The Human Impact of Xenophobia
An 11-year-old girl committed suicide after classmates bullied her over her family's immigration status
An intermediate school student who was relentlessly bullied by her classmates over her family’s immigration status took her own life earlier this month.
Officials at the girl’s Gainesville, Texas school had not even notified her mother about the bullying, although apparently the girl was meeting regularly with school counselors about it.
I imagine news like this trickling up to the likes of Donald Trump, and him responding with something like “well, then her parents shouldn’t have come to the United States illegally.” As if that is even remotely the point. As if we know anything at all about her family’s immigration status, about what horrors they might have fled in their home countries assuming they are immigrants, about what they were like as human beings, about how any of this could possibly justify bullying a sixth grader to death.
Students had reportedly gone so far as to taunt the girl about what would happen if she came home from school to find that her parents had been deported. They even threatened to call ICE and report her family. Do they even know what ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) is? Or do the icy initials alone do the job?
I imagine the usual dinner table conversation in the homes of these bullies. Were they hearing about traumatized children returning home to empty houses because ICE had taken their parents away? Did their own parents tell such stories with glee? Were they learning that other children just like them in every fundamental way are somehow subhuman, not to be treated with the respect due to all of their peers? Did they hear racist and ethnic slurs as part of regular banter in their families? Was Fox News running in the background, spewing lies about immigrants being criminals?
As Rodgers and Hammerstein famously wrote, you’ve got to be carefully taught.
The cruelty is the point.
She was 11 years old.