The battle against racism has been a long-standing war between races and those who stereotype and continue to find wrong in people simply because of the color of their skin. It seems as though this battle will be on-going for generations to come, because even the teens who live in a global online community have ill thoughts about the races around them.
Two teen girls from Florida recently posted a rant on YouTube about their black peers. The rant goes on about the way said peers talk, their complaints about living in the ghetto and even poses their own definition for the term “n**ger.”
“There’s black people, they’re fine. They’re educated they go to school they do what they have to do. Then there’s n**gers who can’t talk right, they keep having kids, they can’t get jobs,” one of the girls says in the video.
David Shelnutt, principal of Gainesville High School, where both girls in question attend, said he held an emergency faculty meeting after viewing the video online and addressed the issue with the entire student body. Eight police officers were sent to the school to monitor the students after the two girls began receiving death threats for their video.
The two 14-year-old students have since stopped attending Gainesville High School.
One of the girls has released a statement saying she is not, in fact, racist.
“I am one of the girls who were in the racist video that got posted. I’m writing this so that I can tell people how truly sorry I am. I could never, in a million years, have pictured this happening with me involved. I wasn’t raised to hate people for their race, and I still don’t. I made a horrible decision in being a part of this video.”
The other girl’s mother released a statement on her daughter’s behalf.
“While we can never take back the words and actions that these two children have said, we have to start to heal and forgive IMMEDIATELY. Stop the violent threats to our homes and our children, stop the anger, because this will solve absolutely nothing, and most importantly, look at yourself for change and love.”
There are a few questions to raise about these two very young girls. If these two clearly live in a diverse neighborhood, how did they come to be so unaccepting? And if these two are able to spew so much hate about the people they see and learn with every single day, then they surely must have peers who share their racist thoughts. Is this learned behaviour? Is it considered ‘normal’ to be racist at Gainesville High School?
The spreading of hate — racism, prejudice, bullying of any kind — needs to come to an end. Judge people for their thoughts, the work they produce, their individual personalities. Race, culture, religion and sexual orientation should never be a factor. Embrace differences, educate yourself on other cultures, and never turn a blind eye to the spreading of hateful messages. As part of a society that has the entire world at our finger tips, the idea of racism and prejudice should be a problem of the generations before us.
The very fact that two young girls are able to drop such a derogatory and hateful words at the drop of a dime is proof enough that this battle against racism is far from over.
[UPDATE]: Here is an emotional apology from one of the girls on YouTube. Do you think she is apologizing because of the backlash, or because she honestly thinks that she did something wrong?
