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<h1>Twelve Years Old and Out of Time</h1>
 <p>The first time I am arrested, I am 12 years old.</p>  <p>One sentence and I am back there, all that little girl fear&nbsp;<br>and humiliation forever settled in me at the cellular level.</p>  <p>It&rsquo;s the break between seventh and eighth grades, and<br>for the first time I have to attend summer school because of<br>my math and science grades, and I am angry about it. No<br>other Millikan kids come here, to this school in Van Nuys,<br>for remediation, only me. The summer school I attend is for<br>the kids who live in my neighborhood. It doesn&rsquo;t have a cam-<br>pus, but it has metal detectors and police. There are no<br>police or metal detectors at Millikan.</p>  <p>Somehow, mentally, I don&rsquo;t make the adjustment. I still<br>think of myself as a student there, which I am but not for<br>these summer months, and one day I do what I&rsquo;d learned<br>from my Millikan peers to do to cope: I smoke some weed.<br>At Millikan it is a daily occurrence for kids to show up to<br>class high, to light up in the bathroom, to smoke on the cam-<br>pus lawn. No one gets in trouble. Nowhere is there police.<br>Millikan is the middle school where the gifted kids go.</p>  <p>But in my neighborhood school things are totally differ-<br>ent and someone must have said something about me and<br>my weed&mdash;two girls had come into the bathroom when I&rsquo;d<br>been in there&mdash;because two days later a police officer comes<br>to my class. I remember my stomach dropping the way it<br>does on one of those monster roller-coaster rides at Six Flags.<br>I can just feel that they are coming for me, and I am right.<br>The cop tells me to come to the front of the room, where<br>he handcuffs me in front of everyone and takes me to the<br>dean&rsquo;s office, where my bag is searched, where I am<br>searched, pockets turned out, shoes checked, just like my<br>brothers in the alleyway when I was 9 years old. I have<br>no weed on me but I am made to call my mother at work<br>and tell her what happened, which I do through tears. I<br>didn&rsquo;t do it, Mommy, I lie through genuine tears of fear.<br>My mother believes me. I am the good girl and she takes<br>my side.</p>  <p>Later, when we are home together, she will not ask me<br>how I am feeling or get righteously angry. She will not rub<br>my wrists where the handcuffs pinched them or hold me or<br>tell me she loves me. This is not a judgment of her. My<br>mother is a manager, figuring out how to get herself and her<br>four children through the day alive. That this has happened,<br>but that she and her kids are all at home and, relatively<br>speaking, safe, is a victory for my mother. It is enough.<br>And for all of my childhood, this is just the way it is.</p>  <p>What made middle school such a culture shock, beyond the<br>race and class differences, was that all throughout elemen-<br>tary school I was considered bright, gifted even, a star<br>student whom my fourth-grade teacher, Ms. Goldberg,<br>indulged when I asked if I could teach the class about the<br>Civil Rights Movement. A week before she had given me a<br>book, <em>The Gold Cadillac</em> by Mildred Taylor, about a girl mak-<br>ing the frightening drive with her father from Ohio<br>through the Jim Crow South, down to Mississippi, where<br>her extended family lives.</p>  <p>The terror in it was palpable for me, the growing sense<br>on every page that they might be killed; by the time I was<br>9, police had already raided our small apartment in search<br>of one of my favorite uncles, my father&rsquo;s, Alton&rsquo;s, brother.<br>My uncle who used and sold drugs, and who had a big laugh<br>and who used to hug me up and tell me I was brilliant, but<br>who did not with live us, whose whereabouts we did not<br>know the day the police in full riot gear burst in.</p>  <p>Even tiny Jasmine, probably 5 years old during that<br>raid, was yelled at and told to sit on the couch with me as<br>police tore through our home in a way I would never later see<br>on <em>Law and Order: Special Victims Unit</em>, where Olivia Benson<br>is always gentle with the kids. In real life, when I was a little<br>kid, when my brothers and sisters were, we were treated<br>like suspects. We had to make our own gentle, Jasmine and<br>I, holding each other, frozen like I was the day of the alley-<br>way incident, this time cops tearing through our rooms<br>instead of the bodies of my brothers.</p>  <p>They even tore through our drawers. Did they think my<br>uncle was hiding in the dresser drawer?</p>  <p>But as with the incident with my brothers, we did not<br>speak of it once it was over.