Students and advocates packed into a Santa Barbara Unified School District board meeting Tuesday night, signs in hand, to speak out against the treatment of Black students and the district’s response to racist incidents.
This time public outrage was over a recent viral post in which a group of San Marcos High School female students artificially darkened their skin to recreate an image of four Black children in matching school uniforms.
Students at San Marcos and Dos Pueblos high schools held a walkout earlier that day to raise awareness and get more people to attend the school board meeting.
Nahsia Darcus, president of the Black Student Union, said the school district handled the blackface post “horribly” and demanded harsher consequences for racist actions.
“Instead of making your Black students feel safe, you have made us aware that we cannot trust you,” Darcus said. “Because of this, I’m demanding that there is actual consequences that are going to be placed into the system after today, ones that are strict and don’t allow those who commit racist deeds to leave school knowing that nothing will happen.”
At the time the incident became public, the district said it would be handled through an “established student discipline process” and officials would not be sharing specific consequences to protect student privacy.
Leticia Forney Resch, co-executive director of Healing Justice Santa Barbara, said the district failed Black students as it took two weeks for the principal to notify parents. She added that if local organizations knew, they could have provided resources to support students.
“We didn’t even have anything prepared for them, we could have provided them with support,” Forney Resch said. “Y’all didn’t do your job. Do better.”
She also noted that when her son was a student at Dos Pueblos High School and there were swastikas drawn on campus, the school emailed parents and had an assembly.
Charlotte A. Gullap-Moore, a Santa Barbara City College trustee, spoke about the harmful history of blackface.
“Blackface was created to recast black people whose labor built this nation as lazy, foolish and child-like,” Gallup-Moore said. “That lie became the foundation for the Jim Crow laws that stripped black Americans of their civil rights.”
She also claimed that the students who posted the image did so to spread hate and it was not just a prank or lapse of judgement.
The photo depicting San Marcos students in blackface was apparently taken in a History of Africans in America class, taught by Abel Gonzalez, who was not at school the day it was taken. He didn’t even learn about the incident until administrators showed up to his class to talk to students.
When he spoke at Tuesday’s meeting, he said it was the first time he’s spoken to the board and district leadership about the incident.
“It’s been years with these racist incidents, and as an Afro-Latino teacher and previous SB Unified student, I’m offended that you don’t care about me and my people,” Gonzalez said. “I know you don’t care because you guys keep letting it happen and don’t fix it. This is how you get rid of teachers like me.”
Gonzalez told Noozhawk that it’s been an “ongoing process” trying to repair the classroom after the incident.
“I’m trying to continue to educate the youth and just talk about Black culture and talk about the history of Black culture and trying to keep it positive,” Gonzalez said. “Talk about all the good things and the hard times that we’ve kind of been through while keeping it open for dialogue.”
Maile Schoonover, the communications manager for The Fund for Santa Barbara, noted that this is just the latest racist incident in the district. She shared previous reports of racial slurs directed towards Black students and teachers, a substitute teacher using the N-word in class, and “monkey noises” directed towards students in the hallway.
“These are not isolated incidents, but reflect a disturbing pattern of anti-Black racism, which is the responsibility of this district to interrupt,” Schoonover said.
York Shingle, president of the Santa Barbara Teachers Union, blamed Superintendent Hilda Maldonado for the lack of change in the district. Specifically Shingle claimed that she’ll continue her typical response of meeting with student leaders and then nothing will happen.
“The classic Hilda move of isolate, placate, and manipulate without any actual changes,” Shingle said. “This is going to be the case until we get a new leader who is actually strong enough to make changes in this district.”
Maldonado addressed the incident before public comment at the school board meeting on Tuesday, condemning the post and acknowledging that it represents a deeper issue of racism and exclusion.
“I want our high schools and all schools to be places where students know they belong and where people are willing to step up when someone is being harmed,” Maldonado said. “We will not build that kind of community through one assembly, lesson, or one statement. We build it through the choices we make every day in our classrooms, in our friendships, in our conversations, and in the 21st century, online.”
The school board is set to talk more about this issue at the next board meeting on Oct. 27.
