Black Students Face Racism In Texas Schools With No Support

Probes Into Racism Faced By Black Students At Texas Schools Stall Under Trump

It’s no secret that one of the main focuses of President Donald Trump’s second term has been dismantling the Department of Education and removing protections for Black and brown students under the guise of reverse discrimination. As a result of stalled investigations, Black students at several Texas schools have endured heightened racism with little to no consequences. 

According to the Washington Post, Black students in Lubbock, Texas, have reported experiencing racist behavior from both students and school officials. One Black student reported being called a “b–ch ass” N-word during a high school football game, and another was disciplined for having a vape pen when in reality it was a pencil sharpener. “They’re breaking people,” Phyllis Gant, a longtime leader of Lubbock’s NAACP chapter, told the Washington Post. “It’s just open season on our students.”

Sadly, these developments aren’t terribly surprising, as the racist rhetoric was so severe that the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) launched an investigation into the Lubbock-Cooper school district in 2023. An OCR investigator was set to visit the area earlier this year, which gave parents hope that the federal government would implement protections for their children. After Trump took office, the Education Department closed 12 OCR field offices, including the one in Dallas that was investigating the incidents. As a result, the visit never happened. 

“In many of our communities, where people feel isolated and like they didn’t have anyone to turn to, OCR mattered and gave people a sense of hope,” Paige Duggins-Clay, a lawyer at the Intercultural Development Research Association, an education and legal advocacy group that helped file some of the civil rights complaints against Lubbock schools, told the Washington Post. “And it matters that they’ve essentially destroyed it.”

One of the saddest incidents involves 12-year-old Ja’Maury, who faced severe disciplinary action after a rumor spread that he sexually harassed a white student. 

From The Washington Post:

Last December, Ja’Maury, then a 12-year-old, whose last name is not being used because he is a minor, learned of rumors that he’d touched a white girl’s breast during school. He went to administrators at the school, McCool Academy, to tell them the truth. But the assistant principal believed the girl and radioed a police officer, who interrogated Ja’Maury and threatened him with jail unless he confessed, according to Ja’Maury and his grandfather Mike Anzley.

Alone in a room of adults, Ja’Maury broke down and admitted to 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 person’s word against a Black person’s word.”

It’s 2025, and white people are still lying about young, Black boys preying on white girls. Yet thanks to Trump’s war on “unlawful DEI,” white people are the real victims, and not students like Ja’maury. 

Ja’maury was sentenced to 30 days at Priority Intervention Academy, Lubbock Independent School District’s detention school, where students are sent when their actions are deemed too severe for traditional discipline. Anzley said Ja’maury began suffering from anxiety and wet his pants twice at school when a teacher refused to let him use the bathroom. 

“He had never been in trouble before,” Anzley told the Washington Post. He’d taught Ja’Maury to trust adults and was devastated when school officials betrayed that trust. “I had to make him distinguish right from wrong in a whole new way.”

Anzley filed a formal grievance with the school district, which led to a formal apology from the school, the incident being wiped from Ja’Maury’s record, and the school administrators and officer who interrogated him being disciplined. 

Under the second Trump administration, the Education Department has dismissed thousands of civil rights investigations, instead focusing on making life harder for trans children and investigating policies that it deems discriminatory to white students. 

Julie Hartman, press secretary for legal affairs for the Education Department, defended the Trump administration’s approach and tried to shift the blame to the Biden administration. “These complaints of racial bullying were filed in 2022 and 2023, meaning that the Biden Administration had more time to investigate this than the Trump Administration has even been in office. The Trump Administration’s OCR will continue vigorously enforcing the law to uphold all Americans’ civil rights,” Hartman told the Washington Post.

One thing I’ve quickly picked up on is that “all Americans” is simply the Trump administration’s synonym for white people. Exacerbating the lack of federal support are laws passed by the Texas state legislature banning DEI programs in K-12 schools. On both the federal and state levels, the message is loud and clear: Texas doesn’t care about Black students. 

SEE ALSO:

UnderstandingThe Education Department’s Civil Rights Cuts

Trump Administration Begins Dismantling Department Of Education