Polishing brass on the Titanic describes the futile act of making something appear less egregious than it actually is while simultaneously ignoring the catastrophe beneath it.
Legally, hazing and a hate crime are not the same. Hazing is generally abusive conduct connected to initiation or participation in a group. A hate crime requires proof that criminal conduct was motivated by bias against a protected class.
The distinction matters because motive matters. Yet, regardless of the legal classifications ultimately applied in any particular proceeding, changing the label does not change the lived experience of those who endured the conduct. Changing the label simply changed the narrative they wanted the public to believe.
A lack of transparency rarely operates in isolation. It is often accompanied by the strategic use of language to reshape public perception. Calling conduct “hazing” instead of examining racially motivated behavior is an exercise in equivocation, euphemistic labeling, minimization, false characterization, and even suppression of evidence when material facts are omitted. These rhetorical devices do more than soften the truth. They obscure accountability. When institutions knowingly substitute less troubling language despite evidence pointing to racial bias, the issue is no longer simply poor reasoning. It becomes misrepresentation.
The recent Spokane County jury verdict against Mead School District found the district liable and ordered it to pay approximately $17 million in damages; $8 million to one former student and $500,000 to his parents, and $7 million to another former student and $500,000 to his parents. This monetary win acknowledges devastating harm. It does not answer to the psychological stain of racialized violence that was at play.
The same violence that entertained white mobs in southern town squares as Black bodies dangled from trees in the hot sun. The same violence that was glibly used to teach spelling on childhood chalkboards in a draconian version of Wheel of Fortune, except there was no wheel nor fortune, just a noose, a gallow, and the slow hanging of a stick figure who got closer to imminent death with each misplaced letter. You remember the game Hangman, right? Shout out to social media influencer and truth teller Ashley B (IG @ashleytheebarroness) for calling a spade a spade. Honesty is freedom.
The money is the least, not the best, that this district should do. But we the people, we the taxpayers who fund our schools, cannot let cognitive dissonance win. No amount of money restores dignity or heals the scars these students will go into their young adulthood carrying.
What should bother everyone is the collective insistence on softening its edges. Nothing changes if nothing changes. For centuries, dominant culture has reached for a dilution solution to disguise racial hatred. In this case, it’s “hazing.” When I read about the verdict or watch recent reports, the word hazing jumps to the front of any explanation of the events that happened in Mead against the plaintiffs. This word allows institutions and communities to look away from the deeper questions of racial hierarchy, dehumanization, bigotry, and power.
We are being deceived. The ability to recognize that racism exists while refusing to acknowledge when it unfolds in front of us is treacherous hypocrisy. It is the conditioning that teaches us to believe a thing is not a thing, that racial degradation becomes hazing simply because calling it racism would demand accountability.
The lawsuit outlines a timeline that the plaintiff argues demonstrates more than an administrative oversight. It contends that a key document, the February 18, 2023 racial harassment complaint filed by Rod Bumpus (father of one of the biracial students involved), was withheld despite multiple opportunities for the district to disclose it.
In the meantime, the filing states that the sustained harassment ultimately drove the student athlete out of the traditional school environment, forcing him to complete his education online. It further states that the experience fundamentally changed his desire to play sports leaving him unwilling to pursue basketball because of the whole ordeal.
A Public Records Act request was made on August 2, 2024, seeking all records related to the district’s handling of the racial harassment complaints, including investigative files, evidence, findings, and communications. Mead School District acknowledged the request on August 8, produced records in installments, and formally closed the request as complete on October 10, 2024.
According to the complaint, the district omitted the very document that initiated the district’s response to the alleged racial harassment from the February 18, 2023 complaint detailing claims that coaches tolerated racist conduct and failed to intervene.
The court filing states that after discovering the complaint had not been produced, Bumpus repeatedly contacted the district through phone calls, emails, and in-person visits seeking the missing records. On March 18, 2025, a Title IX official reportedly acknowledged during a phone conversation that he was looking right at the complaint. Bumpus immediately submitted another written request the same day asking for all complaint records and the investigation’s conclusions. When the records still were not produced, he followed up again on April 23, 2025.
It was not until May 2, 2025, approximately nine months after the original public records request was submitted and more than six months after the district had declared the request complete, that Mead released the February 18, 2023 complaint. The lawsuit contends this sequence of events demonstrates that the district’s intentional withholding of the racial harassment complaint.
Families should never have to play cat and mouse with a public institution to public records to obtain records concerning complaints they themselves filed. Transparency is a legal obligation.
Equally important is the conversation we continue to avoid: Who gets to define Black trauma? Certainly not those who perpetuate it with complicity. Certainly not those who have never been in America’s underbelly. Those experiences do not always present themselves through grades, attendance records, or visible emotional breakdowns.
For centuries, Black Americans have lived with the cumulative generational effects of racism, humiliation, exclusion, and violence. They live in hypervigilance, anxiety, mistrust, isolation, and what W. E. B. Du Bois described as double consciousness, the burden of constantly viewing oneself through the eyes of a society that has historically devalued Black humanity.
Yet too often, dominant culture appoints itself the authority on whether Black people have suffered enough. The very institutions that have historically perpetuated racial harm presume to determine whether the psychological consequences are sufficiently severe. There is a ridiculous irony in asking those who have often ignored racial trauma to become the judges of its validity.
As America commemorates 250 years of independence, we should ask ourselves whose freedom we are celebrating if children can still endure racial degradation in public schools and institutions hesitate to call it what it is.
Polishing the brass does not stop the ship from sinking.
Justice is more than a monetary damages award. It is more than litigation. It requires moral fortitude. It requires institutional honesty. It requires confronting racism without euphemism, and refusing to sanitize conduct that strips children of their dignity.
Only then do we begin to repair the ship instead of pretending it is still afloat.
That is exactly what Case No. 25-2-03694-32, Complaint for Violation of the Washington Public Records Act, is giving. Racism cannot be paid off.
It is a python that has to die before it squeezes us to death.