Product Placement
I have been rocking my natural hair for several years and there are some questions I get sick and tired of hearing: Is that your real hair? How do you get your hair to curl like that? Are you mixed? I could go on forever. But there’s one question that actually makes me smile: What products do you use? Your hair smells so good!
Unfortunately, that’s not the reaction an 8-year-old biracial Seattle girl received from her teaching while wearing Organic Root Stimulator Olive Oil Moisturizing Hair Lotion.
Charles Mudede, the girl’s father, told The Seattle Times, that his daughter, the only black child in her honors class at Seattle’s Thurgood Marshall Elementary School, came home from school last month and announced her teacher made her leave the classroom because the girl’s hair was making the teacher sick. The girl was moved to the hallway, then another class.
Mudede was left with many perplexing questions:
Why did the teacher think the problem was his daughter’s hair? Why hadn’t the school called the parents? How could the girl return to her own class if they didn’t first figure out what had made the teacher sick?
What investigation was being done to pinpoint the source of the problem? And, finally, why did the school seem oblivious to the racial overtones of a white teacher singling out her only black student?
On Friday, the NAACP announced it would file a complaint about the situation with the U.S. Department of Education. The Seattle Times reports that
Mudede seemed surprised the situation had reached the point where there was talk of a lawsuit. He just wants answers.
Mudede, who is black, said he has talked with his daughter about valuing her natural beauty and resisting pressures to straighten her hair in an effort to look more like her white classmates.
“I want her to know she’s beautiful,” he told The Seattle Times.
I get having severe allergies. Really, I do. But how can a teacher be so insensitive to the feelings of a student to do something like this? Think of the message this incident will send to this little girl or the embarrassment she must have felt, especially considering she’s the only student of color in the class.
How do you think this situation should have been handled?
Below is KING-5’s report on the incident.
Come on now, there are a million ways that could have been handled without singling her out like that.
I hope there are repercussions. Whether this was racially motivated or not it’s extremely stupid and hurtful for the student.
Not only should she get back into school, she should be able to get back into that honors class.
This is ridiculous. If the teacher had a problem, she should have talked to the student and the principal privately about a solution, not kick the girl out of class.
Also, isn’t it ironic that this happened at Thurgood Marshall school?
And just setting aside the obvious racial undertones, what kind of teacher singles out a student for “smelling” in front of a classroom? That teacher is either willfully oblivious or cruel.
That racist “teacher” with the imaginary “allergy” to Black girls hair needs to be
1) fired
and
2) stripped of her license to teach in the State of Washington.
Bigots like that have no business in front of a classroom!
I do believe it’s possible that the teacher is allergic to the hair product, but as an educator, I can think of a dozen better ways the situation could have been handled.
imaginary “allergy”
The product the student used has peanut oil in it.
You know, peanuts, which can’t be used in any shape or form in most public school lunches now because of acute anaphylactic shock among allergic students?
Again, for me, I’m not questioning whether or not the teacher had an allergy, especially since a letter was sent home to parents stating that she did. I do wonder, however, how she knew it was the hair product that was making her sick, especially since the news reports indicate that the girl had been using the product all year. Even if she was in fact allergic to the hair product, I believe the bigger issue here is how the situation was handled.
As a teacher, I know how stressful the classroom can be and we make mistakes. So I’m not necessarily advocating that the teacher be fired. But as educators we need to be mindful of how our actions affect the self-esteem of our students.