Minority students at Arsenal Tech High School on the city's near eastside are feeling uneasy after more than 100 fliers announcing a revival of the KKK would take place at the school on October 31. The Star reports that the fliers read, “If your not white your not right,” and contained racial slurs and threats against blacks and Hispanics. "At least one student also reported seeing white students chanting 'KKK.'" The fliers were found blowing across the school's campus before classes on Monday morning according to school officials. The school's Vice Principal Robert Huggins believes the fliers are simply a prank. “This, by most of us, wasn’t considered to be an alarm,” Huggins said of the school’s immediate reaction. “It was considered to be a prank.”
Some were criticizing school administrators for not sounding the alarm after the fliers were first found. "It’s not our intent to escalate the issue to the point where we do have students over-alarmed and unnecessarily alarmed,” Huggins said. He told the Star that IMPD is investigating the incident. "We do take it seriously,” Vice Principal William Buckley said. “That’s why the police agencies are involved with it.” Higgins offered this as his reason for believing the fliers were a hoax:
The fliers’ numerous grammatical and spelling mistakes seem to be done on purpose, Huggins said. While he insisted that the administration and police were taking the investigation seriously, he also drew attention to the revival’s supposed date: Halloween.“Halloween is a date historically known for pranks,” he said, “historically known for all types of strange things to take place.”
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That aside, this was obviously a prank by a student or students.
If it is found that white students were responsible we're looking at another Jena 6, Indiana style. Should that happen, it could ignite a lot of racial fires that have been smoldering in the city's eastside for several decades since blacks began to move in during the early 60's.
Hard to believe that only 20+ percent of the of the student body at Tech is white. So much for desegregation.
The entire IPS system is majority minority. whites have abandoned the district. Only African Americans, Hispanics and a smallperecentage of Caucasian students attend the schools.
Racism is alive an well in Indiana. It is practiced undercover, until it slaps one in the face.
If you see the flyers, you know it's an idiotic prank. I attend the school, I saw the flyers, and I attended school today, Halloween, with very little fear. That wasn't just because the campus was full of police officers, and lacking in students.
This isn't racism, not in its truest form. It's an odd residual effect of racism, and probably very interesting from a psychological standpoint.
I say all of this because the child that committed the "hate crime", and it is legally a hate crime, even if it wasn't actually committed out of hate, but ignorance, and lack of intelligence, was african-american in descent. The child was african-american in skin color, and the child was african-american in mind.
While forced to listen to often-overzealous morning DJ Russ Parr in the morning, I heard him read an interesting email sent to him during that particular segment. It stated that white people don't mind being called "cracker" as it derives from the practice of white men cracking whips against the slaves' backs, and therefore is easy for them to brush off; the email also stated that black people don't have the ability to do the same with the general slur directed towards them, as they were, of course, on the opposite end of the whip, and called as such.
No, of course I don't believe that white people are born with the subconscious knowledge that "cracker" means "cracker of whips" and therefore don't mind the insult. I do believe that for such an odd thing to come out of this child's mind, and the african-american community as a whole, racism has done an odd thing to the development of the black culture in the United States over the past 100 years. I could go on, but that's the beginning of a thesis paper, not a comment.
Also, I'm not just assuming the child is black. He/She was found and taken by the FBI, and no more information other than skin color has been released. I'm actually not sure how much information has been released to teachers, but the most they're able to say is that he's black, and I'm not even sure they're supposed to dispense that information, as only one has come out and said it; one of the younger, blunter, less PC teachers.
24% percent of the student population of Arsenal Technical High School is of Caucasian descent. 65% is African-American, and the remaining are obviously Multi-Racial, Asian, Hispanic, or Native American.
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