A California middle schooler was banned from school sports after school officials decided that his over-exuberant use of football eye blacking paint was an example of racist “black face.”
The school acted after someone snapped a photo of the eighth-grader — only identified as J.A. — taken on October 13 at a high school football game between La Jolla High School and Morse High School. In the photo, the Caucasian boy is seen with black paint covering his cheeks and chin, leaving his proper skin tone only visible for his mouth, nose, eyes, and forehead, the New York Post reported.
But a week after the game, the boy’s principal at Muirland Middle School called the family and told them he was being punished for using blackface.
The teen and his parents say that the wild paint job was a joke and was in no way a racial statement. They even claim that a black security guard joked about the coloring and told them to add even more to the boy’s face. But their claims were brushed aside.
They were told that the boy was barred from attending any sporting events at the school district.
According to the official notice sent to the family, the boy “painted his face black at a football game,” an act they claim was an “offensive comment, intent to harm.”
Principal Jeff Luna added that the paint was offensive because Morse High School, one of the teams playing at the game the boy was attending, is a “largely black” school.
However, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) calls the punishment an absurd overreaction and demands a reversal of the school’s decision. FIRE also calls the school’s move a violation of the boy’s First Amendment rights.
Football on the ground, held by a player wearing gloves on the field. (Bernhard Lang/Getty Images)
“As the First Amendment protects J.A.’s non-disruptive expression of team spirit via a style commonly used by athletes and fans — notwithstanding your inaccurate description of it as ‘blackface’ — FIRE calls on the school to remove the infraction from J.A.’s disciplinary record and lift the ban on his attendance at future athletic events, said Aaron Terr, the group’s director of public advocacy, in a statement.
FIRE adds that the boy’s eye blacking “emulated the style of eye black worn by many athletes” and that “such use of eye black began as a way to reduce glare during games, but long ago evolved into ‘miniature billboards for personal messages and war-paint slatherings.”
This, FIRE said, is a very different history than that of black face, which they describe as “dark makeup worn to mimic the appearance of a Black person and especially to mock or ridicule Black people.”
“It has its origins in racist minstrel shows that featured white actors caricaturing Black people, and generally entails covering the entire face in dark makeup and exaggerating certain facial features,” Terr added in his statement.
The boy’s paint, though, was nothing like racist black face, Terr added.
“By contrast, J.A. followed a popular warpaint-inspired trend of athletes applying large amounts of eye black under their eyes, which has no racial connotations whatsoever,” the FIRE statement said.
FIRE added that the boy wore the face paint throughout the game without incident.
“There is no evidence J.A.’s face paint caused a disruption — let alone a material and substantial one — at the football game or at school afterward,” the group exclaimed.
“The complete lack of disruption is unsurprising, as the sight of fans in face paint is familiar to and expected by anyone who has ever attended a football game or other sporting event,” they concluded.
FIRE is threatening a lawsuit unless the school replies by November 22 to its demand to reverse the suspension.
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