Tidiani Epps Jr.’s drawing
Children’s mothers and grandmothers are outraged. They are organizing and refusing to let their children disappear into the night and fog of casual institutional educational violence. They are tired of being tired of the injustice. These are three recent vignettes from the institutional war on children, told in the order of the children’s age.
In Dimbaza, in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, a ten-year-old child was found to have done something wrong. He was accused of dangling a child over a bridge, a charge that he denies and denied at the time. According to the child, the principal then called on older boys to grab the child, strip him naked and parade him, crying by this point, through and around the entire school. The boy ran home and refused to return for two days. The boy’s mother and grandmother are organizing to have the principal removed and to have the entire matter investigated fully. The mother explained, “I want harsh action taken against the principal. My child was abused and humiliated. He will be traumatised for the rest of his life.”
In Montgomery County, just outside of Washington, DC, 11-year-old Tidiani Epps Jr was given an assignment to draw a picture about what he would like to see stopped or banned. Tidiani drew a picture of a lynching, of a Black man hanging from a tree with two Ku Klux members in attendance. Tidiani Epps Jr is Black. He wants police violence to end: “In this picture, I was trying to describe what was going on in the world, and what happened back then. It’s what happened back then, and a piece of what happened back then is still here today in the present, like racism. I just want it to stop. I don’t want to see this any more. Young black people get killed for no reason. It’s not fair or right.”
The school responded by sending Tidiani to a counselor who called the family and recommended he go to a crisis center for a mental health evaluation. They decided that a young Black child who knows that there is violence in the world and understands he is a key target of that violence must be potentially suicidal. Tidiani’s mother, Sade Green, sees it otherwise. She was livid at the school’s treatment of her child and at what it portends for his future: “My child has to walk to school every day. He is a young black male. He will grow up to be a black man. I have to let them know what’s going on in society. Nobody is safe. What kind of parent would I be if I didn’t try to teach them the rights and wrongs of what’s going on?” What kind of parent, indeed.
On the Virginia side of the Washington, DC, suburbs, in Dumfries, a middle school teenager, Ryan Turk, forgot to pick up his milk carton and returned to correct that. A “school resource officer” saw Ryan take the milk, stopped him and told him to go to the principal’s office. When Ryan refused, the “resource officer” arrested him, put him in handcuffs and charged him with disorderly conduct and petty larceny. Ryan Turk was offered “nonjudicial punishment”, also known as “diversion”, which he and his mother turned down, and so next month, Ryan Turk will stand trial for taking a 65-cent carton of milk that he was supposed to have. Ryan’s mother, Shamise Turk, explained, “My son is not going to admit to something he did not do.”
What are these three children, and all the children around them, being taught? Violence is good; spectacular violence is great; due process is for the birds, unless they’re Black; and no one in charge gives a damn about you. Fortunately, the mothers and grandmothers are outraged and livid, and they’re organizing. They’re refusing “the deals” offered to palliate and silence them. They’re refusing the mis-education of their children and the destruction of the present as well as the future. As 11-year-old Tidiani Epps Jr explained, “It’s not just black lives that matter. Everyone matters, but for right now, in this era, so many black people have been getting killed for no reason. It matters.” It matters.
(Photo Credit: Donna St. George / The Washington Post / Fairfield Citizen)