We like to hope that the next generation is spared the sort of racism that we've experienced. Unfortunately, that does not seem to be the case, especially in today’s society.
One particular case involves a 12-year-old black girl who has been the target of several incidents of racial harassment at a Georgetown ISD middle school, according to the Dallas News.
If those incidents weren't bad enough, the girl’s father and civil rights attorney, Robert Ranco, alleges the middle school in question, James N. Tippit, hasn't appropriately disciplined the students who reportedly harassed his daughter.
Ranco told local newspaper Austin American-Statesman that the school neglected to suspend any of the students involved and refused to refer to the incidents as bullying.
It has been concluded that the girl "was a victim of more than one incident of racially harassing conduct," according to the Tippit Middle School report via a document obtained by the Statesman. The school report documented three different incidents, in fact.
One report cited a March incident, in which a girl followed Ranco's daughter around a tennis court, holding a piece of trash as a makeshift whip, reportedly screaming at her, "You're my slave now!"
That same month, a boy said, "You're not really going to take the word of a BLACK person over the word of a WHITE person, are you?," after the girl reported him regarding a cafeteria dispute.
A couple of months later, in May, the same girl who pretended to whip Ranco’s daughter asked a fellow male classmate about his seating arrangement; the boy moved so he wouldn't be sitting next to Ranco's daughter.
Why did he move?
“Because I don’t sit next to apes,” he said. The girl who made the whip also reportedly pulled up a photo of an ape on her cellphone telling Ranco’s daughter, “This is what you look like.”
The Statesman reports that Tippit's report doesn't specify what kind of discipline the students faced, but that the document did say that they were provided "additional re-teaching.”
Ranco worried about the effects these incidents will have on his daughter's emotional well-being. "Georgetown ISD has had a least a few suicides in the last five years resulting from bullying," he told the Statesman, "I don’t have that concern for my daughter, but I’m sure other parents didn’t think their kids were suicidal, either.”
As of now, the school has not issued further statements on how officials intend to address these ugly racial episodes.