On a warm morning in August, 2021, a black Dodge Caravan pulled up to Foxboro Elementary, in North Salt Lake, Utah, and Isabella Tichenor got out, excited for the first day of school. Isabella, who went by Izzy, was ten, and wore overalls that were fashionably pre-ripped at the knees; she loved dancing and playing four square. In a photo that her mother, Brittany, took that day, Izzy stands with her seven-year-old sister, Addison, and their six-year-old brother, Jaxson, all of them captured mid-laugh.
“It was a good day,” Brittany told me. But, about a week into the new school year, Brittany noticed that Izzy had become quiet. She asked about Izzy’s new teacher. “Mommy, I don’t think she likes me,” Izzy said. She explained that the teacher wouldn’t look at her, and that she never greeted her in the morning, as she did other students. Brittany asked if Izzy was the only Black student in the class. “I think so,” Izzy said.
Brittany had also grown up in Utah, where the Black population is less than two percent. Classmates started calling her the N-word in the first grade. She suffered from what she has come to recognize as depression, and sometimes struggled to get out of bed. When she graduated from high school, she gravitated toward work that rewarded her knack for numbers—cashier jobs, then positions in accounting. Izzy, the result of a short-lived relationship, was born in 2011; she had dramatic eyebrows and a mole on her forehead. At three or four, she began screaming inconsolably in grocery stores and other public spaces, unprovoked. At times, she was so overcome with anxiety that she couldn’t speak, and clapped her hands at Brittany, trying to get the words out. Brittany believed these were signs that Izzy was autistic.
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