Teacher Who Went Viral After Video Of Students Removing His Braids Says Backlash Was Due To Him Being ‘A Young, Handsome, Black Man’

Marquise White, a Black school teacher who recently went viral for allowing his female students to remove his braids in the classroom, believes his looks played a role in the public’s outrage.

The science teacher was widely criticized after posting a TikTok video showing a few of his female students helping him take his braids down. This sparked numerous discussions debating whether it was inappropriate or not.

On May 18, The Shade Room shared a post of White, known as JaQ Lee on TikTok, to explain himself after being ridiculed. Although he admitted the situation people witnessed was “unprofessional,” [according to the dictionary’s definition of the word inappropriate,] Not sure I understand what’s being said here. Did he reference the dictionary’s definition? Let’s reword to make clearer for reader the principal and students’ parents had zero issues with his TikTok videos. He also shared that he’s an “eclectic, unconventional, and in some ways unprofessional teacher.”

The next day, The Shade Room posted another semi-long TikTok of the middle school instructor calling out two other school teachers for posting content that should’ve sparked the same fury. The first video he shared in the background of him talking was a white male teacher whose female students bedazzled his bald head. The second unknown person he calls out is a woman who tweeted a picture of buttocks with the question, “Y’all think my 10th graders looking at me?” White used these two situations to question why they weren’t persecuted like he was.

“I firmly believe that I was attacked, and let me add this in here, mainly attacked by my own community,” he said per Vibe. “I was mainly attacked by my own community for the most part. Anyway, I firmly believe that I was attacked because I’m a young, handsome, Black man.”

He continued: “People who watched this video and thought anything weird, or anything suggestive, saw me, was attracted to me. I got tattoos, I got an attractive energy, [an] attractive aura, you can sense that through the video. And, since you can sense that attractiveness, or sense you are attracted to me, you projected your own thoughts, ideologies, traumas, and experiences, onto me and my children. And that is a hill I’m willing to die on 1000% of the time.”

Despite news spreading like wildfire that he was immediately terminated from his teaching position, he denied the reports and said he still has his job at Maya Angelou French Immersion School in Hillcrest Heights. According to WUSA 9, he was “reassigned out of the classroom pending the outcome of the investigation.”