Yet another story about a young black girl being targeted in school for her hair. Remember that seven-year-old girl from Milwaukee who was playing with her braid in class whose annoyed teacher grabbed this scissors and snipped it?
This time it’s an 8-year-old honor student at Thurgood Marshall Elementary School in Seattle. Apparently, the little girl had Organic Root Stimulator Olive Oil Moisturizing Hair Lotion in her hair and the scent of the product was too much for her teacher to handle, so she kicked the girl out of the class.
Her parents are rightfully steaming. According to The Seattle Times, her father, Charles Mudede, wanted to know why his daughter, the only black child in her advanced-placement class, was made to leave her classroom and stand out in the hallway. Why was she then moved to another class? Why didn’t the school call the parents?
Mudede also says that he has talked with his daughter about valuing the way she looks and about resisting pressures to straighten her hair with products in an effort to look more like her white classmates.
“I want her to know she’s beautiful,” he said to The Seattle Times. Mudede writes for The Stranger and expresses more about the incident with his daughter here. He notes that this story is definitely about race since the teacher was white and his daughter is black. He also notes that his daughter’s mother is also white.
The Organic Root Stimulator product she was wearing when she was removed from the class was a compromise, he said, something light that kept her hair in its natural state.
“It was a very serious thing to our family,” he said, recalling incidents in his own youth that made him feel like an outsider because of his race.
The situation has since escalated because, according to Mudede, no one at the school would answer his questions about what happened. The family has recently engaged an attorney and the NAACP announced that they would file a complaint about the situation with the U.S. Department of Education.
“We’re certainly concerned about the incident and are looking into it,” district spokeswoman Teresa Wippel said Friday. “Because it’s been elevated to a legal issue, we can’t really talk about it.”
Parents, has your child ever been negatively targeted in school for what you believe were racial reasons? What did you do?
