A few years after I complete my degree, Dr. Monique W. Morris published her groundbreaking book, Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools, demonstrating how Black girls are rendered disposable in schools, unwanted, unloved. Twelve percent of us receive at least one suspension during our school careers while our white (girl) counterparts are suspended at a rate of 2 percent. In Wisconsin the rate is actually 21 percent for Black girls but 2 percent for white girls.
But having attended schools with both Black and white girls, one thing I learned quickly is that while we can behave in the same or very similar ways, we are almost never punished similarly. In fact, in white schools, I witnessed an extraordinary amount of drug use compared to what my friends in my neighborhood schools experienced. And yet my friends were the ones policed. My neighborhood friends went to schools where no mass or even singular shootings occurred, but where police in full Kevlar patrolled the hallways, often with drug-sniffing dogs, the very same kind that they turned on children in the South who demanded an end to segregation.
By the time Black Lives Matter is born, we not only know that we have been rendered disposable because of our lived experience—which few listened to—but also from data and finally from those terrible, viral images of Black girls being thrown brutally out of their seats by people who are called School Safety Officers, for the crime of having their phones out in the classroom. Monique Morris’s reporting will tell us about the 12-year-old girl from Detroit who is threatened with both expulsion and criminal charges for writing the word “Hi” on her locker door; and the one in Orlando who is also threatened with expulsion from her private school if she doesn’t stop wearing her hair natural.
Twelve.
And for me, too, it started the year I turned twelve. That was the year that I learned that being Black and poor defined me more than being bright and hopeful and ready. I had been so ready to learn. So willing.
Twelve, the moment our grades and engagement as students seem to matter less than how we can be proven to be criminals, people to be arrested.
Twelve, and childhood already gone.
Twelve, and being who we are can cost us our lives.
It cost Tamir Rice his life.
He was a child of twelve. And the cop who shot him took under two seconds, literally, to determine that Tamir should die.
Tamir Rice. Twelve.
Twelve, and out of time.
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BLOODLINES
She did not tell them to clean up their lives or go and sin no more. She did not tell them they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek or its glorybound pure.
She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine.
TONI MORRISON
Yet for all the ways that middle school challenges me, for all the culture shock and for all of my struggles with the math and science courses, there is one incident that defines it more than any other, and it has everything to do with police and nothing to do with police and everything to do with poverty and nothing to do with poverty. It has everything to do with being Black and nothing to do with it.
Just before I cross that sixth-grade elementary school stage, just before I head off to Millikan and Sherman Oaks, a confident graduate about to rush headlong into the next chapter of my life, my mother and I are out, shopping for groceries. At some point between the Cheerios being put in the cart and the milk, she turns to me and says, I need to talk to you when we get home. Okay, I say, though I wonder, Why not talk to me now?
At home, after the groceries are put away, she guides me into her bedroom, onto her bed, patting it for me to sit beside her. I do. She takes a deep breath. This is not a conversation that she wants to have. And then she just blurts it out. Alton is not your father, she says. He’s Paul’s and Monte’s and Jasmine’s. But in between Monte and Jasmine, we broke up and I fell in love with Gabriel and we had you.
Gabriel? I ask. Do you mean that man who has been calling the house for the last few months?
Yes, she says. Gabriel is your father. It is a statement that makes no sense to me.
Do you want to meet him? she asks.
Her words confuse me. I don’t know what to say, what to think. I don’t want any of this. In the background my mother is saying something about running into Gabriel, exchanging numbers, her telling him about me. But I barely hear these details. I am in prayer: Can everything be the same? Please, God? Please?
I look at my mother but none of this comes out. I try to speak but cannot. I pull and pull from a place inside me I cannot name and then I say, hard and quick, That would be okay. I want to meet my father.
From the time my mother tells me about Gabriel until I meet him a month later, there is no conversation about him in our home. There is no backstory. No this is how we met. This is how we fell in love. This is where you really come from. We are a family of survivors and a family of doers, but we are not a family of talkers. We do not process, my family, we do not take it all down to the bones of it. Gabriel goes undiscussed, exists almost like an imagined friend, or else someone I meet in dreams that are hazy, not quite knowable, but still present.
But there is this one time, this one conversation. It happens with Alton, the only father I’ve ever known. Six years he’s been gone from our home. Six years of him visiting only, and us never knowing when. I am 12 and I will not connect his disappearance from us to any larger social or structural disruption but only to the idea that we, the kids, must have done something wrong to make this big, loving man go away. I will not know how he had been disappeared from himself, disappeared from the only life he’d ever known: 20 years on the line at the GM Van Nuys plant and then nothing. Alton will find jobs well below his skill set at garages, but he will never again know stability or a living wage. And all I will know then is that I love him and I miss him. Alton with all his big emotion and laughter. Which is why on this day when he comes through the door, unbidden and loud, and says, Come on girl, let’s go get something to eat, I am grateful and bound out behind him. Little shadow follows big shadow.
We walk down the block holding hands. Down past the 7-Eleven where we get our groceries. Down past George’s Liquors, where I will one day buy cigarettes. Down to the small hole-in-the-wall, the Mexican spot with the name no one ever seems to remember. We order tacos, but before I can start eating, I look up at Alton, his brown face gleaming with sweat in the Van Nuys sun, and I see them, the tears, they are falling freely, incongruently with a man who looks like he does, all muscle tip-to-tip, a man who started lifting weights when he was 14 years old and never stopped.
Alton and his Jheri curl, his 501 jeans with the super-hard crease down the center, his Stacy Adams shoes. Alton and his 18-pack abs that peek out from the silk shirt he always wears mostly unbuttoned when he isn’t working. Alton whose masculinity is ripped from the headlines. His tears push for real.
Am I still your father? he asks.
Of course, I say.
We pause.
And then, about my mother: I didn’t want her to tell you, he says. I never wanted you to feel like you were half anything, step nothing. Like you weren’t mine. You’ve always been mine. I didn’t want you to feel different.
I cannot figure out how to respond. I have not been prepared for any of this. I only know I do not want to betray him, my Alton, my father. I want him to just feel what my 12-year-old heart, my 12-year-old brain, cannot find the words to say. I wish right then we would simply say I love you a million times but we don’t. It isn’t what we come from. We say nothing and just eat and are silent. But the tears are a sign. Everything is changing and I feel guilty. It all feels like my fault.
But I have to meet Gabriel.
A