Last May, I was counting down the final days of my freshman year at Bartram Trail High School and anxiously waiting to pick up my first high school yearbook. When the yearbooks finally came, I rushed down the hallways to the cafeteria to grab my copy and immediately did what every kid does: I flipped through the pages until I found my photo. But when I found it, my stomach dropped. The school had inserted a black rectangular bar across my chest — censoring my body in my high school yearbook without my knowledge or consent.

The fact that an adult teacher had looked at my photo and decided to censor my chest made me feel exposed and embarrassed. The school had censored the photos of at least 80 other students — all girls — to cover up their chests. Meanwhile, the photos of boys were completely untouched — including a photo of the boys’ swimming team, where they were wearing only swim briefs. I realized then that the school’s issue wasn’t with how students were dressed. The school’s issue was with girls’ bodies.

I felt angry and shamed by the school, but not surprised. My high school — and the entire St. Johns County School District, where my high school is located — has enforced its dress code unfairly against girls for as long as I’ve been a student. Until recently, the school district’s dress code set out different rules for boys and girls, including that girls’ tops must cover the shoulder and be “modest and not revealing or distracting” and that girls’ bottoms may not be less than four inches above the knee — something I received a dress code warning for. On top of these gendered rules, the school district has targeted its enforcement against girls, with about 83 percent of dress code violations issued against female students.

Just a few months earlier, my high school conducted dress code sweeps and pulled dozens of girls out of class because their clothes were “out of code.” One teacher even forced a girl to unzip her sweatshirt in front of other students and staff, even though she said would rather not because she was only wearing a sports bra underneath. The school has also conducted dress-code checks when students enter the building, where girls have been disproportionately scrutinized.

As a girl, I feel like the school cared more about what I was wearing than about my education or comfort. I became so anxious about being dress coded that I often second-guessed myself or found myself changing my outfit multiple times before school. Other girls I know have worn long shirts and pants — including in the heat — to prevent scrutiny, and the repeated dress coding caused one girl to have a panic attack in the bathroom. After speaking with fellow classmates, it is clear that these harmful effects can be even worse for transgender, non-binary, or gender-nonconforming students by reinforcing sex stereotypes, as well as for girls of color.

To fight back against the school’s sexist dress code, I created an online petition to call on the school district to stop sexualizing girls’ bodies and to change its policies. I spoke out with my classmates and parents at school board meetings to share our experiences with the dress code. And in July, the ACLU Women’s Rights Project and the ACLU of Florida sent a letter explaining that gendered dress codes violate our civil rights and asking the St. Johns County school district to end its discriminatory dress code enforcement against girls. Thanks to all of these efforts, the St. Johns County School Board voted to remove the gendered language from its dress code in time for the new school year.

While I’m glad that the school district took this step, it is not enough to change the language of the dress code. The school district must also change its actions.

In addition to passing the gender-neutral dress code, the school district must create policies to prevent future discriminatory enforcement of its dress code against girls — including by ending the humiliating practice of dress code sweeps and scrutinizing students’ bodies and clothing. The school district should also take steps to hear the concerns and feedback of students and parents about the dress code’s enforcement. It is the school district’s responsibility to ensure a safe and equal learning environment in our schools.

When the school board recently met to discuss the dress code, one of the School Board members said: “You understand that there’s a big difference between an elementary school student’s physical anatomy than there is a high school student … A first-grade student has the same physical size as a first-grade student, if I’m making any sense there.” These comments shocked me at the time, and the more I think about them, the more I realize that the school district oversexualizes and views girls’ bodies as a problem.

It’s time to understand that shaming girls is harmful and discriminatory and makes it unnecessarily stressful for us to get an education. Girls shouldn’t be made to feel that there is something wrong with having a body.

American Civil Liberties Union

Dress and Grooming Policies Based on Gender Stereotypes | American Civil Liberties Union

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This op-ed is originally published in Florida Politics.

In 2016, the conservative James Madison Institute and libertarian Charles Koch Institute polled Floridians about their attitudes on the criminal justice system. A full 75% believed that prisons cost Florida taxpayers too much money; almost two-thirds felt too many nonviolent people were behind bars, and 72% agreed that reform was needed.

That same year, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune published the first of two groundbreaking series about gross racial inequities in sentencing in Florida courts, with Black people often receiving radically longer sentences than white people for similar crimes. Those series added to the outcry for reform.

Floridians are still waiting for those reforms in part because the state has failed to produce the data on which any effective reform must be based — despite being ordered to do so by the Florida Legislature.

In 2018, two years after those polls and damning news articles, the Legislature passed the Criminal Justice Data Transparency law. It mandated that law enforcement agencies, court clerks, state attorneys, public defenders, county detention centers, and state prisons submit records on a monthly basis. Those records were to include data about arrests, bail and bond determinations, convictions and sentencing, which would include information on the race of the people impacted.

The law was trumpeted as a model for the nation. It was to educate the public about how criminal justice is administered in Florida, including what resources are devoted to each step of the process, and to provide policymakers with the data they need to make informed policy decisions.

Criminal justice entities were to begin collecting and posting that information in January 2019, but 32 months later the database still does not exist. When the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Florida requested pertinent data from both state and local agencies it was told alternately that no such records exist, that culling the records would be exorbitantly expensive and the ACLU would have to foot the bill, and that no database mandated by the transparency law had been created by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE). This is despite the fact that the FDLE has been provided with millions of dollars in taxpayer money to do so.

The ACLU filed a lawsuit against the FDLE and the Florida Department of Corrections, on the state level, and on the local level against the Broward Sheriff’s Office and Clerk of Courts. The suit demands the data be provided promptly and at no cost, as the transparency law mandates.

