Reader Pritesh Patel points to this AP story:
“International Terrorist” were the words framing President Bush’s picture on a black T-shirt that the Dearborn High School junior [Bretton Barber] wore to class on Feb. 17.
School officials told him to take it off, turn it inside out or go home. He went home. The next day he returned, with a different shirt.
School officials said they were worried about inflaming passions at the school, where a majority of students are Arab-American. . . .
Bretton said he wanted to express his anti-war position by wearing the shirt, which he ordered on the Internet.
“Bush has already killed over 1,000 people in Afghanistan ? that’s terrorism in itself,” he told The Detroit News for a story today.
He said he wore the shirt for a presentation he made that morning in English class. The assignment was a “compare and contrast” essay, and he chose to compare Bush with Saddam Hussein.
Dearborn Public Schools spokesman Dave Mustonen said students have the right to freedom of expression, but educators are sensitive to tensions caused by the conflict with Iraq.
“It was felt that emotions are running very high,” said Mustonen. “The shirt posed a potential disruption to the learning environment at the school. Our No. 1 obligation is to make sure we have a safe learning environment for all of the students.” . . .
Imad Hamad of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee said officials took the right approach. Hamad said he hoped they would take it one step further and use the experience to educate students on how to exercise freedoms in positive ways.
“I see no winner here,” Hamad said. “The school did the right thing to diffuse any potential conflict among the student population. I assume they would do the same thing if another message was displayed that was offensive to a different culture.” . . .
As I mentioned in my pro-life T-shirt post below, student speech like this can generally be restricted only if (1) there’s serious reason to think that it’s likely to cause material disruption, or (2) it’s vulgar or profane, and offensive because of that and not because of its political message. (It could also be restricted if it’s otherwise unprotected, for instance because it’s a knowing lie, a death threat, or the like, but that surely doesn’t apply here; though lots of people think the viewpoint the shirt expresses is wrong, it’s clearly a statement of opinion, not of fact.) The T-shirt here might be seen by some as rude, but the rudeness flows precisely from its political content, so item 2 doesn’t apply, either.
The question is whether the school really has some good reason to think that this would cause material disruption. I’m pretty hesitant, absent more evidence, to think that it would. The fact that most of the students are Arab-Americans doesn’t seem to me to be particularly relevant here. If the school can show that similar T-shirts had started fights, there or in neighboring schools, or that there were incidents that seemed about to blossom into fights, it might have a good case. But I don’t see how this is inherently likely to be any more disruptive than the anti-Vietnam-War black armbands that the Court held to be protected in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent School District (1969), the leading case in this field.
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