Brown Girl in School–Izzy’s Story
When asked to describe myself a few titles come to mind including: daughter, sister, aunt, teacher, and student. This post reflects me as an aunt and educator. I have three nieces (two on earth and one in heaven). My oldest niece Isabelle Kristina is of course the most beautiful and intelligent six-year-old I’ve ever met. She is a first grader at an elementary school in Salt Lake City, UT, I know what you’re thinking “There’s black people in Utah” and yes there are some.
This post will discuss an incident that occurred last year when Izzy was in kindergarten. Isabelle would leave school via a bus to an after-school program at a daycare. In order to get to the bus, she had to walk with other kids and a teacher a little way from the school. On this particular day Izzy made it to the bus with an accessory she picked up along the way. The accessory was a tiny flag used by land surveyors to mark an area, we’ve all seen them when driving down the street. So, one would think no big deal right, to any child that tiny flag would look like a toy and removing one certainly wouldn’t disrupt the work of the surveyors. The issue came along when my father, Izzy’s GP (grandpa) went to pick her up from the daycare that evening, he was told that there was an issue because Isabelle had stolen something. The daycare teacher began to explain about the flag and that arrangements must be made to return it. Although, I’m sure she isn’t the first child to pick up one of those flags and I’m almost positive that the land surveyors weren’t searching frantically for the flag. In response as any parent or grandparent would be my father was pissed to say the least, at first, he just ignored the words, however once it was repeated he responded with a not so nice “I heard what you said”. Of course, the news of the incident traveled through my small family rather quickly.
As an educator, I have learned to choose my words carefully when talking with parents as we want to make it clear that we are all on the same side, and that is the side of the child, so in all conversations we want that to be discernible. Thus, when I heard this story I was taken aback by the word choice of stolen. I began to wonder whether the flag would be considered “stolen” if Isabelle had been a white five-year-old girl? As I stated earlier this elementary school is located in Salt Lake City, Utah although Izzy is not the only minority child in the school obviously she is one of very few and even fewer are black students.
I have been researching the discipline disparities of African American and Latina girls for some time now but this situation made the words I have read many times much more apparent. I began to see in action how our girls are criminalized at such a young age. I created The Innocent Brown Girl Project to fight discipline disparities in school settings. I believe that our girls deserve a fair and equal education regardless of their school setting. Educators should be equipped with resources and professional development to enhance the education of our girls.
