Los Altos teen falsely accused of "blackface." It derailed his life
Roger Williams was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1635 due to his controversial religious and political beliefs. He advocated for separation of church and state, religious freedom, and fair treatment of Native Americans. Photo by Peter F. Rothermel, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Holden Hughes, Mountain View high-schooler posted a picture of himself wearing an acne mask. It went viral—for all the wrong (and false) reasons. A chilling local case study in the tyranny of Silicon Valley's racialist, left-wing cancel culture—and the abject failure of leadership institutions to behave ethically. The exceptional Free Press reports.
In the fall of 2021, Holden Hughes sat on a couch in the corner of his football coach’s living room, sweating with anxiety. It was the beginning of his freshman year at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, and he was surrounded by a dozen or so new teammates. They’d gathered to watch each other’s high school football reels.
His coach connected a computer to the television, and typed each guy’s name into Google, one by one.
“H-U-G-H-E-S . . . ”
Holden’s heart pounded with each letter the coach punched into the keyboard. All he could think about was whether or not this would be the moment his new teammates would find out about his past.
But when the coach pressed “enter,” all that popped up on the screen were some old football videos. Nothing about an upcoming trial. Nothing about a picture of him that had gone viral in 2020, upending the lives of his entire family.
He let out a sigh of relief—the biggest one of his life so far, he told me. He didn’t have to explain himself. At least not yet.
Throughout college, Hughes carefully guarded his secret—at first never mentioning it, then sharing it with a trusted few, then opening up a little more. Now, having just graduated, he’s ready to tell his story in public for the first time in The Free Press.
That story starts with a photograph, casually snapped in 2017—when he was just 14—and promptly forgotten about.
Hughes, then 17, was asleep in his childhood bedroom in Los Altos, California, when his younger brother barged through the door, woke him up, and told him to check his phone. Hughes had over a dozen missed calls from a close friend.
Hughes called back, and his friend—who was, according to Hughes, “distraught”—said, “Check Snapchat.”
Hughes did what he was told, and that’s when he saw it: the 3-year-old selfie of him and two other buddies. All of them were wearing acne masks—a common over-the-counter skin-care product that’s essentially a very thick cream that you smear all over your face. The masks were dark green.
The picture had been posted dozens of times, by different people—some of them high school classmates, others complete strangers—along with captions and comments that he, at first, found inexplicable.
“Thank You Holden Hughes,” one local wrote on Facebook, “we know who you truly are!!”
“Disgusting. Shameful. Completely horrendous,” somebody posted.
“Hitler’s Kids it’s in their blood line,” read another comment, from a stranger.
“It’s a Hate Crime Point Blank!” read one more.
“It’s absurd that through all the things going on that kids would have the audacity to do some shit like this,” an alum of Hughes’s high school posted on Facebook. “#Fuckracism.”
Slowly, it dawned on Hughes that, while he saw an innocent photo of three teenage friends wearing a dark-green acne mask, the internet saw something very different: blackface.
His first thought was: This can’t actually be real.
Remember what America was like in June 2020. Most of us were stuck at home, glued to our phones, because of the Covid lockdown. California was 10 weeks into a mandatory stay-at-home order. And, in bright-blue counties like Santa Clara, where Hughes grew up, people were hyper-alert to racism: It had been mere weeks since the video of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis had gone viral, and fiery protests against racial injustice were still taking place in major cities across the U.S.
And so, in Los Altos, the picture of Holden and his friends went off like a bomb.
Within 24 hours, he would not only be kicked off his football team—the one he thought would secure him college admission, and potentially a scholarship—but he was also told he was no longer welcome at Saint Francis High School, the fancy private Catholic institution he had attended in Mountain View, where tuition currently costs over $28,850 a year. Within a week, his family would feel pressured to leave town for the summer. By the fall, Hughes was living in a different state, a 12-hour drive from his mom and brother, friendless and miserable. He told me the decision-makers at Saint Francis never asked him for his side of the story. (The school did not comment on this particular allegation.)
So, he and his family decided to sue Saint Francis. The lawsuit argued that the school defamed the children and violated their due process rights by de facto expelling them without investigating what happened. The legal battle dragged on, hanging over Hughes as he tried to start a whole new life in Utah.
“It was always kind of like lurking in the back of my mind,” Hughes told me. “Just always the thought of, like: What if this person knows? What if they go and tell everybody at the school, and I get outed here, too?”
At last, in May 2024, Hughes and his fellow plaintiff won a major ruling in California’s courts. Though the jury rejected the defamation claims, it did find that the school had not granted the boys their right to a “fair procedure.” In the end, both boys were awarded a total of $1 million and an additional $70,000 each for tuition reimbursement. A spokesperson from Saint Francis told me that the school “respectfully disagreed with the jury’s finding” that the disciplinary process had been unfair.
This is the thing about the flurry of online cancellations that took place in 2020: It could have happened to anyone. There is probably something, deep in the Facebook page of a friend, that—with the wrong caption—could have gotten you fired back then. Your child has probably done something, on the internet, that—if it blew up—could ruin their life. And yes, America is different now. The fervor of 2020’s “racial reckoning” has subsided; support for the Black Lives Matter movement, for example, has dropped by at least a quarter in the last five years. Many of the powerful figures who lost jobs or friends back then for saying the wrong thing have bounced back; some of them have made a name for themselves by speaking out against these injustices. But for every famous person who was canceled, there are many more ordinary Americans who were cast out of their communities—without a platform, or the connections, or the skills to tell their own stories—and these people are still suffering today.
Earlier this year, I wrote in The Free Press about two sixth graders in Evanston, Illinois, who were accused by their school of committing a “hate crime” because one of them had been tying nooses on the playground. The police later described the nooses as a “cry for help,” noting that one of the accused boys had a history of mental health issues. The school never corrected the narrative. Holden’s story, in a way, is a sequel to that event: It’s about what happens when the boy falsely accused of committing a “hate crime” by his school grows up. It’s about how the lie can follow you into adulthood, curbing your ambitions, ruining your relationships, and destroying your interest in life.
It’s been half a decade since he was publicly condemned as a “racist”—which in 2020, Hughes said, “was one of the very worst things that you could be labeled as”—and, he said, he’s been living a “double life” every day since. “Yes, this was five years ago,” Hughes told me with a shrug, his foot tapping on the ground so vigorously I can feel the floor beneath us shaking. “But this changed the whole entire trajectory of my life, separated our family, changed me as a person, and is something that not only sticks with me now, but will stick with me forever."
Set in a progressive county in a progressive state, with a posh reputation, Saint Francis High School was exactly the kind of California institution that felt compelled to take a long, hard look at itself during the weeks that the Black Lives Matter movement swept across the United States.
For one thing, he was a pariah. On Monday, June 8, a few days after he was forced out of Saint Francis, a parent held a Black Lives Matter protest in front of the school, having used the photo of Holden to promote it on Facebook. “This is a protest to the outrageous behavior that current and former students from SFHS did,” she wrote, “A George Floyd instagram account making fun of his death, the fact that he could not breath[e] and kids participating in black face and thinking that this is all a joke.” (This parent did not reply to a request for comment.)
After the protest, Jason Curtis, the school’s president, confirmed to a local journalist that one of the incidents being investigated by the school involved the use of blackface. He said the students involved faced “serious consequences.”
As I found in Evanston, Illinois: A narrative, once established, isn’t always easy to correct. In a local news story announcing Saint Francis had settled last May, an anonymous commenter wrote that “these boys were cleary [sic] implying racial harm and now their [sic] paid racists! Despite the money given to them the world will never forget what they did!!”
Read the whole thing here.
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