The Banning of BLM and Pride Flags from Schools

As though LGBTQ and BIPOC youth didn’t have enough to worry about already, particularly in a year with deadly legislation running rampant from state to state, schools across the country have now begun to ban students and teachers alike from having BLM and Pride flags in the classroom.

The David School District of Utah, along with the Newberg School District of Oregon, have banned the use of Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ Pride flags in their schools, referring to them as “politically charged.”

In a year where anti-trans, anti-black, and anti-LGBTQ laws have reared its discriminatory head across the country, it’s important that BIPOC and LGBTQ youth alike are allowed to express themselves. These measures only serve as another way to silence them, another way to make them more invisible.

The effect of these mandates has more of an impact on queer and BIPOC youth than lack of visibility. It puts a target on their backs. It gives the students around them “permission” to bully their peers.

As Oliver Haug of them writes, “These coordinated attacks appear to have trickled down to student behavior as well, with several assaults on LGBTQ+ students by their peers in recent months. Administrators are investigating after harassment against members of the GSA in Bartram Trail High School in St. Johns, FL was documented in a viral video earlier this month, and another video captured at Lowndes High School in Valdosta, GA showed a student being shoved to the ground after a classmate ripped off their Pride flag cape.”

In Utah specifically, LGBTQ Nation‘s Juwan J. Holmes reports, “High schoolers in Utah’s Ridgeline High School were captured on video cutting down an LGBTQ Pride flag while classmates laughed and cheered.”

When people in authority use queer and BIPOC kids as scapegoats, it only serves to make the lives of these students more challenging, setting them up for bullying, harassment, and worse.

As recently reported by The Trever Project’s National Survey on LGBTQ Mental Health, “Forty-two percent of LGBTQ youth seriously considered attempting suicide in the past year, including more than half of transgender and nonbinary youth. Twelve percent of white youth attempted suicide compared to 31 percent of Native/Indigenous youth, 21 percent of Black youth, 21 percent of multiracial youth, 18 percent of Latinx youth, and 12 percent of Asian/Pacific Islander youth.”

Banning BLM and Pride Flags isn’t creating a “politically neutral classroom,” as Chris Williams, the spokesman for the Davis School District, recently told Utah’s KUTV. Rather, it’s dividing their students by using the most marginalized as scapegoats and setting them up for even further harassment.

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