Grant High School Responds to Its Own Incident of Racist Online Posts

A team dinner for Grant High School's boys' varsity soccer team turned ugly earlier this month when a white player posted a racist slur on Snapchat and others responded with derogatory texts, Grant Magazine reports Monday on its website.

But rather than respond with punishments, Grant's principal and others at the school are taking a new approach: They're organizing communitywide discussions about race.

"When our response is disciplinary and when it's punitive, it continues to paint a picture of people of color as victims," Grant principal Carol Campbell tells the magazine. "I think this approach is a way to empower, to give voice and give space and time for people to talk…We are actually trying to change the entire way that our community thinks about race."

The school district's response comes as college campuses and schools across the country have struggled to address racist behavior by students and others.

This past weekend, Lewis & Clark College was rocked by a report that white men assaulted a black student, shouted slurs and forced him to drink an unknown substance. The assault followed days of protests stemming from the discovery Tuesday of racist posts on Yik Yak, a social media tool that allows anonymous comments.

The soccer incident at Grant isn't the first of its kind at the Northeast Portland high school. Last spring, Grant officials investigated after white freshmen posted racist and sexist comments on social media.

This time the school is taking a different, proactive response.

"We haven't always handled these things well," Campbell told the award-winning magazine. "Last year, we should've prepared a little more for what we did in the classrooms. We kind of focused on the freshman, but what we did with them, it wasn't well thought out, and I don't think…it had much of an impact."

Kendall Berry, president of the Black Student Union at Wilson High School in Southwest Portland, applauded the approach and said he wished Portland Public Schools would try it at his campus. Last spring, in a story in WW, he and fellow BSU members lamented the lack of honest conversations about race at school.

"I think it will really open up their eyes to things," he says of Grant students.

Willamette Week