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4 How. Hum. & Civ. Rts. L. Rev. 45 (2019-2020)
Removing the Chokehold on School Discipline

handle is hein.journals/howumcvr4 and id is 51 raw text is: Removing the Chokehold on School Discipline DARIN E.W. JOHNSON' In his influential book, Chokehold - Policing Black Men, Paul Butler argues that the chokehold - a widely-banned and lethal ma- neuver in which a person's neck is tightly gripped in a way that re- strains breathing2 is an apt metaphor for how the U.S. criminal justice system treats African-American men: A chokehold is a process of coercing submission that is self-rein- forcing. A chokehold justifies additional pressure on the body be- cause the body does not come into compliance, but the body cannot come into compliance because of the vise grip that is on it. This is the black experience of the United States. This is how the process of law and order pushes African American men into the criminal system.3 Butler articulates the Chokehold as a metaphor for understanding how racial inequality infuses the modern criminal justice system, which through the war on drugs, mass incarceration, discriminatory law enforcement practices, and police violence has become a system of social control and for the African-American community, and in particular black men.4 Butler argues that the Chokehold is the means to the end of maintaining a racialized economic and social hierarchy.5 He supports his theory with myriad statistics about how U.S. law and criminal justice practices exact a harsh toll on black men. While But- ler primarily focuses on the construction and impact of the Chokehold rather than the motivations behind it, his analysis presumes what the 1. Associate Professor of Law, Howard University School of Law. The author would like to thank Yannick Gill, Howard University School of Law, Class of 2019, for his research assis- tance with this article. 2. PAUL BUTLER, CHOKEHOLD: POLICING BLACK MEN 3 (2017). 3. Id. at 5. 4. Id. at 6. 5. Id. 2020 Vol. 4 No. 1 45

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