School Policy Against Wearing Black Paint on Faces?

Here is an email that I received from one of my regular readers:

• A Conservative Teacher, at my high school we have something called spirit week, which is a week where students have different dress up days and such to encourage school spirit. One of these dress up days is a day where each class wears a certain color- seniors dress in black, juniors in white, sophomores in yellow, freshman in red, etc. One of my seniors dressed up in all black and thought it would be cool to also paint his face black to show his school spirit. Unfortunately, our school has a policy against wearing black paint on one's face, so this student was called down to the office and told to wash it off. There is no policy about wearing white paint or yellow paint or red paint on one's face, but there is a policy in our school handbook that does forbid wearing all black paint on one's face because doing so would be racist. Is there some way that I can help this student out so that he isn't punished further? Thank you, Regular Reader (name edited out for protection).

My reaction to hearing something like this is to laugh, because it demonstrates how politically correct public education is- it is just silly to think that someone felt it was correct to put in a student code of conduct a rule that says that a student isn't allowed to wear black paint on his face because doing so would encourage and inspire racism. So many things are wrong with this that I don't even know where to start or what to say to the teacher!