Students Seek to Curb Speech That’s Offensive

When Huntington Beach High School students Brandy Marks, Joshua Holland and their friends saw racist flyers on campus, they were irate.

“I felt like, ‘I’m not wanted here,’ ” said Marks, 18, one of about 25 black students at the school. “It made me really angry.”

But when the students went to school Principal Jim Staunton to demand action, he could only point to a section in the state education code that bars acts “disruptive to the school environment” but does not address racist acts on campus.

So Staunton, Marks, Holland and several friends appealed to Assemblywoman Doris Allen (R-Cypress) for legislation meant to give school administrators the power to punish students who say or write statements to others with the intent to incite a disturbance.

“You can’t go through (school) principals with this problem now because they’ll always come back with the line, ‘We don’t have the authority,’ ” said Marks, who will be a freshman at Cal State Long Beach in the fall. “We figured we would go all the way to the top” to change that.

On Wednesday, Marks and Holland will testify before the state Senate’s education committee in Sacramento about the need for such a change in the education code.

Marks, Holland and their 17-year-old friend La’Tron Hutchins did not know the ins and outs of free speech and legislation when they started their campaign. But they learned quickly with the help of several teachers, they said.

Black pupils make up 1.5% of Huntington Beach High’s 2,000 students, Staunton said.

“You get snide comments when you walk down the hall, you feel like you’re different,” said Marks, a former cheerleader at the school who graduated this month. “You don’t feel comfortable.”

The threesome are unlikely friends, by their own admission. If they were students at a mostly black school, they said, Holland would probably hang out with the jocks, Hutchins with the rappers and musicians and Marks with the cheerleaders.

But they were united at Huntington Beach High by issues of race.

Last year, a student at the school was found with a racist flyer showing a caricature of a black man, and Staunton suspended him. When the youth’s parents protested, Staunton said, he turned to the education code and found that it did not specifically spell out administrators’ authority to punish students on the basis of offensive speech.

Last November, it happened again. Several non-students were seen dropping racist flyers in the campus parking lot, Staunton said.

That set off the students’ frustrations, said Holland, 17, during a recent interview in Staunton’s office. They took their anger to Staunton and told him to do something to stop the problem.

“People came right through these doors,” Holland said, pointing to the administration entrance. “Mr. Staunton couldn’t even sit down--we took up every chair.”

Hutchins nodded. “I said, ‘Why does this keep happening?’ ”

Staunton said the students’ demands made him feel “defensive.” But he decided to invite the students to gather before school to discuss the incidents and possible solutions.

They got together and drafted a resolution against race-related crime, Staunton said. He told Allen about the resolution, and her staff fashioned it into a bill.

“What impressed (Allen) the most was that these students who had been victims of verbal abuse had decided not to respond in kind but to go through the proper channels with an educated response,” said Marc Burgat, Allen’s chief legislative aide.

Allen’s legislation would amend the education code to include a section that allows administrators to suspend or expel any student who verbally or through writing tries to incite a “lawless action.”

Codes regulating speech have become a hot issue on college campuses in recent years.

The universities of Michigan and Wisconsin adopted codes in the late 1980s barring racist and stigmatizing speech. Both were struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court after challenges that they violated the First Amendment.

At UC Irvine, a speech policy was enacted about three years ago, said Horace Mitchell, vice chancellor for student affairs. Officials may talk to students about their actions or punish them if they use words attacking other individuals on the basis of sexual orientation, gender or other characteristics. No students have ever been disciplined, he said.

“The tension is between freedom of speech, and the kind of speech that creates an intimidating and hostile environment,” Mitchell said. “It’s a very thin line--or rope--that you walk on between them.”

Arizona State University law professor Charles Calleros, who helped create that university’s anti-harassment policy, said he credits the Huntington Beach students for trying to change the law, but he added that it may be off-target.

“The event that inspired this action was dissemination of an idea that was offensive,” Calleros said. “The danger is: You have a law like that which either won’t have much effect on offensive speech because it only applies to extreme things that result in violence . . . or some (administrator) is going to take that law and apply it much more broadly than intended and discipline people for saying unpopular things.”

Francisco Lobaco, the American Civil Liberties Union legislative director in Sacramento, said he is concerned about the bill’s language. “The bill fails to define what ‘lawless’ action is,” he said. “It’s too broad.”

The Huntington Beach High students, though, want to see their efforts result in change. The lawmaking process is “there to do something,” said Holland, who will go to the University of Colorado at Boulder to study and play football in the fall. “You can’t rely on other people to do things for you.”