As the Southern Poverty Law Center reported last month, the racist vitriol associated with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump negatively affects students of color throughout the country. A number of Latino high school students recently earned the right to fight that vitriol in their own school. 

As The Guardian reported Tuesday (May 3), about six Latino students at Newport Harbor High School in Orange County, California, faced pushback from their principal after wearing shirts reading "Dump Trump" on Friday (April 29). The students wore the shirts in response to racist and pro-Trump taunts and graffiti around their school, as well as one friend being assaulted during an anti-Trump protest.  

Principal Sean Boulton told one student, 16-year-old Angelina Alvarez, that she and her friends had to change out of their shirts for their own safety. As Alvarez told The Guardian, the principal’s words smacked of hypocrisy as other students wore pro-Trump shirts without any punishment:

"They’ve worn the shirts all this time, and we wear a shirt for one period and we get called up right away," Angelina said. "It’s not like we’re doing anything violent. We’re just standing up for ourselves."

While Boulton insisted the school didn’t know about the taunts and addressed the graffiti incidents, the students pushed for and won the right to wear the shirts.