In March 2025, a report by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) raised concerns about student-reported use of racial slurs on campus. WASC is an organization that evaluates and accredits schools. They conduct comprehensive evaluations of school curriculum, equity and climate every six years, providing feedback on areas of growth. FHS WASC coordinator for the 2024-25 school year and US History teacher Thomas Hammond explained that this was the first time racial slurs came up in a WASC evaluation.
FHS staff are currently in the process of planning a way to address the use of the n-word. FHS Principal Brian Emmert explained one potential step would be to bring speakers from SJSU’s BSU to speak to staff. There has been discussion about different methods that can be used to correct students’ vocabulary, and FHS English teacher Alyssa Long noted the difficulty navigating this process.
“As a Lit teacher, language is super important, and policing language is definitely like a political statement, and not policing language is also a political statement,” Long said. “So I feel oftentimes that I’m in sort of an area of being conflicted.”
Long has been teaching at FHS for 21 years, and noted the recent increase in the word’s usage among students.
“It has become more prevalent, I would say, in the last year,” Long said.
The n-word is deeply rooted in the slave trade and is widely considered offensive. For many, the word has remained a constant reminder of the U.S.’s racist roots. Hearing it in school hallways and classrooms, seeing it in comment sections on social media. Despite knowledge of the racist background of the word, many non-Black people use the word daily. FHS is not immune to this epidemic. Students and teachers note that the n-word is most commonly used in casual conversation.
“It just goes unnoticed,” FHS senior and BSU Vice President Kiya Alemu said. “I think it should be pointed out more. It should be called out more by teachers.”
FHS English teacher and BSU advisor Alexis Parker noted that FHS stood out compared to previous schools she worked at regarding policies about language use.
“Majority of the places that I went to, there was very, very low tolerance for such language,” Parker said. “There was very serious consequences for it. I think we show what we value by the effort that we put into it. It’s similar with the bikes on campus, right? You hear it all the time, ‘Walk your bike, walk your bike.’ There’s signs, there are announcements, everybody says it, but we don’t have the same thing with the type of language [with the n-word]. It kind of makes it seem like nobody cares.”
The Phoenix’s journalists report hearing the word daily. While the frequency of the word’s usage may make it seem normalized, Black students and teachers at FHS report that it still causes them emotional anguish.
“[In my] first two weeks, I think I went home and cried on my way home several times because I had never heard the n-word so much, particularly by non-Black students,” Parker said. “And then after a while, you, I hate to say, get used to it. And then I started to realize, I hated that I was getting used to it, because you start to get numb to the pain, as I’ve heard from many of my kids.”
The n-word is commonly used online, in music or on social media, which can lead to students picking up the word as a part of their vocabulary without realizing the weight the word carries, Long explained.
“I feel like the students who use it are using it without the knowledge of what it might mean to somebody else, and are using it because other people are using it,” Long said. “[They are] sort of just adopting the vocabulary of the videos that they’re watching, or the streamers that they’re listening to, or the people that they’re hanging out with, not necessarily being intentional about their vocabulary choices.”
A study by California State University, Sacramento, noted that the n-word in hip hop music during the hip hop “Golden Age,” in the 80s and 90s, became a way to self-reference, create solidarity and to bring attention to the prevalence of racial discrimination.
“The popularization of rap music in its current state has glamorized [the n-word] — a term previously used to convey racial inequality, misogyny and hyper-masculinity,” according to the study.
Though the term is used colloquially by many to signal solidarity or endearment, not everybody feels the same way.
“I can’t imagine a situation where it would be necessary,” Long said. “I don’t use it personally, but I understand other people have tried to reclaim the word, or [are] choosing to reclaim the word.”
Regardless of the n-word’s increased use among Black communities, it is still considered unacceptable for those outside of those communities to say it.
“[The n-word] just holds weight to a certain group of people, and it’s usually said by people that are not from that group,” Alemu said. “I’d want to tell people [to] just try to understand where we come from, our perspective better and stop using [it].”
Long expressed that teacher intervention is not always the best solution. In her experience, students often respond better to conversations from peers, leading to real change in campus culture.
“I think that is going to make a student think more than an adult just policing language out of context,” Long said. “That’s going to make more change in that student’s actual vocabulary, because there’s not going to be a staff member everywhere they go, but there are peers everywhere they go on campus, so if they can remember that the words that they say can have impact on other peers, I think that’s going to matter more to ultimately changing the actual vocabulary that’s in usage. And I think we did something similar with the r-word. We did something similar with gay being used as an insult, and made positive change. So I think it’s definitely something that Fremont is capable of doing.”
The FHS staff has faced similar problems in the past and seen success in addressing the use of other harmful language.
“Over the years, we’ve done some stuff around antisemitism, we’ve done some stuff around islamophobia, we did stuff again around LGBTQ, but we haven’t done anything specifically around the use of the n-word, which is one that has come up,” Emmert said. “And so we’re in the process.”
Although there is not yet a concrete resolution, the faculty at FHS understand the gravity of the issue, and are working on a long-lasting solution.
“Moving forward, we as a staff agree that that is something that absolutely needs to be addressed as quickly as possible, but also methodically,” Hammond said.
