When Black students exhibit negative behaviors or become withdrawn, educators often label them as problems and subject them to reactionary, zero-tolerance policies and other practices that disproportionately affect Black students but don’t address the root causes of such behavior.

This harm manifests in a number of ways: adopting curriculum that isn’t culturally responsive, lowering academic expectations, tracking Black students into remedial or special education classes and seeing Black youth as older and less innocent than their white peers—a bias known as adultification.

Support for Black LGBTQ youth goes beyond ensuring their physical safety. It also means teachers are intentional about creating environments that are inclusive of LGBTQ history and narratives and mindful of exclusive or binary constructs that ignore Black LGBTQ students’ intersectional identities.