</p>  <p></p>  <p>In any event, I am sure this incident is at least partially<br>why <em>The Gold Cadillac</em>, of another time and another place,<br>was a story I clung to so deeply, why I remember it now,<br>decades on. Where the details wove together differently, the<br>fear drawn out across those pages is the same, is my own.<br>Finishing it, I wanted more. I wanted confirmation that that<br>which we did not speak of was real. Which was why I asked,<br>Please, Ms. Goldberg, may I have more books to read?</p>  <p>Of course, she said, and gave me stories I devoured,<br>child-size bites of the fight for freedom and justice.</p>  <p>Please, I went back and asked Ms. Goldberg, can I teach<br>the class about the books?<br>Yes, she said, Why not? Because that&rsquo;s how she was. Ms.<br>Goldberg, with her &rsquo;80s feathered brown hair and her<br><em>Flashdance</em>-style workout gear she wore to school every day.</p>  <p>I had a reward&mdash;pieces of candy&mdash;for my classmates who<br>answered the questions I posed during the 15-minute presen-<br>tations I was allowed to give on the books I read. I wanted<br>them to know our history in this nation, what it was we come<br>from. I wanted them to learn, as I had learned, the terror we<br>knew. Somehow it connected to a terror I&mdash;we&mdash;felt in our<br>own neighborhoods, in our own current lives, but could not<br>quite name.</p>  <p>But between Ms. Goldberg and then Ms. Bilal&mdash;the<br>afterschool teacher and the single dark-skinned Black<br>woman I would have during my early education, who brought us<br>Kwanzaa and Afrocentricity&mdash;I turned toward middle<br>school hopeful, even if it was in a community I didn&rsquo;t know,<br>a community without my community. I expected to still be<br>loved, encouraged.</p>  <p>Millikan Middle School is sufficiently far enough away from<br>my home that I need a ride each morning in order to get to<br>school on time. Before, I could simply hop on the city bus<br>with all the other kids from my hood, but getting into Sher-<br>man Oaks is a more complicated endeavor. The problem is<br>that my family does not own a car, which is why our neigh-<br>bor Cynthia steps in to help. My mother borrows her car to<br>ensure my safe passage. This is not quite as straightforward<br>as it may sound.</p>  <p>Cynthia, no more than 19, a young mother who has on<br>and off been involved with my brother Monte and who will<br>eventually have a child, my nephew Chase, with him, had<br>been shot a year before in a drive-by while she was at a party.<br>From the waist down, she was left paralyzed. But she has a<br>car she loans my mother, a beat-up, champagne-colored sta-<br>tion wagon. The back windows are gone, replaced by plas-<br>tic lining, and the whole thing smells like pee because with<br>Cynthia being mostly paralyzed, she sometimes loses con<br>-trol of her bladder.</p>  <p>My mother takes me to Millikan in that car, which<br>initially I deal with because, a car! But after the first day, I<br>realize quickly I have to make a change. Day two and I say,<br>Drop me off here, Mommy, meaning a few blocks away from<br>the school. The car we are in does not look like any of the<br>other cars that pull up to Millikan, all gleaming and new in<br>the morning sun. Kids pour out of those vehicles, Mercedes<br>and Lexuses, and run from waving parents onto the cam-<br>pus&rsquo;s greener-than-green lawn, as all at once I become famil-<br>iar with a sudden and new feeling taking root in my spirit: a<br>shame that goes deep, that is encompassing and defining. I<br>realize we are poor.</p>  <p>Later, as an adult, a friend will say to me, Of course you<br>felt that. Oppression is embarrassing, she will say quietly.<br>But in middle school, segregated as it is, between Black and<br>white kids, wealthy and poor kids, I don&rsquo;t quite know<br>what to do with this feeling or the terrible question that<br>encircles my 12-year-old soul: Am I supposed to be embar-<br>rassed about the people who nurtured me, who gave me<br>to the world and gave the world to me?</p>  <p>I don&rsquo;t fit in with the white kids who smoke weed in<br>between classes in bathrooms or on the campus lawn. I<br>don&rsquo;t fit in with the few Black girls who want to be Janet Jackson<br>or Whitney Houston when they grow up. I wear MC Ham-<br>mer pants, crotch swinging low. I wear my own brand of<br>Blackness informed as it also is by the Mexicanness of the<br>neighborhood I was raised in. People say I am weird, but I<br>don&rsquo;t feel weird. I only feel like myself: a girl from Van Nuys<br>who loves poetry and reading and, more than anything,<br>dancing. I am in the dance department and my dances are<br>equal parts African, Hip Hop and Mariachi, which is also<br>to say, weird.