Ideas have consequences -- the Death of Carl Walker-Hoover
I'm late on this - I should have known and posted about this before April 17th. (It is only slight consolation that most of my fellow bloggers missed it entirely. Stories do get lost in the chaos, and sometimes the only way to keep on top of what is happening is to link to other bloggers, so if nobody catches it the first time around, it can 'fall through the cracks.')
But April 17th was when this should have been all over the blogosphere. Two reasons: April 17th is the Annual Day of Silence held by the students of many schools in support of gay students and gay rights in general. And April 17th would have been the birthday of Carl Walker-Hoover. Only he didn't see his birthday. He had been mercilessly taunted by his fellow students for being gay, and, eleven days before his birthday, he hung himself.
There are two other facts that make the story more poignant. One is the fact that there is no evidence that he thought of himself as gay or was gay - which really doesn't matter but which might open the hearts of some homophobes.
The other is the fact that, on April 17th, 2009, Carl Walker-Hoover would have turned twelve years old.
Now this isn't a case of a parent discovering her son's body and then a diary revealing what had driven him to this point. His mother "contacted the school repeatedly over the last six months to ask teachers to intervene after learning her son had been targeted by students. Walker said her son's classmates called him gay on a daily basis, made fun of his clothes and threatened to harm him, according to the Springfield Republican."
Think about it. I don't have to ladle on the horror. You can all picture your son, or nephew, or grandson, or even the neighbor's kid, dangling from the electrical-cord noose he made for himself. You can see the look that will permanently be in the child's mother's eyes, can even look in a mirror and see it in your own eyes if you imagine being the one to find the boy.
I won't even be the one to draw the obvious lessons - except for one minor one. But the greater lessons will occur to each of you, and will, hopefully be the basis of any discussion this receives. How do we make sure this stops here? How do we make sure, not just that the school Administration is punished, but that no other school ignores this sort of complaint?
But I have to include one smaller point. There have been commenters, some of them generally progressive, and usually young, in various blogs who have defended the use of the word 'fag' or 'faggot' as an epithet on the grounds that it has become so 'generalized' it has lost its specific anti-gay connotations, much like 'c*cks!ck*r' has. (And that, it's true, was once an anti-gay or anti-woman term.)
But maybe Carl Walker-Hoover will remind us that it still has specific sting to its venom.
It's the result of acceptance of systemic bullying in our schools. I think tying this tragedy to the social struggle of the homosexual community creates a dynamic where the actual root causes become obscured. The behavior can manifest around any feature the pack decides to highlight about the kid who's "different". This seems more germane to the Columbine discussion. In both instances, the kids being picked on chose a deadly way out.
One thing I have heard from a NYC school teacher(Harlam) friend is that the administrators don't respond because of pressure from Bloomberg's administration. Essentially, problems are intentionally ignored because if they are addressed ("officially" reported), administrators are penalized for having "problems in their school".
Basically, the politicians are improving school (and crime) stats by penalizing the reporting of abuses/crimes. If there is no record, it didn't happen ... and the politicians are making life "safer" for our kids every day. We are creating a system that encourages educators not to respond to bad situations, instead sweeping them under the rug. This is also a major problem with the idea of "merit pay".
The things that administrators refused to respond to were shocking. For example, my friend had a MP3 player literally ripped from her ears by a student, in front of the class. The administration responded by saying "We told you not to bring anything you considered valuable to school". The "kid" was put right back in the classroom with no repercussion (and was allowed to keep her property). If that's how they respond to assaults on teachers ... imagine how much they care about a kid being harassed into killing themselves. This is just one of dozens of examples she gave where the administration refused to provide safety for either the teachers or students because they didn't want the report.
IMO there is a good chance the administrator was more pleased to be rid of likely problems the kid could have caused to the school than they were upset about the child's death.
This is a systemic problem in our schools. Let's focus on the real problem instead of getting distracted by the word "fag". It's not particularly the specific words that hurt, it's being attacked and ostracized - regardless of the words used.
April 25, 2009 1:26 PM | Reply | Permalink
Please dismount your hobby horse. This was not about 'bullying in general,' a boy being 'different' (there's no evidence I've seen in the early stories that he was either 'different' OR 'gay'), the inadequacies of public scholls -- this was a charter school -- or, fergawdsakes, Mayor Bloomberg.
The boy was being bullied and taunted every day. He was being called 'gay' (or, probably, 'fag'). The parents reported it. The school did nothing -- and, btw, he was also black. If he'd been called 'nigger' -- unlikely in a predominantly minority school -- does anyone doubt that an assembly would have been called stopping it and telling the students in no uncertain terms this was intolerable?
But somehow, in a post as inaccurate as your spelling of HarlEm, you overlooked one minor thing -- the corpse of an 11 year old boy, and the noose he made to produce it.
April 25, 2009 5:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
Prup,
As someone that grew up in a school system where both Mom and Dad were teachers and my last name conveniently rhymed with "queer" I know, FIRST HAND, how very cruel "our future" can be.
Hope more see this and talk to the future parents of their grandkids.
IT IS A MASSIVE PROBLEM in our schools, public and private. Just as there is a ZERO tolerance policy on drugs there should be the exact same policy on those that bully, and their damn uninvolved parents.
Teachers no longer get the support of parents like they did back when I went to school. If I got in trouble at school I was in worse trouble at home. Until parents of today practice that kind of discipline schools will continue to be the training ground for the assholes of the future.
Life sucked until I cold cocked a guy in the 7th grade, my Dad beat my ass when I got home, but all the bullying stopped.
Thanks for this.
Oh, and rec'd
April 25, 2009 7:29 PM | Reply | Permalink