If you are expecting protests and marches for this one – accompanied by massive, or even significant, news coverage – I doubt you’ll find your expectations realized.
Excerpted from Selim Algar’s article in today’s New York Post:
A white student at a predominantly Hispanic and black Long Island high school says he was targeted for punishment over his race — punched, hit with a chair and repeatedly called “cracker” and “white boy” — while administrators did nothing to protect him.
Lawyers for Giovanni Micheli, now 23, aim to convince a federal jury that their client was singled out as a “minority” in Brentwood High School and then told by school officials, most of them white, to either “project more self-confidence” in order to stem the beating and berating — or leave.
Micheli sued the Brentwood School District in 2010, and the trial opened Monday in Brooklyn federal court.
After his parents complained, administrators eventually removed Micheli from the campus in favor of home tutoring, according to Schaefer.
Officials later turned down the family’s request to have the increasingly depressed and withdrawn student moved to another district.
But Schaefer said the parents were told, “If we do that for him, we would have to do that for all the white children.”
Does it surprise you that Black and Hispanic high schoolers can be racists? If so, why? As I have written numerous times in this blog, no group is immune to or from racism.
Would you be surprised if the trial validates the Micheli family’s claims that school officials were unwilling to do anything about it? If so, why? In these bizarre times, to accuse a largely minority student body of racism is more than a little likely to guarantee the accuser will be called a racist.
Are you surprised that this lawsuit, filed in 2010, is just now coming before the court? If you are, on this one we agree. I would love to know why it took 6 years to get this before a judge – and will try to get the answer.
How will the trial turn out? That is obviously the most interesting question of all. I’ll try to keep track of its progress – which, I suspect, won’t be easy because there will be so little coverage of it.
llustratively, I just googled “Giovanni Micheli Brentwood” and, in the first five pages, the NY Post article referenced above was the one and only mainstream media source I could find.
I’ll let you know what I know when I know it.