</p>  <p>Middle school is the first time in my life when I feel un-<br>sure of myself. No one is calling me gifted anymore. No one,<br>save for my dance teacher, encourages me or seems to have<br>patience with me. It&rsquo;s in middle school that my grades drop<br>for the first time and that I come to believe that maybe all<br>that love I&rsquo;d gotten in elementary school had somehow dried<br>up, my ration run dry. At the age of 12 I am on my own, no<br>longer in the world as a child, as a small human, innocent<br>and in need of support. I saw it happen to my brothers and<br>now it was happening to me, this moment when we become<br>the thing that&rsquo;s no longer adorable or cherished. The year<br>we become a thing to be discarded.</p>  <p>For my brothers, and especially for Monte, learning that<br>they did not matter, that they were expendable, began in<br>the streets, began while they were hanging out with friends,<br>began while they were literally breathing while Black. The<br>extraordinary presence of police in our communities, a re-<br>sult of a drug war aimed at us, despite our never using or<br>selling drugs more than unpoliced white children, ensured<br>that we all knew this. For us, law enforcement had nothing<br>to do with protecting and serving, but controlling and<br>containing the movement of children who had been labeled<br>super-predators simply by virtue of who they were born to<br>and where they were born, not because they were actually<br>doing anything predatory.</p>  <p>I learned I didn&rsquo;t matter from the very same place that<br>lifted me up, the place I&rsquo;d found my center and voice: school.<br>And it will not be until I am an adult, determined to achieve<br>a degree in religion, part of a long and dedicated process I<br>undertook to become an ordained minister, that I will en-<br>joy school again.</p>  <p>A few years after I complete my degree, Dr. Monique W.<br>Morris published her groundbreaking book, <em>Pushout: The</em><br><em>Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools</em>, demonstrating how<br>Black girls are rendered disposable in schools, unwanted,<br>unloved. Twelve percent of us receive at least one suspen-<br>sion during our school careers while our white (girl) counter-<br>parts are suspended at a rate of 2 percent. In Wisconsin<br>the rate is actually 21 percent for Black girls but 2 percent<br>for white girls.</p>  <p>But having attended schools with both Black and white<br>girls, one thing I learned quickly is that while we can behave<br>in the same or very similar ways, we are almost never punished<br>similarly. In fact, in white schools, I witnessed an extraordi-<br>nary amount of drug use compared to what my friends in my<br>neighborhood schools experienced. And yet my friends<br>were the ones policed. My neighborhood friends went to schools<br>where no mass or even singular shootings occurred, but<br>where police in full Kevlar patrolled the hallways, often with<br>drug-sniffing dogs, the very same kind that they turned on<br>children in the South who demanded an end to segregation.</p>  <p>By the time Black Lives Matter is born, we not only<br>know that we have been rendered disposable because of<br>our lived experience&mdash;which few listened to&mdash;but also from<br>data and finally from those terrible, viral images of Black<br>girls being thrown brutally out of their seats by people who<br>are called School Safety Officers, for the crime of having<br>their phones out in the classroom. Monique Morris&rsquo; re-<br>porting will tell us about the 12-year-old girl from Detroit<br>who is threatened with both expulsion and criminal charges<br>for writing the word &ldquo;Hi&rdquo; on her locker door; and the one<br>in Orlando who is also threatened with expulsion from her<br>private school if she doesn&rsquo;t stop wearing her hair natural.</p>  <p>Twelve.</p>  <p>And for me, too, it started the year I turned 12. That<br>was the year that I learned that being Black and poor de-<br>fined me more than being bright and hopeful and ready. I<br>had been so ready to learn. So willing.</p>  <p>Twelve, the moment our grades and engagement as stu-<br>dents seem to matter less than how we can be proven to be<br>criminals, people to be arrested.</p>  <p>Twelve, and childhood already gone.<br>Twelve, and being who we are can cost us our lives.<br>It cost Tamir Rice his life.</p>  <p>He was a child of 12. And the cop who shot him<br>took under two seconds, literally, to determine that Tamir<br>should die.</p>  <p>Tamir Rice. Twelve.<br>Twelve, and out of time.</p>  <p><span><em><figure><img src="/wp-content/uploads/imports/af6ff1c073bb43c583da397a874298fd.jpg"></figure>From When They Call You a Terrorist by Patrisse Khan-Cullors and asha bandele. Copyright 2018 by the authors and reprinted by permission of <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/smp/" target="_self" title="" rel="noopener noreferrer">St. Martin&rsquo;s Press</a>.</em></span></p>
