A month ago, the “East is Beast” Instagram account — a student-run school spirit page with more than 700 followers — posted a racial attack on Hispanic families at a soccer game, encouraging fans to call Immigration and Customs Enforcement on SM West attendees. As later shared by West students in the first Youth Equity Stewardship meeting of the year, several families immediately left the game, fearing for their safety.
In the following week, I saw a surge of momentum from several SM East clubs condemning the situation in dozens of social media statements, resulting in the removal of the account.
It’s great to see the amount of energy our school can channel against these kinds of hateful acts. But was the page taken down because a student — still anonymous and enrolled at our school — felt remorse and realized their hateful actions could potentially shatter families?
More likely, that the student who deleted the account was motivated purely by the fear of academic and legal repercussions. And so, although the account is gone, the damage remains and the East community is no less discriminatory.
The problem is that we only address the crisis of racism at our school through patching up the extreme symptoms: racial assaults in the hallways, online threats at soccer games. We fail to consider the gradual causes of the issue — the thousand ways in which our students are, year after year, not taught how to empathize in a country still fraught with violent, corrosive racism.
Our school is more than 83% white, according to Niche. On top of that, a great portion of our student body is deeply intertwined with country club culture, from Carriage Club to Milburn to Indian Hills — environments where kids lack opportunities to socialize with different races or economic backgrounds.
It’s all too easy for kids growing up in their predominantly white school and even more homogenous country club to never internalize the reality of modern racial struggles. That’s what East is seeing when our kids reach high school, in our classrooms full of microaggressions and stereotyping.
It’s this fundamental lack of diverse perspectives that not only allows for extreme incidents like the Instagram post, but raises a broad demographic that’s willing to accept and even make light of these incidents — including the hundreds of students and parents who had been following “East is Beast.”
It was almost certainly not a fortified belief in racial superiority and the necessary deportation of Hispanic families that caused the student a month ago to press “post.”
To them, it was a joke.
And a joke is not some isolated thing, some spur-of-the-moment impulse that reflects nothing about our own experiences. What we share as comedy, what we expect to garner laughs, are things that have made our peers laugh in the past.
This post isn’t the result of a single student’s hateful worldview — it’s the product of a broad portion of our community that has never learned the harm of the worldviews it fosters.
Many of us were willing to condemn the racial assault two years ago in the hallways. But we forget that the other problem is that when a walkout was staged and the Harbinger livestreamed it on Instagram, our student body was making racial jokes about a walkout staged for a girl that was beaten.
Crime rates down at the school. Chocolate people going crazy. Three-fifths of the school showed up. These comments, comments that collected dozens of likes, can be just as bruising to our community as thrown fists.
A demographic that is born and raised never understanding the damaging effects of racism is a much harder demon for our administration to slay. It requires more than halfhearted slideshows presented during seminar on famous minorities from Wikipedia.
And as much as I support the Y.E.S. initiative, which holds conferences for student leaders to plan action against injustice, it can only do so much as a program that only reaches out to the subset of students already most mindful about race.
To combat the unique challenges our school faces, we need to add new elements to our core curriculum that all of East’s students will participate in. In our history and English classes, we should integrate analysis of critical race theory throughout the curriculum: the history of redlining, legislative discrimination, denied loans and deferred promises.
But as we’re integrating that learning, we need to keep an emphasis on the present and the local. Too many of our students hold the assumption — based on their upbringing — that we are in some post-racial America. We are not, and currently may be walking backwards.
Curriculum change may be hard for our school because the country, state and district don’t mandate it. But bigotry has its roots in ignorance. As a place of learning, we need to be doing more than applying reactive band-aids when students commit hate crimes — aren’t we supposed to be teaching them better?
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