In April 2019, school employees at Pearland Independent School in Texas allegedly used a black Sharpie to color in the design shaved into a 13-year-old black student’s haircut. Not one, but three white school officials decided this was an appropriate action to take, defending themselves with the logic that the boy’s hairstyle didn’t adhere to the district’s dress code.
Probably surprising no one, the school district is now facing a federal civil rights lawsuit filed by the student’s parents. They’re seeking declaratory judgment, injunctive relief, and monetary damages.
"I was mad. I was really mad," Dante Trice, the child’s father, stated as reported by KHOU. "I just imagine three people holding him down with a marker against his will."
According to the teenager, who is identified in the suit as J.T., school officials told him that either his fade had to be colored in with a Sharpie or he could enter in-school suspension. The suspension, by the way, would require him to miss class and jeopardize his spot on the school’s track team. The complaint notes that though the school had his parent’s contact information on file, they did not reach out to his family during this fiasco.
The three school officials included discipline clerk Helen Day, teacher Jeanette Peterson, and former assistant principal Tony Barcelona. And lest you think that last person has been fired, they’ve actually been promoted to head principal since the incident. According to the complaint, the teacher and discipline clerk laughed while they colored on the student’s scalp.
"The haircut did not depict anything violent, gang-related, obscene or otherwise offensive or inappropriate in any manner. J.T. did not believe the haircut violated any school policy," the lawsuit states. Mind you, even if the fade had depicted something inappropriate, this still wouldn’t have been the right way to handle it. But no, it was just a totally appropriate, normal haircut.
What was the school’s actual hairstyle policy? Full of racially coded language, that’s what.
The school’s code at the time stated that “hair must be neat, clean and well-groomed. Extreme hair styles such as carvings, mohawks, spikes, etc. are not allowed,” according to KHOU.
It’s important to keep a few things in mind when considering this situation. First of all, black students—and especially young black men—are more likely to be disciplined and suspended than their white peers. Black hair, in particular, has importance here, too. Longheld beauty norms that are wrapped up in white supremacy suggest that black hair (including, for example, natural texture) and styles suited to black hair (such as locks and twists) are not as “clean” or “appropriate” as Eurocentric styles, such as using a straightening iron. As is the case with J.T. here, when white supremacy is the basis for rules and regulations, it leads to students of color being more policed and penalized.
In the end, the marker didn’t do anything to “cover” up the hairstyle. In fact, it’s pretty ridiculous to suggest that coloring on someone’s scalp (aside from it being assault) would do so, which makes the entire thing feel more like a humiliation tactic and punishment than an earnest effort to “right” a dress code violation.
“The jet-black markings did not cover the haircut design line but made the design more prominent and such was obvious to those present at the very beginning of the scalp blackening process,” the complaint reads. No surprise there!
“When it first happened, I was very upset because I didn’t find out until after he got off the bus and he got into the car and said, ‘Look what they did to my head,’” KTRK reports that J.T.’s mother, Angela Washington, said of the incident.
J.T. suffered from depression and anxiety after the incident, according to the suit. He was made fun of by his peers, including being called a “thug.” His classmates even made memes about him. The Sharpie ink, by the way, stayed on his scalp for days.
Pearland ISD released a statement noting: “A campus administrator mishandled disciplinary action by giving the student options including notifying his mother, disciplinary consequences or filling in the shape of the hair carving with a marker. This latter practice is not condoned by the district and does not align with appropriate measures for dress code violations.”
The school has since updated its dress code. What that doesn’t absolve, however, is a seventh-grader’s trauma.