More than a decade ago, when he was a teacher and school counselor, Amir Whitaker was called into a Los Angeles classroom to support a student in a disciplinary situation. A Black girl had been humming in one of his white colleague’s classes. His fellow teacher, Whitaker said, had asked the student to stop humming to no avail.
Eventually, the student was recommended for suspension for “defiance” – a broad, subjective category that, under the California education code, meant a student “disrupted school activities or otherwise willfully defied the valid authority” of teachers, administrators and other school officials. Whitaker later learned the girl hummed to regulate her ADHD.
