This post is the best parts of a 40 page letter a woman named Lisa Henry Bowen wrote to the Kansas City, Missouri School Board after a teacher slapped her son. I know it seems like the longest blog post in the world, but trust me, it is so so so worth it. I just spent a good 20 minutes trying to work out what I could cut to make it more readable, but there isn’t a single thing in here that isn’t essential.
I’m also aware of how fake this whole thing seems (The use of WordArt alone was enough for me to call bullshit) but after exhaustive investigation (i.e. 4 minutes of Googling), I’m totally convinced that it’s for realsies.
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Oh, and sorry for the blurriness of the text, but it’s worth the migraine you’ll get from straining to read it. Trust me.
OK, so the first part of the 40 page letter deals with “the incident”, which is a major snoozefest. Here’s the gist of it:
A teacher named Ms. Curry (who is white), slapped the letter writer’s black son Curtis (whose name is, apparently, copyrighted to the letter writer) and another student across the face for fighting at school. Curtis didn’t seem too bothered by this:
The next few pages are her talking about the “incident” from different perspectives. But the details remain the same: Curtis and another girl got slapped. The teacher apologised. Should be the end of story. Or maybe the teacher should get retrained or transferred or something. IDK (or care). But back to the letter:
So that you can be reminded that this blog is about a HUMAN BEING – a child, and not just the son of a crazy, racist idiot, I am going to pepper this post with photos of Curtis. (JK, I’m going to put them in here so that the islands of text don’t all just run into each other and make stuff difficult to read. And also because they’re hilarious.)
Oh oops, did I say “racist idiot”? I meant “historically and spiritually aware idiot.” Also, “…you are idiots wrapped in stupid.” HA!
OH.MY.GOD. Just to be clear, she is suing for a quarter of a million dollars, because the teacher slapped one quarter of a face that she herself valued at a million dollars. But that isn’t all she wants:
Meh, this stuff doesn’t seem too unreasonable. Well, paying restitution to the witnesses might be a bit much. And I suppose an anger management counsellor in every school would be a bit costly, but posters and job loss? I could get behind that. At least she didn’t request anything TOO crazy. Oh wait:
Actually, maybe this is a wee bit cray cray. I’m going to include the rest of her demands here in their entirety (or at least as much as I can, because the uploader of the letter cut out 14 whole pages of them), because they’re all SO GOOD. Trying to edit some out would be like Sophie’s Choice (if there’s too much for you to read here, make sure you at least look at item 3.12)
And then, once she’s done demanding stuff, she hops aboard the crazy train to rant town:
Translation: “I demand that Curtis will be educated to a level where, unlike his mum, he won’t misuse TWO commonly used phrases in a single paragraph”. Rant on:
I am willing to bet that “KISS MY ENTIRE BLACK ASS” will have entered the popular vernacular by the end of this year.
Then there’s the legal side:
This has actually gotten me a little bit worried. I know she’s obviously, completely and totally insane, but can she make me pay to use her name? She can’t, right? I half remember reading a news article about Leonardo DiCaprio copyrighting his own name or something. So Lisa, if you do see this and decide to sue me, I feel I should warn you that I charge £400,000 to respond to emails/postal correspondence. So er, bear that in mind (that should work, right?).
Anyway, on we go with more demands:
And phew, she’s done. Oh wait, one last thing, here’s a list of everyone she CC’d on this:
I bet Michelle Obama is going to be OUTRAGED by all of this (and by “outraged” I mean “rolling around on the floor, drenched in her own tears of laughter”).
You can read the whole thing here.
PS – Am I the only one who read this entire thing in this voice?
