How can a school’s actions turn a six-year-old boy into a potential perpetrator with a law enforcement record? ​​ This is how.

This is my story about how it happened to my six-year-old son. It is a story of deep trauma. It is a story of how I, a typical working mom, tried everything I could to try and fix a problem and right a profound injustice, and how I ran into obstacles and dead-ends coupled with apologies everywhere I turned.

This is a story about what happens when school administrators are deputized by municipalities; about what happens when school personnel look at a Black and Latinx boy and, instead of seeing a six-year-old behaving like a six-year-old who is learning and growing, see a criminal and the need for law enforcement; about how individuals within public institutions have carte-blanche to act with impunity and it is impossible to hold them accountable.

What happened to my son is an act of violence. It is part of a long history of false allegations against Black and Brown men and boys sexually assaulting white girls and women that has a lengthy violent racist history in this country that goes right back to Emmett Till. It is one of the many invisible daily dehumanizing indignities behind the ongoing struggle for equity and racial justice.

I am making this painful and traumatizing experience public to make visible how the school-to-prison pipeline is set in motion in early childhood. To uncover how schools and police work together- in ways that are hidden and go beyond uniformed police officers in high schools. My intent is to show the institutionalization of injustice, how it operates and inflicts harm by design, and to illustrate the architecture of systemic racial injustice in our schools and communities, created and sustained by our civic institutions, including the ones to whom we entrust the most precious thing- our children.

By sharing my family’s story, I hope to provide a map that can support other families in similar situations, while helping to dismantle the system that allowed my son’s school to bring law enforcement into his life, triggering a chain of events that the schools set in motion and which entangled my son with law enforcement; actions which the schools continue to believe were appropriate, just, and for which they apparently bear no responsibility.

I never thought this could happen to my son. It did.

It could happen to you. 

Read about the incident in its entirety here.

https://architectureofinjustice.com

#FB00714