A 15-year-old in South Carolina is suing her college district for violating her civil rights after a instructor assaulted her within the hallway for refusing to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
Marissa Barnwell, a Black honor roll pupil at River Bluff Excessive Faculty, was strolling to her classroom on November 29, 2022 — her birthday — when a teacher, Nicole Livingston, grabbed her and held her against a wall whereas the pledge was being recited.
Livingston, whom Barnwell doesn’t have a category with, demanded that Barnwell cease strolling and acknowledge the pledge, in accordance with the lawsuit, which lists the instructor and the state Division of Schooling as co-defendants. Livingston then despatched Barnwell to the principal’s workplace to face additional self-discipline.
Though different college students had been strolling within the hallway and never reciting the pledge, Barnwell was the one pupil focused, the lawsuit notes. Barnwell was the only Black student in the hallway, and the college is predominately white.
After discussing the scenario with Barnwell, the principal determined towards punishing her and agreed to look at safety digital camera footage of the assault. Barnwell’s mom later referred to as the college, in tears, after studying that her daughter had been focused.
Since then, no motion has been taken, regardless of Barnwell and her dad and mom repeatedly calling for the college to take disciplinary measures towards the instructor.
“Nobody has apologized, nobody has acknowledged my harm. … The truth that the college is defending that type of habits is unimaginable,” Barnwell said at a press conference last week.
The college, the instructor, the principal and the district have but to subject a proper apology. Solely after the lawsuit was filed did the principal name the Barnwell household.
That decision “ought to have been performed proper after the incident” occurred, Barnwell’s father said.
At a January 10 college board assembly, Barnwell and her dad and mom pleaded with the district to self-discipline the instructor for her motion months prior — however the district refused to behave, the household notes within the lawsuit.
“I really feel like one thing ought to have occurred to the instructor, and the instructor ought to have been dealt with appropriately, the place she is both arrested or fired,” Barnwell told The New York Times. “However nothing like that’s occurred and he or she nonetheless works there.”
The First Modification of the U.S. Structure protects People’ proper to not partake within the Pledge of Allegiance, and the state of South Carolina has legal guidelines saying that students do not have to participate in the pledge so long as their resolution to abstain doesn’t forestall others from selecting to take part.
Barnwell and her household word within the lawsuit that she hasn’t recited the pledge since she was in third grade, when she realized that the precept of “liberty and justice for all” shouldn’t be utilized to everybody in america. Barnwell has mentioned that she was impressed partly by NFL participant Colin Kaepernick, who protested police brutality and racial injustice by kneeling throughout the Nationwide Anthem at video games. She was additionally impressed to “[stand] up for Black folks” by the 2020 uprisings in response to the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others, she told The Times.
In fifth grade, a instructor from Barnwell’s elementary college called her parents to inform them that she was not participating within the pledge. Barnwell’s dad and mom informed the instructor that they wouldn’t drive her to do one thing she didn’t agree with, and the scenario didn’t escalate additional.
Data from an American Psychological Association study in 2021 reveals that Black youngsters in faculties throughout the U.S. are sometimes topic to a lot harsher self-discipline than their white counterparts, even over minor infractions like gown code violations. The examine discovered that 26 p.c of Black college students who engaged in a minor college code offense had been issued at the very least one suspension for doing so, in comparison with simply 2 p.c of white college students.
The Pledge of Allegiance has traditionally been used as a weapon to sentence those that don’t take part as unpatriotic. Nativists and white supremacists have additionally used the pledge to assault folks they deem “un-American” based mostly on race or immigration standing.
There are myriad examples of Black college students being assaulted or subjected to self-discipline for his or her refusal to take part within the pledge.
In July 2019, a guard on the Virginia statehouse aggressively grabbed a Black teen and forced him to stand up when a legislative chamber started studying the pledge; in October 2020, an 11-year-old Black pupil in Florida was suspended from school for three days and arrested when he refused to recite the pledge and referred to as the U.S. flag racist; and in fall of 2017, white college students in Alabama threatened to lynch Black students who were speaking out against racism in the U.S after one other white pupil on the college was disciplined for utilizing abusive language towards a Black pupil who didn’t recite the pledge.
In an op-ed for EdWeek in the fall of 2021, Richard O. Welsh, a professor of schooling and public coverage at Peabody School of Vanderbilt College, famous that disparities in disciplinary motion towards Black college students versus their white counterparts are, “in some ways, byproducts of bigger points in Okay–12 education, reminiscent of an absence of workforce variety, weak classroom administration, and shortfalls within the cultural functionality of lecturers.”
“Given this, there isn’t any silver bullet,” Welsh wrote. “As an alternative, strategic coordination of assorted different approaches to exclusionary self-discipline is important, as these levers work in tandem to dismantle disparities. Insurance policies prohibiting suspensions for much less extreme offenses, for instance, will be coupled with a school-based program reminiscent of Restorative Practices and augmented by skilled growth on classroom administration and culturally responsive practices for lecturers and faculty leaders.”
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