California Students Get $1 Million After They Were Expelled for Wearing Supposedly Racist Acne Masks
During a sleepover in August 2017, three 14-year-old boys, two of whom were about to start attending St. Francis High School in Mountain View, California, took a picture of themselves wearing dark green acne masks. One of the boys, who was hosting the other two, had severe acne, and his friends applied the masks in an act of playful solidarity. They took the picture because they thought they looked “silly.”
Three years later, after another teenager obtained the picture and posted it online, the two St. Francis students were falsely accused of posing in blackface and forced to leave the school under the threat of expulsion. This week a California jury awarded the boys, identified as A.H. and H.H. in their lawsuit against the school, $1 million in damages, plus a tuition reimbursement of about $70,000.
“A photograph of this innocent event was plucked from obscurity and grossly mischaracterized during the height of nationwide social unrest,” the boys’ familes said when they filed their lawsuit in 2021. The photo came to light in June 2020, a month after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd. “St. Francis became involved in a number of racial scandals,” NBC News reports, “including one where recent graduates of the school posted a meme about Floyd’s death on Instagram.” Because of that context, A.H. and H.H. argued, St. Francis officials rushed to judgment, tarring the students as racist and disrupting their lives without giving them a chance to explain the photo.
“The boys did not use the facemasks or take the photograph with any ill-intent, bias or prejudice, let alone in connection with any racist sentiments or epithets,” the lawsuit said. “Defendants took it upon themselves to use the innocent and wholly unrelated photograph of the boys to make the malicious and utterly false accusation that the boys had been engaging in ‘blackface,’ and to recklessly assert that the photograph was ‘another example’ of racism” at St. Francis. That false accusation, according to the complaint, interrupted the boys’ educations, destroyed their local reputations, and forced their families to move.
The jury agreed that St. Francis had treated the boys unfairly, thereby violating an oral contract. More controversially, the jury accep
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