Racist Kids Drove an 11-Year-Old to Suicide

This is the GOP's America.

Jocelynn Rojo Carranza

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Parenting is hard. Sometimes you do everything right but your kid acts like they don’t have any common sense. Other times, kids mirror their parents and spew the same hate they hear at home. Donald Trump has normalized that behavior and now a kid is dead.

Middle schoolers are brutal. Grades 6-8 were the most miserable for me. I was picked on because my family was poor, my dad was dead, and whatever else my classmates decided they hated about me that week. It should come as no surprise to those who know me that I spent a lot of time suspended once I learned how to punch bullies in the face.

One thing I didn’t have to deal with from bullies was racism. That’s because I am very, very Caucasian. If you put me in the sun for half an hour, I start twinning with a tomato. My whiteness shielded me from the vicious racism that my classmates of color had to deal with in our Southern middle school.

My eldest son was also shielded from the racism in his middle school because although he’s Latino, he’s white-passing. That means he looks more like me than his Salvadoran father. Our son was protected from a lot because of his perceived whiteness. For instance, he didn’t have to deal with derogatory comments about immigrants after Donald Trump was elected the first time, even though he was the son of an immigrant. He didn’t have to worry about the children of Republicans telling him that his father was going to be deported. Sadly, that wasn’t the case for a little girl in Texas.

On February 3, 11-year-old Jocelynn Rojo Carranza died in a Dallas hospital, five days after attempting suicide. Marbella Carranza, the little girl’s mom, told Univision that her daughter’s death came after brutal, racist bullying at Gainsville Intermediate School.

Jocelynn’s classmates at the suburban Dallas school harassed her by threatening to call ICE on her family. The little Klan members in training told her that she was going to be left all alone when Trump’s Gestapo deported her family. In the weeks leading up to her death, Jocelynn repeatedly reported the bullying to administrators at the school.

Carranza told reporters that the school never reported the abuse to her or Jocelynn’s father. Administrators also failed to take action to stop the bullying. As a result, Jocelynn continued to suffer day in and day out until finally she couldn’t handle it any longer and took her own life.

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The Gainesville Independent School District has not released a statement about the bullying Jocelynn endured. The Independent reached out to the district, but a spokesperson refused to discuss the little girl’s death and instead claimed it had a strict anti-bullying code.

That’s nice that the district has an anti-bullying code but it means nothing if it isn’t being enforced. Also, what if the administrators Jocelynn reached out to didn’t consider what the kids were saying as bullying? The Trump administration has normalized hate and xenophobia.

“Build the Wall!”

“Deport them all!”

Get them out of here!”

Those were once catchphrases by a desperate man seeking public office but are now standard language for Republican voters, and apparently, it has trickled down to their pimple-faced spawns.

I’d actually go further and say this evil, vile racism has been normalized by the Republican Party over decades. It’s not as if xenophobia started with Trump. Remember when Joe Arpaio was bragging about targeting Hispanic neighborhoods in Phoenix in the early 2000s? Or in 2009 when a jury acquitted a group of high school football players in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, after they beat Luis Rameriz to death while screaming racial slurs? I could keep going, but you get the picture.

While Republicans have conditioned generations of vapid white people to hate minorities and immigrants, Trump has made it okay for them to vocalize their hate freely.

I have no idea if the kids who bullied Jocelynn came from conservative households. I’m also willing to acknowledge that parents can’t control what their kids do all the time, but let’s be fucking for real. Those kids heard it somewhere. I’d bet my $12 eggs that it was at their home or around other family members who think Trump is a cool guy who just wants to make America Great Again and terrorize families in the process. I’d love to give the parents the benefit of the doubt but I just don’t have it in me anymore.

If my kid went to that school, we’d be in deep discussions about racism, bullying, and suicide. The school district should be leading the way, no matter what the officials in Texas or the Trump administration have to say about it.

We have an obligation to teach America’s youth to treat people with respect. There will be kids who come from hateful households and we can’t do anything about that, but we can try to reach them anyway. We can discuss what’s happening in the world. Explain the suffering families go through when they are ripped apart. We can tell them that their parents are ignorant morons who are wrong. Push back on the normalization of hate in any way that we can.

That’s the only way we will save vulnerable kids.

Jocelynn was laid to rest on the morning of February 19, the day I am publishing this article. Her family will now spend the rest of their lives healing from the pain. You can support them by contributing to their GoFundMe if you want to help.

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