Race likely played a role in the punishment handed to a Black male student who looked at a White female student. According to Fox 19, the 12-year-old boy engaged in a starring contest with the White girl in Sept. 2014 at St. Gabriel Consolidated School in Glendale, Ohio.
The girl smiled while looking at the boy, but her parents told school officials that she felt “threatened” by the boy. The next day, school officials told the boy and he immediately wrote an apology to the school and the female student. However, the boy was suspended and the school didn’t notify his parents until two days after the incident.
The boy’s parents filed a suit to have his suspension removed from his record citing that the boy didn’t have a chance at proper due process. But the Hamilton County court ruled against the boy and upheld the suspension because of “the perception” that he intimidated the White student.
The boy’s mother believes the school was biased against her son. The female student who felt she was intimidated poured milk on another student and was never reprimanded for her actions.
For hundreds of years, interracial relationships were shunned by racist Americans. Hundreds of Black men were arrested or lynched for merely looking at White women during the Jim Crow era. Emmett Till’s brutal murder made national headlines after a White woman claimed that he whistled at her while in a store.
Black males have always had to deal with the consequences of paying too much attention to White females. The young male student received a harsh lesson on race relations in America. Unfortunately, school officials and the Hamilton County court played a role in perpetuating the racist idea that Black males should never stare at White women.
