Isabella Tichenor killed herself a few days ago. She was 10 years old.
Her mother, Brittany Tichenor-Cox, said last week that her daughter – she called her “Izzy” – had been the target of ongoing racist abuse from classmates at her school in North Salt Lake, Utah. Izzy, who was African American and had autism, was repeatedly called a “n—-r” and told that she stank. Tichenor-Cox said the family appealed to administrators, who did nothing.
Izzy’s mistreatment is consistent with the findings of a Justice Department investigation that wrapped up two weeks before she died. It found widespread racist abuse in the school district. Black kids were being called “n—-r,” and likened to apes. They were told their skin looked like feces or dirt. They were told to go pick cotton. Officials did nothing about that, either.
“How young is too young to teach kids about race?” That was, coincidentally enough, the text of an ill-fated tweet CBS News posted two days before Izzy died. It was intended to promote a documentary on the raging controversy about how and if schools should teach America’s sordid racial history. Republicans, railing against so-called “critical race theory,” have been frantically passing laws to effectively ban any such lessons.
But there was a bias implicit in the framing of the CBS question and if it was invisible to the network, it was jarring to people of color, many of whom responded sharply.