Teens in Arlington and Monroe must be feeling the heat lately. Not only are they dealing with serious issues involving racism in their communities, they’re being forced to do so in front of the entire country, practically. That’s not the kind of high school experience most teens dream of.
Cross-burnings and noose-tauntings attract heavy doses of media attention. But it remains to be seen if the TV trucks and throngs of reporters will come back to find out how these teens, their parents, the schools and the rest of the community decided to work through these problems and come up with answers and plans for action. Such attention also implies these communities are hotbeds for such problems, instead of what they really are: places where issues every single community faces have boiled over, forcing people finally to address them.
Some people still don’t think racism can be found in their schools or towns. Or that it’s on such a small scale that it doesn’t matter. But in light of the Arlington cross-burning, anyone who read about the African-American Harrison family’s struggles and successes as a black family in that city learned how painful subtle acts of prejudice can be. Name-calling and low expectations of them by others have stayed with the now-grown Harrison children, as they told a Herald reporter. Just remembering some childhood experiences brought pain and anger to the surface for them.
It’s to the credit of both Arlington and Monroe that people aren’t ignoring the matter. In Arlington, kids and grown-ups got together last month for an all-day anti-racism workshop sponsored by the city and the school district.
In Monroe, a community group has been in place since spring, before the latest problems happened at the high school, said district spokeswoman Rosemary O’Neil. At the school level, the district has many projects in the works, including raising awareness among teachers and staff to be more alert to those quiet forms of racism, while simultaneously encouraging students to stop creating a culture of silence by keeping what they see or experience to themselves.
Like other community settings, a high school is like a family and everyone needs to take care of everyone else, O’Neil said.
It’s important to realize the attention-grabbing headlines in Arlington and Monroe are not exclusive to those cities. Our children don’t have to be subjected to the horrors of a cross-burning or the fright of a noose-waving to be victims of bigotry. Nasty words, nasty looks and thoughtlessness can be just as devastating. Every child deserves a better school experience than that.
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