Chicago Public Schools in under fire when two boys, ages 5 and 6, were denied the opportunity to eat breakfast at their elementary school because they came to school wearing the wrong shoes. Noah and Niko Nicholson, students at Adam Powell Grade School were told that their black athletic shoes don’t match the school dress code, which calls for black dress shoes. The school’s assistant principal, Angela Peagler, was the one who asked them to leave.
“I felt sad. We’re always supposed to have breakfast,” said Noah Nicholson, who is in the first grade.
“It hasn’t been a problem all this time and all of a sudden they can’t have breakfast because of their shoes,” said Kahlia Edwards, the boys’ mother.
The boys’ great Aunt is even more livid over what happened to the children.
“I don’t care if they had on orange shoes, they were in line to eat,” said Robin Price. “I’m not going to feed you because you have the wrong shoes? Shoes? No, no.”
Of course school officials were asking reporters to leave the premises when they came to the school with questions. This video (which you can watch here) made the school’s assistant principal look even sillier than she already did. Perhaps she was sticking with protocol, but I can’t imagine her not being “dealt with” behind closed doors.
I’m sure the situation was not as heinous as it sounds on the surface. Ms. Peagler even made the point that she thought the boys were going to come back to breakfast after changing their shoes (I’m not sure where they were going to get new shoes at school). She also found herself looking like that much more of a demon when one of the children, with sad little eyes, simply told the news reporter, “I was hongry (not ‘hungry,’ but ‘hongry’ – black folks know the difference).”
Obviously, this situation would outrage any mother, and I don’t blame Ms. Edwards for her anger. This situation also speaks to the fact that unnecessarily rigid rules and counter-productive structure of our educational system serves to marginalize black boys at an early age. Not to say the school’s dress code isn’t necessary, but when you start treating little boys like they are social deviants at the age of five, they begin to learn to act like social deviants by the age of nine.
I can personally remember numerous occasions in my own educational experience where it was the rules, not the academics, that kept me in trouble. Yes, my grades were terrible all through school and much of this was because I felt like a criminal when I went to class. Rather than seeing that I had the potential to eventually become a college professor, many of my teachers could only see that I’d worn the wrong hat, answered the question out of turn, or had an attitude that they didn’t deem appropriate. Sometimes, going to school can stand in the way of getting an education.
By being classified and treated like a trouble maker, I saw little incentive in trying to fit into a system that was designed to reject me because I was a black boy. This is true for millions of black children all across America and even extends into their professional lives (note my status as the “deviant little black boy” of Syracuse University – Cornel West went through the same thing at Harvard).
The Assistant Principal (who is actually black) and the school should be ashamed. Let’s hope that after this PR mess coming from a school system that is nationally-recognized for its glaring inadequacies, we can instill some common sense into the minds of a few administrators who have little ability to think outside the box. Feeding children and educating them should not be contingent upon the color of their shoes.
Dr. Boyce Watkins is a Professor at Syracuse University and founder of the Your Black World Coalition. To have Dr. Boyce commentary delivered to your email, please click here.
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