A high school football team held a frat boy-style mock slave auction involving some black team members – and is paying the price by having the rest of their season canceled.
Members of the River Valley High School football team in California screamed at three black colleagues in their underwear in the locker room stunt.
A video of the prank, with faces blurred out, shows the three black team members standing at the far side of a room in their underwear and with their hands folded in front of them. Meanwhile, other team members point fingers at them.
The stunt was ‘deeply offensive and disgraceful’, Yuba City Unified School District Superintendent Doreen Osumi told CNN.
‘Re-enacting a slave sale as a prank tells us that we have a great deal of work to do with our students so they can distinguish between intent and impact,’ wrote Osumi.
‘They may have thought this skit was funny, but it is not; it is unacceptable and requires us to look honestly and deeply at issues of systemic racism.’
Team members behind the act were suspended right away for the rest of the season for violating the student-athlete code of conduct. Those suspensions left the team short of the minimum number of players needed to compete in the league, meaning the whole team had to pull out.
Osumi added that ‘the recording clearly demonstrates that this situation was orchestrated and organized, which underscores my concern that students spent time contemplating this terrible act without the slightest regard that this action is hateful and hurtful’.
The superintendent said the school will provide ‘education, honest, open discussions and instruction’ around racism.
‘At this time, the District and site administration are working in earnest to identify lessons and programs to help our student body learn from this situation,’ Osumi said.
Yuba City is about 40 miles north of Sacramento, the state capital.
It is not the only recent incident of racist acts in US schools.
In May, a group of students at Colerain High School in Cincinnati, Ohio, put up ‘blacks only’ and ‘whites only’ signs on water fountains reminiscent of Jim Crow segregation laws, took pictures and posted them online. School officials said the responsible students were punished.
‘This type of behavior is not and will not be condoned or tolerated,’ a school spokesperson said. ‘The actions that were displayed do NOT reflect the values and the culture we’ve worked so hard to cultivate in all of our schools across the district.’
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