Twerking for justice

Thirty-three California high school students have been suspended for five days for producing a video in which students twerked. They may be excluded from prom and, for the seniors, graduation ceremonies, all because the school defines the video as sexual harassment.

Earlier this spring, my colleague Kelly Fritz wrote "Twerk for the right reasons," a terrific column about her lengthy experience with twerking as a movement of youth culture and its more recent slut-shaming and racist conceptions.

This issue in California is exactly what she warned us about.

The school's sexual harassment policy defines the act as "unwelcome sexual advances; requests for sexual favors; or verbal, visual, or physical conduct of a sexual nature made by someone from or in the educational setting." Because these students were enrolled in a media class and made the video using school equipment, the school decided this act fit the “visual” proviso of its sexual harassment definition.

There are three huge issues with the school's policy and decision.

1. Calling any "verbal, visual or physical conduct of a sexual nature" that occurs in school sexual harassment is absurdly broad. This kind of conduct could conceivably be entirely victimless, as is the case with this video. How can harassment be victimless? Who is being harassed?

2. Automatically defining twerking as "conduct of a sexual nature" reveals exactly the mindset Kelly Fritz warned us about. Not only does the decision reveal the school's slut-shaming biases, but also its racist assumptions about twerking itself.

The school argues the dance is inherently suggestive, and in many cases the school is right. But so is the tango. And the salsa. Suspending the students involved in the ballroom dance club hardly seems just around the corner, so I don't think we can call this a comprehensive crackdown on sexual dance moves. Could it possibly be that, in the eyes of the school, this particular suggestive dance is derived from a culture they find unsavory? This conflation of twerking with "ghetto" is something Fritz strongly - and correctly - urges us to avoid.

3.) No-tolerance policies, and their offspring, suspension and expulsion, are hilariously wrongheaded. One of the suspended students tweeted, " Suspended for twerking. What do I do? Twerk. At the beach. I twerk at the beach."

Students who get suspended often don't see themselves as being punished, but rewarded. These students shouldn't have been disciplined in the first place. But disciplinary actions are already bound to set angsty teens against the authority figures who enforce them. Even if these students had been engaging in behavior that merited correction, removing them from the one institution with the ability to make that happen is clearly not a solution. No-tolerance policies are the educational system's version of the death penalty. We create a list of offenses for which we say, "If you do this, you're no longer worth our trouble. Goodbye." That's no way to treat our students.

Before we start renouncing acts as sexual or inappropriate and writing those who engage in them out of the educational picture, we should identify the biases leading us to that conclusion and the message we send to young men and women as a result.

Making this video and posting it on YouTube was probably not a very smart choice. I imagine at least one of these 33 students will eventually regret that his or her face appears in a video of twerking buttcheeks, but that doesn't mean the video amounts to sexual harassment.

The school and so many others disagree and think suspension under a no-tolerance policy is a correct or proportional response. That's not a smart choice, either.