Due Partly to Low Grades and Trouble With the Law
Fifteen-year-old Anthony Stokes has less than six months to live unless he receives an emergency heart transplant.
ATLANTA —
A 15-year-old boy in DeKalb County is in desperate need of a heart transplant but doctors say he doesn’t qualify for the transplant list.
Anthony Stokes is receiving treatment at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta at Egleston.
Doctors have told his family that Anthony has less than six months to live, but he can’t be put on the transplant list because of a history of non-compliance.
“They said they don’t have any evidence that he would take his medicine or that he would go to his follow-ups,” said Melencia Hamilton, Anthony’s mother.
Regardless of Anthony’s specific past, his story fits into a larger pattern of racially-motivated skepticism about young black men. The routine criminalization of black youth — thanks in large part to the so-called “ school-to-prison pipeline,” which funnels a disproportionate number of black teens into the justice system for minor infractions — ensures that teens like Anthony are often seen as threats. And once society labels those kids as criminal, suspect, or “non-compliant,” their lives are typically considered to have less value.
This America where a 15 year old can be denied a heart transplant (Well) because he acts like a 15 year old.