A public school is an a public accommodation which must treat us all equally.

Likely you’d have figured that that that statement was so obviously true that I’m an idiot for writing it.

But, in a sense, it only became true in New Mexico today (January 23), when the New Mexico Supreme Court unanimously decided the point, tossing out an erroneous 1981 decision that UNM was not a “public accommodation,” as that term is used in the New Mexico Human Rights Act.

The new case arose from a Halloween event in which their Advanced Placement English teacher allegedly cut three inches off one Native American girl’s braid and called another “a bloody Indian.” Albuquerque Public Schools argued, as lawyers will, that APS was not a public accommodation. The trial court bought that, and dismissed the case; but the Court of Appeal overruled that, and the Supreme Court agrees. (Lawyers will note that the Court of Appeals “distinguished” the 1981 UNM case, but the Supreme Court explicitly overruled it.)

I note the decision not merely for its irony, but for the distinction between our courts’,, and our state government’s, willingness to consider candidly our sorry history in such matters; and to be glad we do not live in Florida or Texas, and have some protection against the possible abuses at the hands of our federal government.

Said the court, “ The NMHRA’s protections against numerous forms of discrimination must be read against the backdrop of this state’s unfortunate history of race-based discrimination, including that history transpiring within our public schools.” Noting that our New Mexico Constitution provides for education for all children, and that, “Children of Spanish descent in the state of New Mexico shall never be denied the right and privilege of admission and attendance in the public schools . . . but shall forever enjoy perfect equality with other children in all public schools and educational institutions of the state.” For a lot of the 20^th Century, that simply was not true for Native American kids.

In judicial language, despite such constitutional protections, “New Mexico schools have been used to further efforts of assimilation and cultural erasure among Native American and Hispanic children” and that historians have written that our schools sought to force “assimilation through education ‘that intentionally sought to destroy their cultural ways of life.’”

Political point: can you imagine the governor or attorney-general of Florida or Texas writing that? Rather, we’re seeing directives that such things not even be spoken of in those states’ public schools.

Personal point: I’ve talked with a Navajo long-distance runner whose father taught himself long-distance running as a kid, racing home after escaping from the schools to which our state sent him to learn not to be Navajo any more. I also recall my friend Fred Johnson, a Dineh student here in 1970, whose required ten-minute film to pass Buddy Wanzer's filmmaking course was a very moving study of his daughter, juxtaposing the loud chaos of a morning here, and on a local schoolbus, with the quieter strains of a morning at home.

Justice Briana Zamora’s concurrence correctly notes that while Brown v Board of Education held in 1954 that the segregation of public schools based on race was unconstitutional, it was 41 years later, in 1995, that a federal court explicitly held that that applied to children on the Navajo Nation.

Another reason I’m glad I’m in New Mexico.

                                – 30 --

[ oops - thought i'd published this y/d, sunday, but apparently i didn't quite do that.]

[The above column appeared Sunday, 26 January, on the Las Cruces Sun-News website, as well as on the KRWG website under Local Viewpoints. A shortened and sharpened radio commentary version will air during the week on KRWG (90.1 FM) and on KTAL-LP (101.5 FM / http://www.lccommunityradio.org/). ]