After a lesson on Martin Luther King Jr. at a southern California elementary school, a seven -year-old white girl drew a picture with four blobs in different colors -- meant to be her friends -- and wrote "Black Lives Mater" and "any life" on the picture. She gave it to a black friend.
When the friend's mother asked why her daughter had been singled out for her race, the principal, Jesus Becerra, made the artist, "B.B.," apologize for an "inappropriate" and "racist" drawing. Teachers banned her from recess and drawing for two weeks.
The parents, who found out a year later, lost their lawsuit against the Capistrano Unified School District. First-graders don't have First Amendment rights, ruled District Court Judge David Carter. An elementary school is "not a 'marketplace of ideas'."
The ruling conceded that B.B. was "innocent" of any intent to hurt her friend's feelings, but said that didn't matter. The court would not second guess the principal's decision that the drawing constituted harassment and interfered with the other girl's right to be "let alone." After all, the judge wrote, "Students have the right to be free from speech that denigrates their race while at school."
B.B's parents, who moved their children to a different school and then to a different state, are appealing, writes Brittany Hunter for the Pacific Legal Foundation, which is on the case.
I'm not a constitutional scholar, but Eugene Volokh is. "This seems to me unconstitutional, even in first grade," he writes on Reason.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the Tinker case that a student's speech is protected unless it "materially disrupts classwork," which this did not.
This ruling strips the first grader's drawing of First Amendment protection because it "can be seen" as "dissenting from what some see as the only proper response to racial problems," writes Volokh, a UCLA law professor. Punishing students for unorthodox views clashes with Tinker's conclusion: "In our system, state-operated schools may not be enclaves of totalitarianism."
Of course, even the slightest smidgeon of common sense would have prevented the whole thing. I think "do nothing" would have been the principal's smartest strategy. Maybe, he could have told the teacher that first graders are not ready to understand why it's not OK to say "all lives matter." (Some adults find the argument challenging.)
By all means, let's punish this poor first grader for having the temerity to say "all lives matter." Can't have attitudes like that in our schools.
Black lives matter...to everyone except black people.