In what is, at minimum, exceedingly poor judgment, a teacher at Philips Academy in Birmingham, Alabama, painted a fake bullet wound on the forehead of a seven-year-old black student. The student’s mother, Zakiya Milhouse, shared a photo of the fake wound when her second-grader got home from school. The picture went viral earlier this week. Birmingham City Schools just issued a public apology. The district clarified that there was “no malice” in the makeup and that it does not “condone the graphic nature of this lesson on special effects.”
How did this happen? During drama class, students had theater makeup applied to their faces as part of a unit on special effects. Students did need a permission slip in order to participate, which Milhouse signed. Kids also had the option to opt-out of participating in the activity. But for this mother, the fake bullet wound was (understandably) simply too much.
When speaking to AL.com, Milhouse noted how realistic the makeup looked. “If you saw it in person, it looked real,” she told the site. “It was supposed to be a gunshot wound. That’s when I got upset.”
The Facebook post which went viral is still up and includes a picture of the makeup. It does look real—and even if it didn’t, it’s still jarring and upsetting. As Milhouse herself points out, black youth are repeatedly victimized by gun violence and police brutality. “This actually happens to our black young men,” she stressed.
Even if someone didn’t want to consider race in this (and removing race from the conversation is always a privileged move to make), it’s difficult to stomach the depiction of a child with a bullet wound in an age where the Sandy Hook massacre lives in our cultural memory.
Milhouse received a call from the school principal, as well as the teacher, offering an apology. However, the apology is not entirely satisfying for the concerned parent. While the principal agreed it was “unacceptable,” Millhouse says that the teacher, whose name has not been released, “didn’t think it was a real big deal” and that he “did paint on different kids, such as black eyes.” He ultimately agreed to take it out of the lesson plan for the future.