Texan Allegedly Bullied Over His Skin Color Appeals To SCOTUS

Inside the Texas Capitol, on the back wall of the Senate chamber hangs a hard-to-miss oil canvas smattered with carefully painted soldiers wielding swords and cannons. The colorful battle scene depicts a pivotal moment in the Texas Revolution when approximately 900 Texas soldiers managed to defeat a much larger group of soldiers from the Mexican army at the Battle of San Jacinto in just 18 minutes.

One of the most famous Henry McArdle illustrations in the frame shows General Sam Houston, whose horse was just shot out from beneath him, being beckoned by an “unnamed and unarmed aid” offering him a new mount. The mystery man is claimed by eighth-generation Texan Brooks Warden, who, nearly 200 years after seven of his ancestors fought in the battle of San Jacinto, faces a very different and very important battle of his own.

Twenty-one-year-old Warden is a plaintiff in a years-long lawsuit alleging students and school administrators in the Austin Independent School District in Texas violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through repeated racial harassment.

“Starting when I was 12 up until the end of high school, I was attacked physically and emotionally because of my race. Being a white Christian, conservative male, I was beaten. They threatened to kill me and verbally abused me daily,” Warden told The Federalist.

Until now, Warden was unnamed due to his status as a minor when the lawsuit was filed. Now that he’s surpassed his teenage years and there is a new development in his case — a petition for a writ of certiorari to the U.S. Supreme Court — Warden is ready to speak about the intense bullying siege he faced from faculty and peers alike.

“I know what I believe, and I won’t be swayed. I’ve taken punches to the face for defending the U.S. Constitution,” he said. “I was never scared to speak my mind. I was terrified to walk down the halls, though.”

Battle Scars

The mistreatment started in October 2017 shortly after then-tween Warden showed up to an outdoor middle school field trip in a Make America Great Again hat. By the time he graduated from middle school in May 2018 (wearing the same iconic red cap), Warden said he had been taunted as a lover of school shootings, scolded for “the evils of the white race in American history,” called “Whitey” by a teacher’s aide, and depicted by a fellow student in a meme as a “hooded Ku Klux Klansman.”

Warden’s parents intervened on his behalf numerous times but were brushed off by the school. He said the middle school principal repeatedly promised them she would take action to curb the incidents, but by spring 2018, she had joined in the bullying, too. In one instance, Warden recalled the principal proceeded to “rip my headphones out of my ears and said, ‘Are you listening to Dixie?’”

“There was always disdain from the administrators for me and my family,” Warden said. “Just the looks I would get walking down the hallway, not from students, but from teachers. I would get — I hate to use this term — but I would get death glares from teachers and assistant principals and principals.”

Warden felt little reprieve when he left O. Henry Middle School for the “oldest continuously operating public high school in Texas,” Austin High School. There, he said he was called “school shooter” for centering one of his projects around the Second Amendment, smeared as a “f-cking racist,” and “punched,” “kicked,” and “thrown to the ground” — presumably over his skin color.

“The guy that attacked me in class told his friends that he beat me up because I was a white boy. His words. And the district has never refuted that,” Warden said.

The administrators in the predominantly Democrat, Hispanic-heavy district, according to Warden, once again did nothing to stop the harassment. Another time, an English teacher mocked Warden by asking, “‘Are you listening to white gospel music?’ in a very demeaning tone.” The tunes in question included a refined blend of what Warden told me were mostly Tennessee Ernie Ford and Andy Griffith songs.

Warden said the schools’ decisions to “make an example out of me” not only encouraged the bad behavior toward him to continue but prompted other white Christian conservative kids to self-censor out of fear that they might end up with bruises on their faces like Warden.

The experiences also pushed him to further embrace his faith.

“I have a very, very strong and personal relationship with Jesus Christ. I was not much of a praying person when all of this started, but I quickly realized I could not walk through this alone,” Warden said.

