As I Just Said about Hoaxes

This was the story I wanted you to notice.  (Update:  I had not yet read Richard Johnson's comment.) It was too convenient. The sixth-grade boys did not attack the girl. But it would have been so cool if they did, because not only does Mike Pence's wife work there, but it's a private Christian school. Tough when reality doesn't work out for you like that.

So right off the bat, the sixth-grade boys were carrying scissors out to recess in a coordinated effort to cut the girls hair?  Then they waited all recess, accurately timing until just before the bell to jump her, cut a little hair and insult her, then run off laughing just as the bell rang? Really? Do you know any sixth-grade boys? Next, Sixth grade boys don't think in the large abstractions necessary to insult someone by saying "You should never have been born." It is possible, certainly, that one of them could have heard an older person use that insult, or sometimes a certain insult will make the rounds in an area and drop down as far as the sixth graders, but sixth-graders don't think like that. That they said her hair was nappy was also possible, but unlikely.  Calling it ugly was always possible.  That is something sixth-grade boys might say.

Also, grandmother takes this story to the news. Red flag. Parents and guardians with legitimate gripes can eventually do such things, but usually they exhaust the possibilities with the school first - or the school doubles down in some way to signal that they aren't going to listen.  Those things are possible.  They do happen.  But when that is bypassed it's a bad sign.

It is also possible that they have been teasing her since school started and she based a dramatic lie off that truth. We apparently aren't going to get details if that's true. I'm guessing not. The statements released by the school and the hoaxer's family suggest otherwise, but those were carefully planned statements, designed that there be no leakage.

This sounds like a sad little girl in the custody of her grandmother who feels ugly and that her blackness is unwelcome and has wished at times she had never been born, so she puts that off on others in accusation.  Victimhood was the solution that occurred to her.  That is not new.  I remember kids at school and camp embracing victimhood. Heck, I tended that way myself in childish romantic relationships.  Self-pity can be powerful, and is not uncommon at that age.  I think we do worry that the victimhood solution is more common now, and adults are more ready to believe it without looking at it closely.