Sing a Rhythm, Dance a Blues by Monique W. Morris

Author:Monique W. Morris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2019-03-17T16:00:00+00:00

Interlude

“Are We Actually Trying to Be Here for Young People?”

There was a recent incident in South Carolina where the classmate of a Black girl drew a picture of the KKK hanging someone.

He was a white boy and handed it to the Black girl, and said, “This is for you.”

She told the teacher what happened, and said, “He’s being racist. He’s actually threatening me. What do we do?”

The teacher said, “That’s a stretch. Go have a seat.”

The Black girl gets dismissed from class, goes to the assistant principal and the principal, and they’re like, “We’ll handle it.”

But let’s look at how they handled it.

The white boy who drew the picture—his mother was called in to get him. They sent the Black girl back to class. There was no parent called to say, “Come comfort your child because she’s totally upset.” She was sent back to class. And then, as the day went on, they’re like, “Okay, he’s going to be expelled … he’s never coming back to school again.”

The Black girl is walking down the hall, and who does she run into? The boy and his family. He wasn’t expelled.

The SRO who they called in later—maybe two or three days later, to investigate—said, “We don’t see any wrongdoing.” Yet the school still suspended him because he threatened the life of a child.

And the police were like, “Oh, we think it’s just boys being boys.”

The girl is going to school … she says, “I love school. I want to be a veterinarian. I have so many dreams, but I don’t know … I just don’t think it’s possible anymore. I don’t have a thrill for anything.”

So when we meet with the principal, he’s like, “Yeah, I should have told you, … but we can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube, so where do we move from here?”

We’re talking about a girl with a 3.6 GPA. You know what they told her? “We’re so glad you didn’t get loud or try to hurt him, because we would have had to arrest you.”

There was no comfort.

Six weeks later, she’s up in the middle of the night. She’s scared.

She said, “I just feel that y’all don’t care about me.”

The principal was like, “We’re going to send you to the school psychologist.”

Six weeks later! Why wasn’t that one of the first things? Why didn’t the school psychologist and social worker step up and say, “This is what we need to be interacting with?”

The school found all of the social and emotional support for him. They looked at this girl—who was five-feet, six inches tall and about two hundred pounds, and they said, “You’re okay. Go back to class.”

When we talk about these things, we can talk about SROs, but the teacher who didn’t respond when we first went there, the assistant principal who sent her back to her classroom, the social worker—all these people who didn’t respond to this Black girl … I think it’s a larger conversation when we start talking about safety and what Black girls deserve, and what girls of color deserve.

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