As the nation reckons with the role that the over-expansion of zero-tolerance discipline policies has played in the disproportionate disciplining of Black girls and Black children as a whole, restorative justice (RJ) has taken center stage in the quest for change. This paper explores the tensions that arise when moving from restorative justice theory to practice. Drawing upon data from a critical ethnographic study, and employing intersectionality as a theoretical frame, this paper explores how one school struggled to implement a genuinely restorative model for Black girls based on their inability to engage, with fidelity, the foundational principles of restorative justice. Without a firm grasp of and commitment to the core principles of RJ, the restorative process in this school was coopted such that it reproduced the inequities it was hoping to disrupt and functioned as zero-tolerance discipline by another name.