It was shortly after a student allegedly threatened Warden that he was going to “kill all Trump supporters” that the Covid-19 panic began to set in and schools in the blue city were shut down. The chaos gave Warden a seamless excuse to shift to homeschooling for the rest of his time in high school.

The suffering he endured at the hands of AISD, however, did not disappear.

“I was 12 when adults started to verbally attack me, people that should be there to protect and teach, and it’s changed how I look at everything,” Warden admitted. “I have kind of more of a fight or flight type of view how I look at everything. I just kind of have a hardened heart. Really sad to say, but it’s true.”

Warden left the AISD system nearly five years ago, but he’s confident that harassment didn’t stop with him, especially because some of the same faculty who joined the dogpile still work in Austin schools. Warden, a self-proclaimed car guy, said he noticed his former principal’s vehicle sitting out front of his old middle school when he drove by just a few days ago.

Another Chance at Victory

Warden’s experience in AISD prompted him to sue. The district court responsible for deciding Warden’s case, however, quickly dismissed it, alleging a failure to state a claim. The Fifth Circuit panel agreed with this decision. In an en banc review, an evenly divided panel of Fifth Circuit Appeals judges also claimed that Warden’s case did not qualify as race-based harassment.

In his dissent, Judge James Ho lamented his fellow judges’ hasty dismissal and noted that Warden was “harassed on multiple occasions for multiple reasons — but being white was absolutely one of them.” He went on to write that “our culture today increasingly accepts (if not celebrates) racism against whites.”

“So it’s not surprising that more institutions increasingly believe that they have cultural permission to tolerate (if not encourage) racism against whites, under the guise of promoting diversity. Racism is now edgy and exciting — so long as it’s against whites,” Ho continued. “But cultural permission is not Congressional permission. Federal laws like Title VI prohibit discrimination on the basis of race. So it may be politically correct in certain circles to discriminate against whites. But politically correct does not mean legally correct.”

In the writ of certiorari petition filed by the Center for American Liberty on behalf of Warden on Monday, attorneys referenced Ho’s points as the reason the Supreme Court should weigh in.

“As Judge Ho correctly observed, the en banc concurrence — like the Sixth Circuit in Ames — impliedly held Brooks to a higher legal standard because he is white,” the petition states. “And as Judge Ho pointed out, this Court’s forthcoming decision could alter the outcome of this case because the heightened standard the en banc concurrence applied reflects the same error as the Sixth Circuit in Ames — that is, imposing a heightened legal standard on plaintiffs from majority populations.”

The Spirit of San Jacinto

In Warden, nearly two centuries after the battle that helped seal Texas’ independence from Mexico, the spirit of San Jacinto lives on. He may be battling a much bigger cultural norm, as Ho hinted in his Fifth Circuit dissent, but he’s not retreating yet.

In fact, Warden feels invigorated and encouraged by the cultural shift already occurring under the second Trump administration.

“Before, I used to fear getting a brick thrown at my head, only because that happened so much. Now, the left, they just seem tired of throwing bricks at people and yelling, ‘You’re a racist,’ and everything that I was called and told every day of my school career, from 12 till 2020,” Warden said.

AISD has 30 days to respond to the Supreme Court petition. Until then or until the high bench decides if it will weigh in on whether Warden can claim racial harassment “even if the ‘primary impetus’ for the harassment was the plaintiff’s political views,” Warden will continue life as usual in the Lone Star State.

Despite the abuse he endured during some of the most formative years of his life, Warden has become a successful young man. He runs his own automotive business, spends his free time buffing up his knowledge of the past (“Don’t get me started talking history, or we’re gonna be here a long time,” he told me), and recently sang a duet with his father at the Grand Ole Opry.

Warden no doubt suffered some battle scars along the way, but much like his Texan ancestors, he knows he must keep fighting for justice no matter how outmanned and outgunned by the culture or the lower courts he may appear.

Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on X @jordanboydtx.