Family photo
The most heartbreaking part of the recently released Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Department investigation report into the murder of Tamir Rice is probably the witness statement by an unidentified acquaintance. The individual talked about the torment and abuse the 12-year-old dealt with long before he was murdered by police.
According to the report, the unidentified boy had known Rice from their shared time at the Cudell Recreation Center. Rice was known to frequent the center daily. According to Det. John Morgan, the boy told investigators the following:
“He stated that the guys at the CRC liked to pick on Rice and bully him. He stated that kids would talk about Rice’s clothes and how he was dressed. [Redacted] revealed that sometimes Rice would wear the same clothes that he had worn the day before or he would have a stain on his clothes on one day and he would wear the same clothes again with the same stain on another day. [Redacted] relayed that boys at CRC picked on Rice almost every day.
[Redacted] recalled an incident where he and Rice were playing basketball and a guy named [redacted] had kicked a soccer ball at Rice and it struck him in the face. [Redacted] said it was an accident, but everyone who saw it knew it wasn’t an accident.”
Honestly, reading this makes me wonder if this kid ever stood a chance.
What I mean is that before Rice’s life could be snuffed out by a trigger-happy white police officer, he was tragically bullied and picked on by his peers. And before law enforcement agents could make a snap judgment about him, his life had been judged and then devalued because he didn’t have the means available to embody aesthetically the image of financial solvency like those around him. And before those officers could take his soul, the likely reality is that Rice’s spirit was being snatched away from him through a slow and painful death.
Obviously the murder of Rice at the hands of people officers and the bullying of him by his peers are not exactly the same. While being kicked in the face with a soccer ball because another kid didn’t like your clothing probably caused considerable physical pain, he was still able to live through it. The same can not be said for those bullets to the gut, which eviscerated his abdomen and lower intestines. However, what both acts have in common is the constant demoralization, as well as flat-out denial of humanity, which often comes with being poor.
It is not easy living in a world where your income defines your treatment. Your peers hate you, even the ones not much more economically stable than you, because you are a reminder of what could easily befall them. The Republicans and the Democrats think you’re a problem in need of fixing. And even the most well-meaning among us believe you are to blame you for your condition – even if you are just a child, and your condition was something you were born into and have little control over.
As a low-income kid hailing from the north side of Philadelphia’s City Hall, clothing was more than a means of protecting one’s self from the elements. It was a status symbol; a way to show the world that I was somebody of value and worth. At one point, my mom worked hard at three low-wage jobs and still brought home $25,000 a year. Most of her income went to putting food on the table and paying bills. But raising two children on her own meant that sometimes even managing those two objectives at the same time was a feat. There were a couple of times when warm bath water was made on electric stoves and carried up flights of steps to the tub because our gas for heat and hot water had been shut off. And there were a few times when we had heat and hot water but took our baths by candlelight because PECO wasn’t pleased with the little money my mom put towards the light bill.
Needless to say, mom couldn’t afford, and wasn’t thinking about, name-brand anything. In fact, most of my clothing had been hauled into the house inside of big clear plastic bags from secondhand shops. Or my clothing came from my fashionably unconscious grandma who used a portion of her meager pension to bring us school clothing from one of the discount department stores that predated Walmart. The shirts were often two sizes too big and the pants were always too short in the ankle. The awkward fit meant that my younger brother and I were slouching our pants low off of our asses way before it was fashionable to do so. What was much worse than the fit was that none of my clothing had any labels – at least none that the other kids in school or around the neighborhood would recognize and respect.
My earliest memory of being ridiculed for my lack of designer labels happened at the 56 trolley stop outside of Harding Middle School. My tormentors were a bunch of older kids who wore the latest in fashion-forward urban footwear, including Nikes, Lottos, Reeboks and my favorite, KangaROOS. I never owned a pair, but some of my girlfriends did. And that day at the bus stop I certainly wished I had the ability to hide inside of one of the pouches of their ‘ROOS.
“Girl, those sneakers are cute. What are those Pretzels?” asked some random girl at the bus stop. She was tall, brown-skinned and had a comfortable smile that was deceiving.
“No, these are Balloons,” I said confidently. It was just a day before that Mom took me to Payless and told me to pick out a pair of sneakers. I liked them because, with the exception of the bouquet of balloons patterned on each side of the shoes, they sort of looked like Reebok Classic Freestyle Hi-Tops. I thought my tormentor was genuine in her admiration as well. However, my correction would inspire a chorus of laughter, pointing and more joking. Others would join in. Then they would start throwing things: candy and potato chips, mostly. I wanted to scream and tell every last one of them to take their nice sneakers and go kick rocks. But there were too many of them. I knew that responding would only encourage them. Instead, I deflated and blamed myself for allowing that joke to travel so far over my head. I also vowed never to wear those sneakers again and opted to wear dress shoes for the remainder of the school term, even on snow days. Unfortunately, my schoolmates would make it loudly known that those dress shoes too weren’t an acceptable form of footwear.
The bullying of kids from low-income families by other kids of means is a direct byproduct of our hierarchical society, which openly practices systematic abuse of power of those less in a position financially to defend themselves. What often starts out as mocking kids in the free lunch programs and who tuck away EBT cards in their pockets gets tremendously worse as we get older. No longer are we fighting kids on school yards because of our unappealing clothing, but instead, we are fighting for our dignity in low-wage yet demanding and demeaning jobs. Or we’re fighting for credit in redlined communities. Or we are fighting against predatory lending via payday loans, cheap rent-to-own furniture and auto loan scams. Or we are fighting for our freedom from mass incarceration because we can’t afford to pay for decent representation as well as court fines and fees. No wonder so many kids and adults from low-income areas tend to emotionally give up and physically opt out of life. With all of society telling you and treating you like you aren’t worth the piece of paper your birth certificate is printed on, it is easy to start believing that you deserve your own marginalization.
It is true that some of us survive. Some of make it out of poverty and get to go on to excel financially in life. But the growing reality is that many do not. Many get stuck, most times through no fault of their own, in a cycle of poverty, rubbing two nickels together, trying to make a dollar and some sense of it all. Unfortunately, we will never know which side of the economic apartheid fence Rice would have landed. As before he was able to take a stand, the bullies got to him first.
