Across the top of the paper, written in large letters, was the N-word with the hard “R.”
I was supervising lunch detention at San Marcos High School when I picked it up. For a moment, I wondered if I was somehow overreacting. Then I asked myself a simple question: Who else in that room could it have been meant for?
So when I read the Santa Barbara Independent’s recent reporting on Black students describing the racism they continue to experience in Santa Barbara Unified School District, I wasn’t surprised. I was heartbroken because I believed them — not simply as an educational rights advocate, but as a former educator in the same district who experienced many of the same patterns they described…