‘Take u like they did Emmett Till’: Black teen threatened in his new Missouri town
Tiffaney Whitt is a single Black mother of seven sons. She moved from Kansas City to Kearney last year for more room and because she saw Kearney as a good school district. But since then, the family has received death threats, has had maggots placed in their mailbox and has been called racial slurs on more than one occasion.
Whitt has pulled her children from Kearney schools. After her 15-year-old reported that one fellow student at Kearney Jr. High had written the n-word on a class project and another student had called him the slur, Whitt’s son was accused of inappropriately touching a female student.
The school is investigating whether he violated the district’s anti-harassment, discrimination and retaliation policy by touching another student’s buttocks. He was only trying to hug a white girl he thought of as a friend in the school hallway, he told his mother.
Threats followed. An investigation into the school incident continued this week.
An anonymous threat referenced Emmett Till, and one message directed to him on May 24 was alarming enough that Kearney police opened an investigation that’s still going on.
“Nigger U weak,” the Snapchat message read. “Touching (name redacted) I am going to pull up at yo house and shoot u nigger u weak asf bitch ass nigga if I see u I am going to kill u for touching get it’s a group of (us) who going to pull and take u like they did Emmett till.” Two cry-laughing emojis followed.
District officials have mishandled the whole situation, Whitt said.
Students weren’t immediately disciplined after her son reported being called the n-word twice. “People don’t understand how traumatizing that word can be,” she said.
Suspensions were eventually handed out, Whitt was told. But complaints to district leaders were followed by a claim against her child.
School officials were prohibited from commenting on specific allegations, a spokesman for the Kearney School District wrote in a statement.
“The district does not respond publicly to situations that involve potential or actual litigation,” the statement read. “Responses in those cases will be done through the court system.”
In case district leaders need a refresher course on their own policy, retaliation against people who participate in harassment or discrimination investigations is prohibited in Kearney schools.
Video shows assault accusation unfounded
School administrators threatened an in-school suspension before the harassment investigation was complete, Whitt said. She pulled her son from the school and filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights as a result.
In the complaint, she accuses the school district of discrimination and retaliation. She wants the district to develop a robust policy to weed out discriminatory behavior.
Whitt filed the claim after a review of surveillance video found no evidence of sexual harassment or assault committed by her child. She sat with assistant superintendent Jeff Morrison to view the footage.
“The video clearly shows my son pointing at the young woman’s back,” Whitt said. She wrote a letter to Morrison voicing her displeasure with the investigation.
“In observing the footage I did not see my son touch this girl’s buttocks,” Whitt wrote. “There is one point in the footage where he walked around her and points at the back of her shirt. You stated that that is when he touched her buttocks. You played it over and over and I told you that he was pointing at something on the back of her shirt. The other student in the video does the same thing.”
Morrison didn’t reply to the email.
“You all rendered discipline in the midst of an ongoing investigation,” Whitt continued. “It’s innocent until proven guilty, not guilty until proven innocent. This speaks to the culture of Kearney School District and how you have not checked your implicit biases nor do you have a willingness to educate yourselves or your staff to be culturally responsive.”
Kearney’s diversity, equity and inclusion initiative is in the early planning stages. A zero-tolerance policy explicitly against racially motivated speech and behavior would add a layer of consequences for bigoted actions. Mandatory diversity and cultural sensitivity training is a good idea as well.
‘Kearney is becoming a (n-word)-loving town’
Whitt fears for the lives of her children. And who could blame her?
The threat was all too real for one of the few Black families in Kearney, whose population in 2019 was 92.8% white and just 0.3% Black, according to the U.S. Census. Jeremiah Parker, Whitt’s oldest son, was called a racial slur at least three times in one year. Jeremiah, 17, recently completed his first year at Kearney High School. His presence in town wasn’t well-received.
“Kearney is becoming a (n-word)-loving town,” a co-worker at a local fast food restaurant told Jeremiah his first week on the job.
Parker was called the n-word three times since the family moved to Kearney last May, and he’s heard the derogatory term at school too many times to count.
“I’ve been called it so many times, it doesn’t bother me,” Jeremiah said. But it should. No one should ever normalize being called the n-word or any other hateful slur.
