Investigation into Discrimination Against Black Students in Texas Schools Continues Under Trump
It is no secret that one of the main focuses of President Donald Trump’s second term has been dismantling the Department of Education and removing the protection of black and brown students under the cover of discrimination. Thanks to the ongoing investigation, black students in several Texas schools have endured intense racism without negative consequences.
According to the Washington Post, black students in Lubbock, Texas, reported experiencing racist behavior from both students and school officials. One black student reported being called the “b–ch ass” N-word during a high school football game, and another was punished for having a vape pen when it was actually a pencil sharpener. “They’re breaking people,” Phyllis Gant, Lubbock’s longtime NAACP leader, told the Washington Post. “It’s open season on our students.”
Sadly, these events are hardly surprising, as the racist speech was so severe that the Department of Education’s Office of Human Rights (OCR) launched an investigation into the Lubbock-Cooper school district in 2023. An OCR investigator was scheduled to visit the site earlier this year, giving parents hope that the federal government will act to protect their children. After Trump took office, the Department of Education closed 12 OCR offices, including the one in Dallas that was investigating the incidents. As a result, the visit did not take place.
“In many of our communities, where people feel isolated and like they have no one to turn to, OCR is important and gives people hope,” Paige Duggins-Clay, an attorney for the Intercultural Development Research Association, an education and legal group that has helped file some of the civil rights complaints against Lubbock schools, told the Washington Post. “And it’s important that they destroy it.”
One of the most tragic incidents involved 12-year-old Ja’Maury, who faced severe disciplinary action after news spread that he had sexually assaulted a white student.
Response from the Washington Post:
Last December, Ja’Maury, then 12 years old, whose last name is withheld because he was young, heard rumors that he touched a white girl’s breast while at school. He went to the management of the school, McCool Academy, to tell them the truth. But the assistant principal believed the girl and alerted the police officer, who asked Ja’Maury questions and threatened to arrest her unless she agreed, according to Ja’Maury and her grandfather Mike Anzley.
Alone in the seniors’ room, Ja’Maury broke down and admitted that something he said never happened.
“He was yelling and threatening to send me to juvie if I didn’t say I did it. I was scared,” Ja’Maury recalled in an interview. “It was a white man’s voice against a black man’s voice.”
The year is 2025, white people are still lying about the young, Black boys are eating white girls. Yet because of Trump’s war on “illegal DEI,” white people are the real victims, not students like Ja’maury.
Ja’maury was sentenced to 30 days at Priority Intervention Academy, a detention school in the Lubbock Independent School District, where students are sent when their actions are deemed too severe to avoid traditional disciplinary action. Anzley said Ja’maury became anxious and wet her panties twice at school when a teacher refused to let her use the bathroom.
“He had never been in trouble before,” Anzley told the Washington Post. He had taught Ja’Maury to trust adults and was devastated when school officials betrayed that trust. I had to make him distinguish between right and wrong in a new way.”
Anzley filed a complaint with the school district, which resulted in the school apologizing, the incident being expunged from Ja’Maury’s record, school administrators and the officer investigating him were disciplined.
Under Trump’s second administration, the Department of Education has scrapped thousands of civil rights investigations, focusing instead on making life harder for trans children and investigating policies it sees as discriminatory against white students.
Julie Hartman, legal affairs secretary at the Department of Education, defended the Trump administration’s approach and tried to blame the Biden administration. “These racial profiling complaints were filed in 2022 and 2023, which means the Biden Administration had more time to investigate this than the Trump Administration has. The Trump Administration’s OCR will continue to enforce the law to respect all the rights of Americans,” Hartman told the Washington Post.
One thing I quickly picked up on is that “all Americans” is just a synonym for the Trump administration for white people. Exacerbating the lack of federal support are laws passed by the Texas state legislature that ban DEI programs in K-12 schools. At both the state and county levels, the message is loud and clear: Texas doesn’t care about Black students.
BREAKFUT:
Understanding the Civil Rights Reduction of the Department of Education
Trump Administration Begins to Cut Department of Education
