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What Five
Signs Ma’Khia Bryant’s Death Reveal About Black Girls in Crisis
As the country collectively gasped in horror at the on-camera
killing of Ma'Khia Bryant, a 16-year-old Columbus, Ohio teenager who was
gunned down by Officer Nicholas Rearden during a knife attack, one prevailing
narrative has emerged that focuses on the actions of the officer. Though
the officer’s actions are worthy of discussion, I feel there are four indicators that reveal Black girls are in crisis.
Ma’Khia, by all accounts was described as a loving and beautiful
soul, yet her home life and demise is becoming an all-too-familiar end for
Black girls. As details of her home life slowly emerge, we find out that
Ma’Khia was not living at home with her parents, but instead she and her little
sister were living in a foster home that housed 10 people. Reportedly,
she had only been in the home for six months but she and her sister had been in
foster care since 2018.
This troubling revelation leads to me to the first indicator that
confirms Black girls are in crisis.
Sign of Crisis
#1: More and more Black
girls live in an unstable home environment.
According to the
National Women’s Law Center, Black girls are 22.9 percent of the girls in
foster care, but are the largest group, or 35.6 percent, of girls who
experience 10 or more residential placements. Living in an unstable
household can lead to depression, increased stress, social anxiety,
uncontrollable emotional responses, and difficulty in relationships according
to Psychology Today.
More troubling is the
increasing number of Black girls who are homeless, accounting for 39.8% of the
homeless population. This growing instability is causing young African
American girls to have to live in unfamiliar surroundings with people they do
not know. We can see the strain of such a living arrangement on Ma’Khia’s
as she repeatedly complained of being bullied while in foster care.
Sign of Crisis #2: At-risk Black girls
are being raised by parents in crisis.
Sadly, in 2019
4.15 million or 64% of black children in the United States were being raised in
a single-parent household. Beyond the increased stressors of financial
responsibility and decreased sleep parents face, children of single parents who
do not have a good support system experience lower grades, anxiety, and are
emotional unstable. As the single parent works their hardest to fulfill
the needs of their children, often the absent parent is emotionally and
financially unavailable.
Beyond being single,
some parents are faced with dealing with men with multiple children by other
women, being financial unstable, drug use and abuse, and a lack of motivation
to escape their current situation.
Though Ma'Kiah's parents
have had since 2018 to complete whatever the state demanded for them to get
their kids back, they had not.
Sign of Crisis #3: Black girls experience violence
too often.
Violence in the homes of
Black girls is prevalent as 41.2% of Black women experience intimate partner
violence according to the Institute Women’s Policy Research. The feelings
of anger, embarrassment, and helpless are only compounded when they are in
public as 33.2 percent of black girls report being in a physical alteration
away from home according to a 2017 report by the Youth Risk Behavior Survey.
From television to
music, society is repeatedly teaching girls violence is the first option versus
the last. The result has been a generation of youth who have no
anger-management skills, and a complete disrespect for personal boundaries.
Sign of Crisis #4: Dealt with more punitively than other
races.
Black girls are dealt with more harshly than any
of their counterparts. In fact, The African American Policy Reform and
Columbia Law School Center for Intersectionality and Social Studies report
nationally Black girls are six times more likely to get out-of-school
suspension. These suspensions are often the result of minor offenses
like dress code and/or cell phone violations.
The punitive treatment
of Black girls is not reserved for high schoolers either. According to a
report by the Education Trust of New York in New York City, Black girls in
elementary and middle school were about 11 times more likely to be suspended
than their counterparts of other races. Often Black girls face excessive
punishment and have trouble throughout school once they have gotten into
trouble.
Sadly, this hostility
toward Black girls makes them guarded and causes them to experience panic
attacks, have difficulty socializing, and sets up a distain toward
authority. Because girls are already dealing with mental, physical, and
emotional changes as they mature, the antagonistic way in which others deal
with them causes even more stress. Teenagers are not equipped with
critical thinking skills until the front part of their brain develops fully;
therefore, girls who are harassed daily often respond out of the emotional
center of their brain.
Though all teens
experience this lack of maturity, when Black girls respond to situations out of
frustration she risks being suspended, attacked or in the case of Ma'Khia
Bryant, death.
These factors are
warning signs that should stir our community to only address the issue of
policing, but to also do the hard work of looking inside and vehemently
pursuing solutions that will address the factors that led to Ma'Khia's
death.
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