When teachers encourage Racial Discrimination
She sat out the anthem in protest. Her teacher said
‘go back to your country,’ students say.
The students were
assembled in the auditorium of their high school on Chicago’s North Side, there
to celebrate Hispanic heritage — but first, their teachers told them, they had
to stand for the national anthem.
A group of students,
who thought the request unusual, decided to remain seated. It was a silent but
recognizable condemnation of racial injustice. Yet, before the anthem had even
ended, they said, their demonstration made them the target of just the sort of
discrimination they were protesting.
When one student — a
Latina and U.S. citizen — refused a teacher’s pointed direction to stand, she
said he replied with an infamously racist line: “Go back to your country.” The
same teacher turned to a black student, who was also sitting down, and asked
whether she was part of the public school system’s free and reduced lunch
program, telling her she should stand for the people who have died for the
country, the students said.
The teacher’s alleged
remark appears to be just the latest example of caustic rhetoric that began in
the White House and seeped into schools, fueling attacks and bullying against
students of color. Since 2016, President Trump’s words have been used to harass
children and teens at least 300 times, according to a recent Washington Post analysis.
Among the phrases
often deployed: “Go back to where you came from” or “Go back to Mexico” or “Go
back behind the wall” — all derivatives of Trump’s July 2019 tweet telling four congresswomen of color that
they should “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from
which they came.”
Also read.
Comments
Post a Comment