True Left

A Palestinian Muslim Valedictorian Spoke About Dignity. Clayton High Told Her to Stop

hollernhammer.substack.com

Her senior quote for the yearbook had been “From the river to the sea,” and Clayton High made her change it. Leen said it was “apparently too political” and “too offensive.” She did not describe it as a threat. She described it as “just a simple phrase that a lot of Palestinians say because of our ethnic cleansing.” That experience told her what the school would do if she submitted the final part of her speech. Nobody had to spell it out. The lesson had already been taught.

That lesson did not stop with the yearbook.

Clayton High has student groups like Turning Point USA and First Priority Christian Club, and Leen was blunt about how that looked from where she stood.

    “Every single time that something culturally in our school is trying to be put out there, it’s often ignored,” she said. “The First Priority and the Turning Point USA club at our school got a lot of praise from teachers and students.”

When she and her friends tried to organize a culture day, they had to get a poster approved, and even that became “a whole process” just to get something displayed in the school.

Turning Point USA, for anyone who has somehow missed the last several years of right-wing campus pipeline politics, is the late Charlie Kirk’s organization that has made defunding public education, attacking immigrants, and mainstreaming white grievance part of its brand.

First Priority is a national organization built around getting students to evangelize other students inside public schools, an approach designed to accomplish through peer pressure what the First Amendment prevents school staff from doing directly.

Students have the right to organize, including students I disagree with, including Christian students and conservative students. The problem is why Clayton High made Leen and her friends fight through a dragged-out approval process for a culture day meant to recognize Muslim, Hispanic, Palestinian, Arab, immigrant, and other students, while Turning Point and First Priority were treated as ordinary parts of the school environment.

Why did the school push Leen’s Palestinian cultural poster through a grinding approval gauntlet while Turning Point and First Priority collect institutional applause?

That is not a neutral standard. That is a school telling certain students that their culture is a process problem, while telling certain other students that their politics are just fine.

This is how students learn the real approval process. Not from a policy on a district website. Not from a student handbook. From watching which words get waved through and which words get sent back. From noticing which clubs get smiled at in the hallway and which ones have to justify their existence before they are even allowed to be visible. From learning that Christian speech can be tradition, conservative speech can be leadership, Palestinian speech can be political, Muslim visibility can be friction, and immigrant grief can be treated like bad manners.
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A process that allows Christian prayer to proceed while stopping a Palestinian Muslim student from saying that human beings deserve safety is not neutral