White high school students in Michigan saying they’d like to bring back slavery shows racism is still alive
Racism is as American as apple pie, baseball and handguns. If any of us thought it was a relic of the past or something relegated to the Deep South, we were sorely mistaken.
Over this past Memorial Day weekend, several white high school students from Grosse Pointe South High School in Grosse Pointe Farms, Mich., a suburb of Detroit, recorded a video where they discussed what they’d love to do if they were elected president in 2040. Among their ideas were bringing back slavery, burning black people with brands and sending them back to Africa.
This isn’t really coming as a surprise to people who live there. In March, four white students from the same high school were suspended for writing racial epithets on their bodies and posting pictures of it on Instagram. Two additional white students were then suspended for threatening people who reported it. Erika Erickson, a reporter for Fox2 in Detroit tweeted that this is actually the fourth incident of racism from the school.
Racism, it appears, is pretty doggone normal at Grosse Pointe South High School, but we’re seeing racist incident after incident among young white teens all over America.
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On Thursday, we learned that a young black teenager named Dayshen McKenzie died from an asthma attack after being chased by an armed white mob calling him the n-word on Staten Island, N.Y.
Last week, a noose was found hanging on the campus of DePaul University after a week of protests.
High school basketball teams in Iowa and Indiana were subjected to racist taunts from white fans earlier this year.
Middle school students in Alabama were recently subjected to an outrageously racist math test.
Racist graffiti was recently painted on the walls of the chapel at Northwestern University.
This is a but sample of the dozens and dozens of racist incidents which happened to make the news. No doubt, many, if not most, have gone unreported.
Nonetheless, here we are, in 2016, staring down problems that could have been cut and pasted from 1926 or 1956. Being black in America is still a very dangerous thing. People still hate your guts because of the color of your skin, and, it appears, they are just as willing to let people know about it as they have been in generations past.
It’s a mess and my gut tells me that it’s only going to get worse in the age of Donald Trump.