By placing Black children in disability specific classrooms under the label of uneducable Oakland Public Schools made a space where disability was racialized, due to uneducable being used to make receiving a lack of culturally competent education into a disability, and how racialization can be disabiling since placing Black students in an underfunded education environment (the disability specific classrooms) caused them to fall behind their peers because of the lack of resources.

Uneducable as a site of Racializing Disability

The BPP understood the label of uneducable as inherently a racist interpretation of Black children's communications, and behaviors at school. At the time the label of uneducable was used to separate poor and racialized students into underfunded classrooms for disabled students.

University of Wisconsin - Madison

The Oakland Community School was founded in part as a challenge to the idea that some youth were "uneducable." Many of the students who came to Oakland Community School had been expelled from Oakland Public Schools or were labeled as uneducable by teachers or school officials. 

The Oakland Community School as a Response to Oakland Public Schools

Schalk, Sami. Black Disability Politics, New York, USA: Duke University Press, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478027003

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