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Racial Discrimination as Disability

Name: Deidre Hammon
Email: d.hammon@gte.net
Date: 09 Dec 1999
Time: 19:18:48
Remote Name: 1cust140.tnt21.sfo3.da.uu.net

Story

Working as an advocate for children with disabilities, I had a young African-American boy, eight years old, come to my office with his mom, because he had been expelled from school. I asked him directly, what was going on at school and he said, "I'm in the retard class."

His mom was horrified and began to correct him, but I stopped her. "That's fine...," I assured her, "Now, tell me, why is it the 'retard' class?'"

"There's no books..."

Mom again began to correct him, but, since I have been in thousands of special education classrooms, I knew exactly what he was talking about: "You don't have any textbooks do you?"

Suddenly I had his full attention. He stared in my eyes and he knew -- I knew -- what was happening to him. He went on for the next hour about what they had done to him, with almost no interuptions this time. He was sure of himself now.

On the play ground the year before, other students -- mostly white children -- had begun calling him "brillo head" and throwing other racial slurs at him. He reported them repeatedly to teachers, the school administrator, and the school counselor, to no avail. Finally, he took matters into his own hands and began to beat the offenders up. He was almost immediately labeled "seriously emotionally disturbed" and the segregation began. First to a resource room, then, as his behavior grew more agressive in an attempt to communicate his anger with this treatment, he was moved to another program, where they "took him down" three to four times a day.

Finally he wound up in a psychiatric hopital with an excellent psychiatrist. The doctor told the parents to take him home. There was nothing wrong with him. "But don't," he warned, "put him back in school."

The following year, they did attempt to put him back in school, his neighborhood school, only to watch him placed again in a segregated classroom where -- in his frustration and rage -- he threw a desk across the room.

When confronted about the harassment issues, the staff counselor had the most amazing response to the question of whether they had followed district procedure and assisted the student to fill out complaints, had followed through with investigations of the complaints or had taken disciplinary or corrective action against the students involved. She said, "No, but we talked to him about how wrong it was for them to do that ..."

To which we replied, "How empowering."

The student was readmitted to the third grade -- where they have textbooks -- and is doing fine (now well into the fifth grade).

Being the victim of harassment should not be further punished by a label of disability and the concurrent sentence of aversive intervention and segregation. Look closely at why things are happening to your students and your children. And above all -- ask them.

Copyright © 1999 Deidre Hammon. All rights reserved.

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