Shawnee Mission East students launch campaign to challenge hateful words

With a black marker on a white board, high school student Georgia Weigel jotted down her feelings in bold letters, then held up the placard and posed for a photo.

“You’re the whitest black person I know.”

“I live with white parents and I’m half black and half white,” the Shawnee Mission East High School junior said. “People always tell me I don’t dress like a black girl or listen to black music. … I don’t think judging me by the pigment of my skin is very fair. ”

Weigel was one of more than 20 black students at East who on Wednesday prepared to launch an Instagram campaign — #itooameast, patterned after a similar photo campaign done last year by Harvard University students highlighting the faces and voices of black students who felt undervalued and unheard on that campus.

The East students, who gathered outside the school gym carrying their boards, were responding to a racially charged Instagram post that surfaced last month targeting African-American and Hispanic students and used the N-word several times.

“The only thing I hate more than South are ...” the anonymous post began. Then came the usual ugly slurs. It ended with “I go to the best school out of all ...SME.”

School officials said they have no way of knowing whether it was written by an East student, “or someone posing as an East student,” said Leigh Anne Neal, spokeswoman for the district.

The East incident came to light as video of a busload of Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity members singing a racist chant at the University of Oklahoma went viral on social media.

That prompted an emphatic response, across the country and on the Norman campus, that racist acts won’t be tolerated.

University of Oklahoma President David Boren expelled two of the students seen singing in the bus video and kicked the whole fraternity off campus.

In a less publicized incident at the University of Kansas, members of the school’s Hispanic American Leadership Organization got an apology from Delta Delta Delta Sorority and Pi Kappa Phi Fraternity for their recent performance of “These Boots Were Made For Dancing,” featuring a character named Paco, a caricature of a Hispanic man dressed in a poncho, sombrero, and with a thick accent.

At East, when the Instagram post was brought to the attention of principal John McKinney, he “was appalled.”

“It’s horrible,” he said in an interview Wednesday. “It wasn’t just offensive to some students. It was offensive to me and offensive to every student. That is not welcome here. … It is not going to be tolerated.”

But McKinney said he was pleased with the way teachers and his students have responded to the hate-filled post.

“Not all teachable moments,” the principal said, “happen in the classroom and some catch you unawares, like this one did.”

East students saw the racist post and showed it to teacher David Muhammad.

It made him angry. It wasn’t the first time Muhammad had seen or heard teens make racially offensive comments. Days earlier a white student had posted a photo of herself locking arms with friends on Twitter and added the caption “me and my n----s.”

Muhammad, a young African-American history teacher at East, where 28 of the 1,666 students are black, explained to that student that the N-word in any form is never OK. She removed the post.

When Muhammad saw the racist Instagram post, he re-posted it with a response:

“To all you who respect me, and yourself, I encourage you to speak against this madness. It’s not OK. It’s not funny. It’s not just a joke. This is my crusade against nonsense. If I see ignorance I’m calling you out.”

That response, McKinney said, “did a really nice job of addressing it by encouraging students not to respond negatively. For every negative position to respond with three, four, or 10 positive posts.”

The black East students, who belong to a student group they call The Union, had been talking about doing a project all year, Muhammad said. When the Instagram post happened, “they decided that in light of other incidents around the country” — the “hands up” campaign in response to shootings of unarmed, young African-American men and the Oklahoma fraternity incident — that #itooameast was the best way to go.

“They wanted to do something that they could get out to everyone,” Muhammad said. “I tell my students that when something like this happens, you have to check it. But it is important how you check it. Academically rather than with emotion.”

So the East students filled white boards with their responses to what have become known as microaggressions — small but mounting slights — they’ve heard at school. They stood behind the boards for a photo shoot they will post to Instagram with the hash-tag #itooameast Thursday morning.

On her board, Tierra Rich-Nave wrote; “An Oreo is a cookie not an ethnic group.”

Calen Gilmore wrote, “I am not a criminal.”

Ricki Taylor wrote, “Please don’t stare at me during the slavery unit. I’m not the voice of all black people.”

During any discussion of black history, Harlem Renaissance or the civil rights movement, “I get blank stares,” Taylor said. “It makes me uncomfortable.”

Andrall Jackson-West wrote, “I’m not some type of superhuman when it comes to sports.”

He said other East student athletes “expect that just because I’m a black athlete I’m supposed to be stronger, faster and jump higher than everybody else.”

Dominick Hurde held his board high during a group photo: “I’m not black. I’m me.”

McKinney watched the students photograph one another for their campaign. He was seeing their boards for the first time.

“I can’t believe some of the things these students hear every day,” McKinney said. “What they are doing here is good. This will start a dialogue.”

This story was originally published March 11, 2015 at 9:52 PM with the headline "Shawnee Mission East students launch campaign to challenge hateful words."