But now,many of them don’t need to wait until Halloween to engage in this racist tradition.

High school students in Sullivan, Missouri were criticized after donning blackface for an intramural football game, which their principal said fueled a misunderstanding, the Riverfront Times reported.

“I thought, ‘Oh, they don’t mean anything by it. Just let it go. No one thinks anything of it,’” Sullivan High School principal Jennifer Schmidt. “I didn’t think anyone did. Evidently, someone did.”

According to Schmidt, in previous years the girls have wore combinations of the schools’ colors — black and gold. But when the senior girls arrived prior to the November 5 game, they discovered everyone had brought the same color face paint — black.

“So that’s what they wore,” says Schmidt. “There was nothing racial about it. They didn’t have any other intention other than to just try to intimidate the underclassmen.”

The fact that schools around the country are justifying white supremacist traditions such as blackface is further evidence of the need forMelanoid Empowerment.