Racism at Park Hill South is part of a years-long pattern, students of color say
Kacy Lewallen remembers the comments from her mostly white classmates at Park Hill South High School — some of whom she considered friends.
“You’re not really Black,” they told her.
“You’re the whitest Black person I know.”
“You don’t act like a Black person.”
Lewallen graduated from Park Hill South in 2019. But after a group of students there circulated a racist petition online to bring back slavery, she’s been reminded of her experiences as one of the school’s few Black students.
What she — and so many other people of color — experienced are microaggressions, which often happen in regard to race, sex and gender. Over time, the psychological impact of those interactions can take a toll.
One parent, who has a Black son attending Park Hill South, told The Star that the school’s administration hasn’t been proactive in its handling of racism.
“They just completely brush it off until it’s in the media and it’s a big deal and then they don’t tolerate stuff like that,” said the parent, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation for her son. “My son was called a monkey, he was called racial slurs multiple times.”
Last week, Park Hill South principal Kerrie Herren said the school is grappling with racism in the same way the wider community is. Herren said that in the past few days, he has had several discussions with parents, students and staff about how the school handles racism.
But for parents and former students there, the petition is just the latest such incident.
At Park Hill South, 74% of students identify as white, according to a U.S. News and World Report breakdown. The report said 10% of the students are Black and 9% are Hispanic.
“I would say it’s very divided, it’s very much segregated,” said Zoie Costello, 18, who graduated in 2021 and is half Hispanic. “Because I’m mixed, my experience is very unique in that, like, I can kind of float wherever I want. I live a different experience.”
But she remembers instances when classmates called her “Dora” in a racist reference to the title character of the children’s cartoon “Dora the Explorer.” She heard it so often, she didn’t know whether to speak up or not.
“It’s almost easier to just laugh about it, than it is to say something because you just get tired of it,” Costello said. “It’s almost easier to just leave it because you know nothing’s going to come from it, and that’s the sad part, like if I went and told someone, nothing’s going to happen.”
Recent Park Hill South graduate Thyra Aguilar, 18, who is Hispanic, said white classmates often called her “pinto bean” and “beaner.” A white student told Aguilar if she was alive during slavery, she’d be getting whipped in the house, she told The Star.
“You’re not really safe at that school as a person of color,” Aguilar said.
She didn’t feel like she — and other students of color — had the support of the administration. She said she felt the administration would do more when a bathroom is vandalized than when she experienced racism.
“It is heartbreaking to hear that we had a student who did not feel supported at South,” Herren said in a statement to The Star on Tuesday. “Clearly we need to do more to reach out to our students of color. This is one of the reasons we started our work to reach out to try to make sure each student feels a sense of belonging at South.”
The Park Hill school district said on Tuesday that it will hire an expert to help create a “plan of action” to combat racism, after students circulated a petition calling for the return of slavery, officials said.
Lewallen — now a junior at Kansas State — has reflected on what her classmates told her when she was at Park Hill South.
“Like, how am I supposed to behave?,” Lewallen, 20, asked in a recent phone interview. “What makes me Black? Why would people say things like that to me? It really took graduating and getting out of that environment to realize that it’s not OK if someone’s looking at me and saying, ‘You’re the whitest Black person I know.”
In his book “Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation,” Columbia University psychology professor Derald Wing Sue, defines microaggressions as verbal and nonverbal interpersonal exchanges in which a perpetrator causes harm to a target, whether intended or unintended.
“Any one microaggression alone may be minimally impactful, but when they occur continuously throughout a lifespan, their cumulative nature can have major detrimental consequences,” Wing Sue writes in his book. “Many white individuals, for example, fail to realize that people of color are, from the moment of birth, subjected to multiple racial microaggressions from the media, peers, neighbors, friends, teachers, and even in the educational process and/or curriculum itself.”
The Park Hill School District has shared few specifics about the racist petition. Nicole Kirby, a district spokeswoman, said last week that because it’s a “discipline incident,” the district cannot share much information, including the number of students involved. On Thursday, the public spoke out at a regularly scheduled Park Hill Board of Education meeting.
“It’s a bigger issue than just the school district, there’s some home training that didn’t happen as well,” Jeff Holmes said during the meeting’s public comment portion. “This racism incident has happened, and no one has seen anything being done. So, I’ve heard all of the nice kind words and I guess they’re OK... But they’re meaningless and hollow and insincere if we don’t see action. Action needs to be taken and needs to be taken immediately.”
The petition at Park Hill is another racist incident in Kansas City area schools that has been made public in the last few years, from a swastika appearing at Pembroke Hill School to a teacher in Lee’s Summit admitting to using the N-word twice.
Last weekend, Olathe South High School’s principal promised to “thoroughly” investigate a photo on social media of two white students with a homecoming dance sign reading: “If I was Black I would be picking cotton but I’m white so I’m picking you for HOCO.”
Last year, Park Hill South was criticized for another incident. The volleyball team was told to remove T-shirts players wore before a game that read, “Together we rise,” with three fists in different colors raised in the air. The shirts were a symbol of racial equity and inclusion. Herren later apologized.
Lewallen said she’s seen comments saying the racist petition was blown out of proportion — kids just being kids, joking around.
“I was 14 years old, I went to Park Hill South, never would I have thought, just for example, ‘let’s start a petition to start the Holocaust again and call out Jewish students in that petition.’ I would have never thought something like that because I was taught from a very young age that that’s not something that you joke about,” Lewallen said.
“I just don’t think that we can give these kids a free pass on this incident and try and sweep it under the rug and act like nothing happened.”
This story was originally published September 28, 2021 at 5:46 PM.