<p>This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org">Yes! Magazine</a> at <a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org/social-justice/2018/05/13/twelve-and-out-of-time">https://www.yesmagazine.org/social-justice/2018/05/13/twelve-and-out-of-time</a>.</p><link href="https://www.yesmagazine.org/social-justice/2018/05/13/twelve-and-out-of-time" rel="canonical"/><p>Yes! Magazine is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of ... . Learn more at <a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org">Yes! Magazine</a></p><img id="republication-tracker-tool-source" src="https://www.yesmagazine.org/?republication-pixel=true&post=12645&ga4=G-74QJNNY44Z" style="width:1px;height:1px;">

Twelve Years Old and Out of Time
 The first time I am arrested, I am 12 years old.  One sentence and I am back there, all that little girl fear and humiliation forever settled in me at the cellular level.  It’s the break between seventh and eighth grades, andfor the first time I have to attend summer school because ofmy math and science grades, and I am angry about it. Noother Millikan kids come here, to this school in Van Nuys,for remediation, only me. The summer school I attend is forthe kids who live in my neighborhood. It doesn’t have a cam-pus, but it has metal detectors and police. There are nopolice or metal detectors at Millikan.  Somehow, mentally, I don’t make the adjustment. I stillthink of myself as a student there, which I am but not forthese summer months, and one day I do what I’d learnedfrom my Millikan peers to do to cope: I smoke some weed.At Millikan it is a daily occurrence for kids to show up toclass high, to light up in the bathroom, to smoke on the cam-pus lawn. No one gets in trouble. Nowhere is there police.Millikan is the middle school where the gifted kids go.  But in my neighborhood school things are totally differ-ent and someone must have said something about me andmy weed—two girls had come into the bathroom when I’dbeen in there—because two days later a police officer comesto my class. I remember my stomach dropping the way itdoes on one of those monster roller-coaster rides at Six Flags.I can just feel that they are coming for me, and I am right.The cop tells me to come to the front of the room, wherehe handcuffs me in front of everyone and takes me to thedean’s office, where my bag is searched, where I amsearched, pockets turned out, shoes checked, just like mybrothers in the alleyway when I was 9 years old. I haveno weed on me but I am made to call my mother at workand tell her what happened, which I do through tears. Ididn’t do it, Mommy, I lie through genuine tears of fear.My mother believes me. I am the good girl and she takesmy side.  Later, when we are home together, she will not ask mehow I am feeling or get righteously angry. She will not rubmy wrists where the handcuffs pinched them or hold me ortell me she loves me. This is not a judgment of her. Mymother is a manager, figuring out how to get herself and herfour children through the day alive. That this has happened,but that she and her kids are all at home and, relativelyspeaking, safe, is a victory for my mother. It is enough.And for all of my childhood, this is just the way it is.  What made middle school such a culture shock, beyond therace and class differences, was that all throughout elemen-tary school I was considered bright, gifted even, a starstudent whom my fourth-grade teacher, Ms. Goldberg,indulged when I asked if I could teach the class about theCivil Rights Movement. A week before she had given me abook, The Gold Cadillac by Mildred Taylor, about a girl mak-ing the frightening drive with her father from Ohiothrough the Jim Crow South, down to Mississippi, whereher extended family lives.  The terror in it was palpable for me, the growing senseon every page that they might be killed; by the time I was9, police had already raided our small apartment in searchof one of my favorite uncles, my father’s, Alton’s, brother.My uncle who used and sold drugs, and who had a big laughand who used to hug me up and tell me I was brilliant, butwho did not with live us, whose whereabouts we did notknow the day the police in full riot gear burst in.  