April Eberhardt: Polishing brass on the Titanic

By April Eberhardt

Polishing brass on the Titanic describes the futile act of making something appear less egregious while ignoring the catastrophe beneath it.

The recent Spokane County jury verdict against Mead School District found it liable and ordered approximately $17 million in damages to two former students and their families after the students – one Black and one white – were assaulted at a school football camp in 2023. This monetary win acknowledges devastating harm. It does not contend with the psychological stain of racialized violence. Money is the least, not the best, that this district should do.

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. That proof in the Mead case was omitted on purpose by district leadership. The distinction matters because motive matters. Changing the label does not change the racism; it changes the narrative intended to lead the public.

A lack of transparency rarely operates in isolation. It is often accompanied by strategic language that reshapes public perception. Calling conduct “hazing” instead of examining racially motivated behavior is an exercise in equivocation, euphemistic labeling, minimization, false characterization and suppression of material facts. These rhetorical devices do more than soften the truth. They deny accountability.

For centuries, dominant culture has reached for a dilution solution to disguise racial hatred. When I read about the verdict or watched recent reports, the word hazing jumps to the front of nearly every explanation. That single word allows institutions and communities to look away from the deeper questions of racial hierarchy, dehumanization, bigotry, and power.

The savagery at the center of this case did not emerge from nowhere. It belongs to a historical continuum. It echoes the same racial degradation that entertained white mobs as Black bodies dangled from trees. It echoes the same violence repackaged into childhood games like Hangman, where a stick figure moved closer to death with every misplaced letter. The symbols change; the willingness to diminish Black humanity does not. Shout out to social media influencer and truth teller Ashley B (IG @ashleytheebarroness) for calling a spade a spade. Honesty is freedom.

We are being conditioned not to believe our lying eyes. Racial violence becomes hazing because calling it racism would demand real accountability. The collective insistence on softening the edges is debilitating.

Families should never have to play cat and mouse with a public institution to obtain records concerning complaints they filed. Compliance is not a courtesy. Transparency is a legal obligation. When institutions appear more committed to protecting themselves than confronting racial harm, public trust erodes long before a courtroom ever enters the picture.

Equally important is this conversation: Who gets to define Black trauma? Certainly not those who perpetuate it with complicity. For centuries, Black Americans have lived with the cumulative effects of racism, humiliation, exclusion and violence. Those experiences do not always appear through grades, attendance records or visible emotional breakdowns. They live in hypervigilance, anxiety, mistrust and isolation. W.E.B. Du Bois called it 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 enabled racial harm presume to determine whether the psychological consequences are sufficiently severe. There is profound irony in asking those who ignored racial trauma to become judges of its validity.

White institutions cannot continue to violate Black humanity, write a check, and expect payment itself to represent justice. Financial settlements acknowledge harm, but they do not dismantle the culture that produced it. They do not restore dignity, interrupt the patterns that continue to expose Black children to racial degradation, or rebuild public trust. Real accountability requires more than monetary damages. It requires abolition and the moral courage to confront racism without euphemism.

As America commemorates 250 years of independence this month, we should ask whose freedom we are celebrating if children are expected to endure racial degradation in public schools protected by district corruption.

Polishing the brass does not stop the ship from sinking.

Justice is more than a monetary damages award. It requires ethical fortitude. 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.

Racism cannot be paid off. It is a python that has to die before it squeezes us to death.

April Eberhardt is editor of The Black Lens in Spokane. This is an abridged version of a piece that appeared in The Black Lens, to read the full version, visit www.blacklensnews.com/opinion.