State prison figures illuminate just how skewed Florida’s criminal justice system is. Black people make up 17% of Florida’s population but as of June 2020, the last figures available before COVID-19 slowed prison intakes, a full 47% of people in Florida prisons were Black.

The murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020, abetted by the shooting deaths of numerous Black people around the country by police, swelled Black Lives Matter protests that same year, including in Florida. That created even greater urgency for reform.

During those demonstrations, Floridians took to the streets to exercise their constitutional right to peaceful protest. Police in different cities made arrests, but no data exists to track the race of those arrested or to compare just how those cases were adjudicated.

Meanwhile, the COVID-19 pandemic blocked transfers of individuals to state prisons and from county jails, creating potentially hazardous health conditions in those jails, but no statewide data was available to track those threats.

“The public deserves criminal justice data. Our taxes pay for accountability and transparency. When such data is hidden, then police behavior is hidden. Policing done right doesn’t need to hide anything,” said Donna Davis, co-founder of Black Lives Matter Tampa. “We would welcome proper data collection as a first step in the get-real conversation about public safety for everyone in the community. Where problems exist, we’ll see them so we can correct them together.”

State Sen. Jeff Brandes, a St. Petersburg Republican, is one leader fed up with the state agencies’ failure to provide crucial figures.

“We spent tens of millions of dollars on this data program that we’ve based zero decisions off of, that we got no data from,” Brandes recently told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. “We should be holding their feet to the fire and letting people go. This isn’t that complicated.”

It’s time for the state to follow the law.

In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson signed National Hispanic Heritage Week into law. Twenty years later, Ronald Reagan announced its expansion from a weeklong celebration to one that would last an entire month.

Hispanic Heritage Month (HHM) kicks off Sept. 15—a date that marks the anniversary of independence for Costa Rica, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador. The month also includes the independence days of Mexico and Chile—Sept. 16 and 18, respectively. Unfortunately, Oct. 12—a day that has long lived in infamy and one that continues to be commemorated as Columbus Day by many—also falls within the monthlong period.

Created to celebrate the achievements and contributions of Hispanic people in this country, HHM too often ignores just what the arrival of Spanish explorers meant to Indigenous peoples of this hemisphere.  School lessons continue to offer a romantic narrative of a daring explorer, Christopher Columbus, who discovered the Americas, but what ultimately was wrought on the American continent—and the long-lasting negative effects it has left on its native inhabitants—has not been taught adequately at all. The arrival of Columbus, an Italian captain working for the Spanish crown, brought on genocide directed against Indigenous communities. His journeys marked the beginning of centuries of colonization and opened the doors to the trans-Atlantic slave trade.  By celebrating Columbus Day as part of HHM, we honor a legacy of conquest and support the erasure of Indigenous peoples and their history. Many Spanish men eventually had children with Indigenous women and intermarriage became common, so that today many people who identify as Hispanic or Latinx have Indigenous heritage. That's why celebrating Columbus Day, and the bloody arrival of the Spanish Conquistadores, is so misguided and grossly ironic.

HHM also fails to adequately celebrate the diversity of the people found today in the Americas. The terms “Hispanic” and “Latino” have been used interchangeably despite the distinction that exists between them. Generally, Hispanic refers to persons who speak Spanish or who are descended from Spanish-speaking countries, while Latino/Latina/Latinx refers to geography, specifying persons from Latin America.

The 1970 census greatly undercounted Latinx populations in the United States and that led to the addition of the term “Hispanic” on the U.S. Census short form by 1980. Although used by cultural and political activists primarily to unify a segment of the population, with the goal of creating a single Hispanic identity that could someday hold political and economic power, the term has a contentious history and is not universally accepted.

In the attempt to create a monolithic identity, the term Hispanic ignores distinct populations and histories; and HHM falls short when it focuses on a singular Hispanic identity using a European lens instead of looking at the diversity of Indigenous communities in the Americas. There are hundreds of distinct Indigenous peoples spread across Latin America. In certain Latin American countries Indigenous people comprise a major portion of the population yet remain largely marginalized. Once they arrive in the United States, Indigenous Latinx are regularly categorized as Hispanic based solely on their country of origin, without regard to differences in culture, religion, or language. Not all Indigenous Latinx speak Spanish, but instead speak Indigenous languages.

Critical Latinx Indigeneities (CLI) is a school of thought that challenges the notion of a collective identity, especially one that is fraught with internalized racism where those who are lighter-skinned, who identify as mestizo, and speak Spanish are the ones who benefit most from the Hispanic label. This approach imposes assimilation on Indigenous populations without their consent and further contributes to their invisibility.

The erasure of Indigenous Latinx communities is problematic because it leads to a lack of representation of Native peoples. Some non-Indigenous people even question whether these communities still exist in the present.  Their histories and experiences are disregarded. Spaces where ignorance and misinformation feed negative stereotypes are permitted to flourish to the extent that Indigenous Latinx groups become vulnerable to further prejudice and discrimination. To not fall into the trappings of a settler/colonial mindset that continues to "otherize" and exclude Indigenous Latinx people, it is crucial to shine a light on authentic representations of these populations, highlighting that these are distinct groups that do not fall under a uniform Hispanic or Latinx identity.

The work must be holistic in nature, looking to the past to acknowledge the legacy of colonialism and how that history continues to impact communities today. A major step in this direction would be the dismantling of a commemoration of Columbus Day that focuses on a Eurocentric model of discovery and that ignores the atrocities committed on Native populations in the United States as well as in Latin America.

In lieu of promoting a white-washed version of history, Indigenous Peoples’ Day turns the tables and places the narrative in the hands of its rightful custodians. It honors the cultures and contributions of these populations and reminds us that they are present today, and that they are relevant. More importantly, celebrating Indigenous Peoples’ Day recognizes the resilience of these communities and reinforces the understanding that visibility and representation matter.