Even tiny Jasmine, probably 5 years old during thatraid, was yelled at and told to sit on the couch with me aspolice tore through our home in a way I would never later seeon Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, where Olivia Bensonis always gentle with the kids. In real life, when I was a littlekid, when my brothers and sisters were, we were treatedlike suspects. We had to make our own gentle, Jasmine andI, holding each other, frozen like I was the day of the alley-way incident, this time cops tearing through our roomsinstead of the bodies of my brothers.  They even tore through our drawers. Did they think myuncle was hiding in the dresser drawer?  But as with the incident with my brothers, we did notspeak of it once it was over.    In any event, I am sure this incident is at least partiallywhy The Gold Cadillac, of another time and another place,was a story I clung to so deeply, why I remember it now,decades on. Where the details wove together differently, thefear drawn out across those pages is the same, is my own.Finishing it, I wanted more. I wanted confirmation that thatwhich we did not speak of was real. Which was why I asked,Please, Ms. Goldberg, may I have more books to read?  Of course, she said, and gave me stories I devoured,child-size bites of the fight for freedom and justice.  Please, I went back and asked Ms. Goldberg, can I teachthe class about the books?Yes, she said, Why not? Because that’s how she was. Ms.Goldberg, with her ’80s feathered brown hair and herFlashdance-style workout gear she wore to school every day.  I had a reward—pieces of candy—for my classmates whoanswered the questions I posed during the 15-minute presen-tations I was allowed to give on the books I read. I wantedthem to know our history in this nation, what it was we comefrom. I wanted them to learn, as I had learned, the terror weknew. Somehow it connected to a terror I—we—felt in ourown neighborhoods, in our own current lives, but could notquite name.  But between Ms. Goldberg and then Ms. Bilal—theafterschool teacher and the single dark-skinned Blackwoman I would have during my early education, who brought usKwanzaa and Afrocentricity—I turned toward middleschool hopeful, even if it was in a community I didn’t know,a community without my community. I expected to still beloved, encouraged.  Millikan Middle School is sufficiently far enough away frommy home that I need a ride each morning in order to get toschool on time. Before, I could simply hop on the city buswith all the other kids from my hood, but getting into Sher-man Oaks is a more complicated endeavor. The problem isthat my family does not own a car, which is why our neigh-bor Cynthia steps in to help. My mother borrows her car toensure my safe passage. This is not quite as straightforwardas it may sound.  Cynthia, no more than 19, a young mother who has onand off been involved with my brother Monte and who willeventually have a child, my nephew Chase, with him, hadbeen shot a year before in a drive-by while she was at a party.From the waist down, she was left paralyzed. But she has acar she loans my mother, a beat-up, champagne-colored sta-tion wagon. The back windows are gone, replaced by plas-tic lining, and the whole thing smells like pee because withCynthia being mostly paralyzed, she sometimes loses con-trol of her bladder.  My mother takes me to Millikan in that car, whichinitially I deal with because, a car! But after the first day, Irealize quickly I have to make a change. Day two and I say,Drop me off here, Mommy, meaning a few blocks away fromthe school. The car we are in does not look like any of theother cars that pull up to Millikan, all gleaming and new inthe morning sun. Kids pour out of those vehicles, Mercedesand Lexuses, and run from waving parents onto the cam-pus’s greener-than-green lawn, as all at once I become famil-iar with a sudden and new feeling taking root in my spirit: ashame that goes deep, that is encompassing and defining. Irealize we are poor.  Later, as an adult, a friend will say to me, Of course youfelt that. Oppression is embarrassing, she will say quietly.But in middle school, segregated as it is, between Black andwhite kids, wealthy and poor kids, I don’t quite knowwhat to do with this feeling or the terrible question thatencircles my 12-year-old soul: Am I supposed to be embar-rassed about the people who nurtured me, who gave meto the world and gave the world to me?  