Outraged Black Parents Hold the School Board’s Feet to the Fire After Learning Their Sons Faced Relentless Racist Bullying at California Elementary School

A Black mother says she feels a California school district has done little to address the multiple instances of racist taunts and bullying her two young sons faced at an elementary school they were recently enrolled in.

Daphne Hawkins, the mother of a 6-year-old and 9-year-old boy, spoke to Atlanta Black Star about the incidents that took place a few months after the family moved to the suburb of Redlands, California, in August 2024 and enrolled their sons in Mariposa Elementary School.

In December, Hawkins said she was looking through her first-grader’s school assignments when she found a coloring assignment featuring a blackface caricature.

Her son told her that his teacher taught the class about Christmas in Denmark and the Dutch representation of Santa Claus known as “Sinterklaas.”

In the folktale, Sinterklaas is often accompanied by a helper known as “Black Pete,” who gives good kids sweets and naughty kids coal. The character is depicted in blackface with an afro wig and red lips, and every Christmas holiday, white Dutch citizens will sport these features as a costume while giving out sweets to children during holiday parades and festivities.

The folktale has faced condemnation across the world in recent years for the character’s racist and stereotypical representation of Black people.

Hawkins said her son was instructed to color in the Black Pete caricature on the assignment. In response, she and her husband assigned him a lesson on Christmas in Ghana, and he delivered a teacher-approved presentation to his classmates that exposed them to holiday celebrations in another part of the world.

But at the start of the spring semester, Hawkins learned her 9-year-old son, who is the only Black student in his class, began encountering discriminatory behavior from his classmates.

In January, a classmate passed him a note saying, “Your skin is as black as your future.” The principal met with the offending student and his parents, but when Hawkins requested a meeting with the classmate’s parents, she said the principal advised against it.

Three weeks later, he complimented one of his classmates on her sense of humor, saying she should be in a comedy show. That classmate responded, “You should be in a comedy show because you look like a black African monkey.”

The school responded promptly to the incident by contacting Hawkins and her husband. The couple then met with the principal and the school district’s DEI coordinator, who promised to start conducting training for all students and staff members.

However, the district staff who led the training sessions only taught the students about the importance of kindness, with no specific language on racism or what discriminatory behavior looks like and how to avoid it.

According to state education data, Mariposa has 435 students enrolled, 45.3 percent of whom are white, 31.5 percent are Latino, 10.1 percent are Asian, and only 1.6 percent are Black.

Frustrated by the school’s insufficient responses, the Hawkinses started a social media campaign to notify parents in the school community about the racist incidents, arguing that the district was failing its mission to prepare “students to become productive participants in a diverse, multi-cultural, democratic society.”

Parents were encouraged to send letters to the school district demanding anti-racism training for faculty and students and an investigation into the incidents.

The Hawkins received nearly 300 letters of support, including from the local and state NAACP, state Sen. Eloise Gomez Reyes, and other civil organizations. They also received dozens of calls from parents of students of color who talked about the racist experiences their children suffered at other schools in the district.

More than 150 people showed up at a March 11 board meeting to support the Hawkinses, who were outspoken to board members about the discrimination.

“Our children deserve better, and, let’s be clear, these are not just words, these are attacks on our children’s dignity and their identity,” Daphne Hawkins told board members.

“We moved here because we thought it was safe. We thought our neighborhood was safe. We thought the community was safe and that our kids would have a better opportunity in life. We didn’t realize we would get here and they would have to draw blackface characters,” Channing Hawkins said.

Daphne Hawkins said that the school board pledged to read and reinstate a 2020 resolution declaring racism a public health crisis that the district adopted following the murder of George Floyd. Board members skipped the reading at the March 11 board meeting but promised the family they would update the resolution’s language, then read it at their March 21 meeting.

Hawkins showed up at that meeting and discovered the resolution wasn’t on the agenda.

With the desire to effect transformational change within the district, the family has demanded a full investigation into these racist incidents with transparency and accountability, proper allocation of funding to address the needs of Black students in the Redlands Unified School District, mandatory, zero-tolerance, anti-racism training for all staff and students, a district-wide reporting and accountability system to track how racist incidents are handled, and a strategic plan on addressing racism in the district by the end of 2025.

School board members have pledged to conduct ongoing racial and cultural sensitivity training and raise student awareness.

“I’m not here saying that that is enough. What I am here saying is that we are not going to tolerate this kind of behavior, and we did take immediate action when we were aware of it,” Superintendent Juan Cabral said earlier this month. “The bottom line is that it’s not OK for our kids to participate in any kind of hate speech or make each other feel in any way less than, and we’re going to do everything that we can to teach them that it’s not OK and that they need to act better.”

So far, Hawkins said the district has launched an investigation and offered optional training for students and staff members.

However, these incidents have yet to stop.

Earlier this month, a second-grade student asked Hawkins’ 6-year-old son if he ate dog poop because his skin was the color of dog poop.

The Hawkinses said the discrimination and the school’s limited actions are enough to make the family consider withdrawing their sons from the district.

“I don’t feel like Redlands SD is equipped to serve communities of color, in particular Black kids,” Daphne Hawkins told Atlanta Black Star. “I don’t feel like they have the concerns or conviction to support children of color.”