Black Lives Still Matter

Remember, it's the people screaming about cancel culture and free speech who are doing everything they can to criminalize even saying that Black lives matter.

Two brothers, 8 and 5, were removed from their Oklahoma elementary school classrooms this past week and made to wait out the school day in a front office for wearing T-shirts that read “Black Lives Matter,” according to the boys’ mother.

The superintendent of the Ardmore, Okla., school district where the brothers, Bentlee and Rodney Herbert, attend different schools had previously told their mother, Jordan Herbert, that politics would “not be allowed at school,” Ms. Herbert recalled on Friday.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Oklahoma has called the incident a violation of the students’ First Amendment rights.

On April 30, Bentlee, who is in the third grade, went to class at Charles Evans Elementary in a Black Lives Matter shirt, which Ms. Herbert said he had picked out himself to wear.

That evening, Ms. Herbert learned that the school’s principal, Denise Brunk, had told Bentlee that he was not allowed to wear the T-shirt. At Ms. Brunk’s direction, he turned the shirt inside out and finished out the school day.

On Monday, Ms. Herbert went to the school to ask the principal what dress-code policy her son had violated, Ms. Herbert said. Ms. Brunk referred her to the Ardmore City Schools superintendent, Kim Holland.

“He told me when the George Floyd case blew up that politics will not be allowed at school,” Ms. Herbert said on Friday, referring to Mr. Holland. “I told him, once again, a ‘Black Lives Matter’ T-shirt is not politics.”

Neither Ms. Brunk nor Mr. Holland responded to emails or phone calls seeking comment on Friday.

On Tuesday, Ms. Herbert’s three sons — Bentlee; Rodney, who is in kindergarten; and Jaelon, a sixth grader, all of whom are Black — went to their schools in matching T-shirts with the words “Black Lives Matter” and an image of a clenched fist on the front.

Later that morning, Ms. Herbert received a call from Rodney’s school, Will Rogers Elementary, telling her that she needed to either bring Rodney a different shirt or let the school provide one for him, or Rodney would be forced to sit in the front office for the rest of the school day. Rodney did not change shirts, and he sat in the office until school was over.

Ms. Herbert learned later that day that Bentlee had also been made to sit in his school’s front office, where he missed recess, and did not eat lunch in the cafeteria with his classmates.

Jaelon, 12, encountered no issues at Ardmore Middle School because of his T-shirt, his mother said.

In an interview with The Daily Ardmoreite, Mr. Holland suggested that the T-shirts were disruptive.

“It’s our interpretation of not creating a disturbance in school,” Mr. Holland told the newspaper. “I don’t want my kids wearing MAGA hats or Trump shirts to school either because it just creates, in this emotionally charged environment, anxiety and issues that I don’t want our kids to deal with.”

 

So ask yourself why a kindergartener is being told by the school that Black lives mattering is "creating a disruption". Meanwhile, how many active shooter drills have kids in these schools gone through?

Pretty sad when you decide to take out revenge, and this is what it is, revenge, mind you, on a five-year-old. What's the district's policy on Confederate flag t-shirts, something that is actually disruptive and hurtful? If those are banned, why are Black lives matter t-shirts treated the same way?

 

Of course, we know the answer to that rhetorical question, and that's why Republicans are doing everything they can to banish everything but the most anodyne interpretation of American history in the name of making white folk feel better about slavery, colonization, and genocide. We have to rewrite history and gaslight our kids to keep them from learning the truth about this country's history for the last 400 years.

I got a crash course on this nearly 30 years ago in high school during the Rodney King riots. I thank my lucky stars that the student and faculty where I went to school actually confronted that and brought the entire school body together to discuss what went on, and yeah, there were people who said nothing bad happened.

But the vast majority of us were pissed off, and we all learned about out own experiences involving race from one another, white, Black, Asian, Indigenous, all of us that April and May. That shaped my life to this day.

And three decades later, a generation later, we're still having this discussion.

Black Lives Still Matter.