What a Sacramento student needed most after being called the N-word | Opinion
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- A Sacramento eighth-grader was called the N-word during class at K-8 school.
- Administrators did not offer counseling or immediate validation to the student that day.
- The mother reported the student experienced anxiety, fear, sleeplessness and withdrawal.
On Juneteenth, when we commemorate the emancipation of enslaved African Americans in 1865, I’d like to remind Sacramento City Unified School District administrators of how profoundly Black children feel the pain and trauma of racial slurs hurled at them by other children they serve.
They are not immune to experiencing humiliation, fear, anxiety, anger, isolation, powerlessness, and a loss of belonging. They also feel poison darts of doubt that cause them to question whether they are good enough.
One Black child, a 14-year-old girl at Leonardo da Vinci TK-8 School, was called the N-word by classmates on June 8 and then left to stew all day in a heartsick state of mind, her mother said at Thursday’s SCUSD board meeting.
Seanella Barnes said that on the day of the incident, no teacher or administrator assured her daughter that she was “a great child,” “a model student,” and “such a leader around campus.”
Barnes said administrators expressed those feelings to her a day after two male classmates called her daughter the N-word during a second-period history class at the school in Sacramento’s Hollywood Park neighborhood. Her child then spent the day frightened, shaken, and trying to process what had happened.
“They checked the box and moved on,” Barnes said at Thursday’s school board meeting. “The day and time that it happened, nobody even called me and told me this was happening. ... I had to check in with my own child, because she was brave enough and had enough sense to say something happened.”
District officials said in a statement Thursday that were unable to corroborate the allegation, a finding Barnes and her family rejected and found deeply disappointing.
For generations, America has struggled to recognize Black pain with the same urgency and empathy it extends to others.
When angry white mobs screamed racial epithets at Black children integrating Southern schools more than a half-century ago, few adults stopped to ask what that experience might do to a child’s mental health. Few wondered about trauma. Was there any counseling?
The expectation was endurance: Walk through it. Ignore it. Be strong. Keep going.
Black parents of that era comforted their children and nurtured them through that trauma, knowing their children’s success would be used by many Americans as a measure of whether integration itself could work. They knew that, for their kids, integration would lead to better jobs, higher pay, and a wider slice of the American dream.
When it comes to how school administrators handle racial harassment of Black students, I fear we still expect African American children to bear the burdens of the nation’s racist past.
Researchers have long documented that Black students in California experience significant disparities in school discipline. There are ongoing concerns about whether schools adequately protect Black children from race-based harassment. Nationally, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has found that experiencing racism at school is associated with poor mental health and elevated suicide risk indicators.
When racial incidents occur in schools, discussions often shift immediately toward investigations, liability, discipline and image management.
The child disappears.
Barnes described her daughter as a student who had loved socializing, percussion and history but now was begging to stay home from school. Her 14-year-old with an independent spirit suddenly began texting her constantly, suffering anxiety, fear and sleeplessness. Her daughter with a 3.65 GPA didn’t want to attend graduation.
In its statement, the district said that it “counts student safety and well-being among its highest priorities every day.” Barnes feels differently.
“They failed us,” Barnes said of Da Vinci administrators. “I had to hold her in my arms and console her while she cried and begged me not to make her go back to school. That broke something in me, to know that she was so defeated.”
What struck me most, though, was not what Barnes said but what her daughter told SCUSD trustees at Thursday’s board meeting.
“It should not be OK for people to be ... racially bullied based on the color of their skin,” she said. “I feel scared to even go to school and have fun and celebrate what’s important to me.”
Restorative-practice experts often begin somewhere simpler, with acknowledgment and healing.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson has argued that Americans have never fully reckoned with slavery, segregation and racial terror. Indeed, the Trump administration is busy removing acknowledgments to as much of it as it can muster.
German citizens contending with a genocidal legacy of Nazism understood that healing begins with truth-telling. Schools should, too.
A racial slur is not merely a rule violation. It is a message: You do not belong. You are lesser. You are other.
When adults fail to respond with urgency, empathy and care, they risk reinforcing that message.
Maybe SCUSD administrators could give it some thought for one day because hey, it’s Juneteenth.
This story was originally published June 19, 2026 at 3:24 PM.
