California high school students walked out of class Tuesday to demand accountability from the Santa Barbara Unified School District over its response to a blackface photo that sparked outrage.
Children from two Goleta Valley high schools, San Marcos and Dos Pueblos high schools stormed out ahead of a district board meeting.
The photo in question is one 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.
The girls were disciplined, but students and parents claimed their conduct is part of a pattern at Santa Barbara Unified School District.
Parents sat with signs decrying racism at a school board meeting on Tuesday night. Signs read things like, “Don’t be a bystander, stop ignoring racism,” and “What was the reason it took two weeks and some to notify parents?” and “racism doesn’t disappear when it’s swept under the rug.”
Most of the signs were made because of an organized protest in favor of black students and demanded action from the district.
Most of the discourse surrounded the girls’ TikTok video in which the girls are seen mimicking an AI-generated image of four young black boys in various poses.
“Meet the gc🥷🥷🥷🥷🥷🥷🥷…,” the post is captioned. The ninja emoji is known to be used as a reference to the N-word.
San Marcos High School Principal Dare Holdren previously said the students “portrayed blackface” in the post and noted the school “instituted consequences” for the girls.
Parents wondered why it took Holdren two weeks to notify them of the incident.
“Parents deserve to know,” Leticia Forney Resch, an executive director for Healing Justice Santa Barbara, said. “They had pictures and images going out to students for a week-and-a-half… Y’all didn’t do your job.”
The girls posed for the picture in an African American studies classroom. The teacher who uses the room as his classroom expressed outrage at the racism in the school.
“When black students are harmed, every student is harmed,” Abel Gonzalez, the ethnic studies teacher at San Marcos High School, said. “Black and brown students are very upset and trying to heal.”
Other racist incidents have rattled the school district in the past.
According to the Santa Barbara Independent, a San Marcos High School substitute teacher read the N-word out loud during a reading of “Of Mice and Men” last year after being told not to. The substitute was then removed from campus.
A parent said the district has just watched racism escalate.
“When a nation refuses to confront institutional and structural racism, the harm does not stay contained, it escalates,” Charlotte Gullap-Moore said. “Santa Barbara Unified has watched that escalation in its own schools.”
The local NAACP previously criticized the school for failing to establish protocols to respond to incidents of racism.
“SBUSD has struggled to establish protocols to respond to racial incidents and execute them with humanity. Principals need clear guidance; parents and students need accessible information about district investigations and potential disciplinary actions for racist incidents,” NAACP Santa Barbara President Connie Alexander wrote in an op-ed for the Santa Barbara Independent.
Even teachers say the only way the school district can remedy the situation is action.
“Doing nothing tells this community that anti-Black bias and racism is woven into the fabric of Santa Barbara schools,” Moore, speaking on behalf of Santa Barbara Unified teacher Tahnia Mark, said. “So be honest, do you really care about black students? If you don’t, just say it…Otherwise, show through action.”