I don’t fit in with the white kids who smoke weed inbetween classes in bathrooms or on the campus lawn. Idon’t fit in with the few Black girls who want to be Janet Jacksonor Whitney Houston when they grow up. I wear MC Ham-mer pants, crotch swinging low. I wear my own brand ofBlackness informed as it also is by the Mexicanness of theneighborhood I was raised in. People say I am weird, but Idon’t feel weird. I only feel like myself: a girl from Van Nuyswho loves poetry and reading and, more than anything,dancing. I am in the dance department and my dances areequal parts African, Hip Hop and Mariachi, which is alsoto say, weird.  Middle school is the first time in my life when I feel un-sure of myself. No one is calling me gifted anymore. No one,save for my dance teacher, encourages me or seems to havepatience with me. It’s in middle school that my grades dropfor the first time and that I come to believe that maybe allthat love I’d gotten in elementary school had somehow driedup, my ration run dry. At the age of 12 I am on my own, nolonger in the world as a child, as a small human, innocentand in need of support. I saw it happen to my brothers andnow it was happening to me, this moment when we becomethe thing that’s no longer adorable or cherished. The yearwe become a thing to be discarded.  For my brothers, and especially for Monte, learning thatthey did not matter, that they were expendable, began inthe streets, began while they were hanging out with friends,began while they were literally breathing while Black. Theextraordinary presence of police in our communities, a re-sult of a drug war aimed at us, despite our never using orselling drugs more than unpoliced white children, ensuredthat we all knew this. For us, law enforcement had nothingto do with protecting and serving, but controlling andcontaining the movement of children who had been labeledsuper-predators simply by virtue of who they were born toand where they were born, not because they were actuallydoing anything predatory.  I learned I didn’t matter from the very same place thatlifted me up, the place I’d found my center and voice: school.And it will not be until I am an adult, determined to achievea degree in religion, part of a long and dedicated process Iundertook to become an ordained minister, that I will en-joy school again.  A few years after I complete my degree, Dr. Monique W.Morris published her groundbreaking book, Pushout: TheCriminalization of Black Girls in Schools, demonstrating howBlack girls are rendered disposable in schools, unwanted,unloved. Twelve percent of us receive at least one suspen-sion during our school careers while our white (girl) counter-parts are suspended at a rate of 2 percent. In Wisconsinthe rate is actually 21 percent for Black girls but 2 percentfor white girls.  But having attended schools with both Black and whitegirls, one thing I learned quickly is that while we can behavein the same or very similar ways, we are almost never punishedsimilarly. In fact, in white schools, I witnessed an extraordi-nary amount of drug use compared to what my friends in myneighborhood schools experienced. And yet my friendswere the ones policed. My neighborhood friends went to schoolswhere no mass or even singular shootings occurred, butwhere police in full Kevlar patrolled the hallways, often withdrug-sniffing dogs, the very same kind that they turned onchildren in the South who demanded an end to segregation.  By the time Black Lives Matter is born, we not onlyknow that we have been rendered disposable because ofour lived experience—which few listened to—but also fromdata and finally from those terrible, viral images of Blackgirls being thrown brutally out of their seats by people whoare called School Safety Officers, for the crime of havingtheir phones out in the classroom. Monique Morris’ re-porting will tell us about the 12-year-old girl from Detroitwho is threatened with both expulsion and criminal chargesfor writing the word “Hi” on her locker door; and the onein Orlando who is also threatened with expulsion from herprivate school if she doesn’t stop wearing her hair natural.  Twelve.  And for me, too, it started the year I turned 12. Thatwas the year that I learned that being Black and poor de-fined me more than being bright and hopeful and ready. Ihad been so ready to learn. So willing.  Twelve, the moment our grades and engagement as stu-dents seem to matter less than how we can be proven to becriminals, people to be arrested.  Twelve, and childhood already gone.Twelve, and being who we are can cost us our lives.It cost Tamir Rice his life.  He was a child of 12. And the cop who shot himtook under two seconds, literally, to determine that Tamirshould die.  Tamir Rice. Twelve.Twelve, and out of time.  From When They Call You a Terrorist by Patrisse Khan-Cullors and asha bandele. Copyright 2018 by the authors and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press.

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