Photo: TheCorgi (Shutterstock)
Here we go again with another incredibly racist school incident. A white high school student has been charged with a hate crime after someone caught a video of him whipping a Black student with his belt, reported The Associated Press. The student was also reported to have thrown cotton balls at him.
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Per video footage, the incident happened in the school cafeteria at Vandebilt Catholic High School in Houma March 9. The 15-year-old white freshman walked up behind the Black student and proceeded to throw cotton balls at him and whipped him with his belt. The Black student stood up and pushed him away.
The teen was arrested Tuesday on hate crime and battery charges.
From AP News:
“I’m very pleased that the school took a front stand on this,” Terrebonne Parish Sheriff Tim Soignet said in a news release.
“When we received the complaint, we immediately put our detectives on it. They worked through the weekend so we could get to this point,” Soignet said. “My officers did a good job handling it and working with the school to get this case to where it is now.”
Vandebilt Catholic President Jeremy Gueldner said the school does not tolerate bullying or racism. These “actions by a few are not consistent with the values and mission of our school,” the archdiocese statement said.
Well it’s a given that tolerating racism isn’t written in the fine print of a school’s mission. However, this is the third incident, nationally, in the past two weeks where a student has experienced a racially motivated attack.
Terrebone Parish NAACP President Jerome Boykin acknowledged how quickly the school and sheriff responded and said he hopes the teen can “learn from his mistake,” per AP News. The family of the victim also responded in a statement.
“We will continue to pray for our school community as a whole, that we not only get through this together but that we each learn a valuable lesson from what has taken place,” they said, per AP News.
