There’s been a leadership change at Philadelphia High School for Girls after principal Lisa Mesi denied two young Black “women their diplomas last month after they danced across the stage at graduation.”
For now, Mesi is no longer in her post. In a letter sent out to the school community, Janis Butler was named as the “substitute principal” of the historic magnet school, which the School District Associate Superintendent called a “temporary” change.
Girls High opened in 1848 and was one of the first public high schools for women in the country. The school “is steeped in tradition,” including expectations that graduates will be dressed in all white attire and walk across the stage in a sedate manner.
Mesi did warn “graduates that if their families clapped, cheered, or called out their names, diplomas would be withheld.”
On that fateful day walking across the stage at the graduation ceremony, “Hafsah Abdul-Rahman did the griddy dance and an audience member laughed, and Saleemah Burch flipped her hair and made a gesture, and someone clapped.”
Abdul-Rahman and Burch have told news outlets they were humiliated by Mesi’s decision and distraught over being held accountable for how audience members reacted.
District officials did state that they didn’t “condone the withholding of earned diplomas based on family members cheering for their graduates. We apologize to all the families and graduates who were impacted and are further looking into this matter to avoid it happening in the future.”
But this is still upsetting, especially when you consider that both graduates were Black and they were just being celebrated by their family members. Given last week’s Supreme Court decisions, it does feel that progress is rolling backwards. Just eight years ago a Mississippi superintendent pressed charges against several family members who cheered their loved ones on during a graduation ceremony.
As activist Mikki Kendall has said “the insistence that a dignified graduation is a silent one smacks of classism and racism. Somehow even the joy of marginalized communities is categorized as a threat.”
“The expectation of silence carries with it an assumption that there is only way to behave in public,” continues Kendall. “[I]t’s only one example of administrators turning what should be a day of celebration into a battle over some arbitrary definition of dignity that prioritizes silence and conformity over actual celebration.”
There is a deeper underlying critique as well, particularly given the longstanding educational disparities our community has faced. “[F]or many marginalized communities, access to education is still relatively new, and the work required to overcome the odds and get their children on the road to success is incredibly onerous. When everyone has worked so hard to help a child succeed, then of course everyone wants to celebrate. And yes, that includes cheering at the moment the diploma is conveyed,” writes Kendall in the Washington Post.