in.  As girls and women, standing in solidarity with other women of color, we know and understand that nothing about us needs fixing because we are imperfectly perfect as we are!  Every  ounce of our beautiful melanated bodies is ENOUGH!  It’s why for us, code switchin’ is about changing the codes of power situated in an ideology of white supremacy instead.  When we code switch, it’s not us we’re changing, it’s all of the beliefs, values, perceptions, concepts, institutions, and people that tell us we aren’t enough and that refuse to recognize who we are and what we bring to the table.  That’s what needs fixing, so those are the codes we are changing!   Like Audre Lorde says, “Women are powerful and dangerous” and we fully embrace our power.  Yep, we are Code Switch, and we have arrived on the scene to actualize a world where every girl, no matter her racial identity, lived circumstance, or gendered expression, attends a school where they are seen, heard, valued, made whole, and liberated to be and become all that they were meant to be!  So the next time you read Code Switch, remember, switch the codes, not the person!  Ase’