Lincoln High Investigating Reports Of Racial Taunts During Football Game In OC

Speaker 1: 00:00 Last Friday evening, the football teams of Lincoln High School in San Diego and San Clemente high school played a game at San Clemente. Cheerleaders from Lincoln say they were taunted with racial slurs, including the inward one, said she was told to go back to Africa this fall as an event at Poway high school last week. We're at a blackout themed event. Things turned racist when a couple of students wore masks and President Obama and a gorilla president of the San Diego chapter of the NAACP Clovis honoree joins me now. Clovis, thank you so much for joining us. Speaker 2: 00:33 Thank you for having my guests come in. Speaker 1: 00:34 I know the NAACP has responded to this. What are you asking San Clemente Highschool to do now? Speaker 2: 00:41 Well, the depends on the outcomes of the investigation. Uh, to some extent we have also, I want to make sure that we have let you know that we have been in contact with the Orange County NAACP and they're also investigating this incident from their end. Primarily we would like to say, well, you know, it's interesting that I saw Aaron Meek, uh, at the, um, press conference asked for an apology and folks as well, isn't it? If someone asks, is an apology really important? And the apology, whether you did something wrong or not, an apology indicates that you're a human being, that you sense the harm that was done to somebody else and you want to help us ways that harm you don't have to admit guilt to do that. So I don't think there's anything wrong with the, uh, principal, uh, apologizing to start with. But more importantly, we want to make sure that this doesn't happen again. Speaker 2: 01:21 So we want to see that the community is made conscious and sensitive to these issues so that they can make the kinds of adjustments they need to make and that we want to see if anything, um, really in inappropriate was done. Uh, if there are sheriff's officers who did not respond when they were alerted, if there are other people who were responsible on the campus who did not take action, uh, there, there are to be consequences. There will be a, there are CIF regulations that may have been violated, school regulations that may have been violated, not to mention the state and national constitution, uh, when we have institutions that are allowing this kind of behavior to take place in not correcting it Speaker 1: 01:51 because I wanted to ask more about that. And you know, he's spokesman for Capistrano unified said, uh, the school is looking at all of the cameras to see if there were specific instances in the stands or anything else and that they had six Orange County sheriff's deputies present private security, lots of parents and staff members present. So to your knowledge, what did all of those people do when the racist taunts were being made? Speaker 2: 02:14 Well, we have the statements from the students to statements from the adults that were there. And we have statements from, uh, apparently white members of the Sanclemente group that were posted on social media that also apologize for incidences that they indicated they were aware of. So it's not, and first of all, I want to, I want folks to understand that if African American children tell you something happened, do not discount it. Uh, what I've seen in the news on occasion is if these things are true, we have these allegations. Uh, we don't know. These children told us they had these experiences and if your children came home and told you that they had been called the inward, you would take it seriously. You would not try to discount them. So we, but in addition, we have other corroborating information that's coming through social media from folks who were there indicating that they were aware of these incidences. What did they do? What did they apparently from the information we have thus far, no one did anything of I at least no one from San Clemente did anything of substance to assuage the problems. Many as you saw in the, in the press conference and from many others testimonies that the African American students, uh, the Latino students, the, the people who were the adults who were with them did take incredibly brave and appropriate action to minimize the problems that were going on at that, at that time. And make sure that the children were safe. Speaker 1: 03:20 It's reporting the Lincoln high cheerleaders who are just 14 and 15 year old girls heard these taunts the most. Can you talk about how the trauma of racism impacts children and adolescents? Speaker 2: 03:30 We know that after 400 years of of experience here in the United States of America, that trauma, we have seen studies that show that trauma affects the DNA. We know that, uh, my parents who were born in apartheid, even though I was born in 1960 at the end of a part that I taught me, things that they learned because of the environment they grew up in that may have not seemed to have been as applicable in the 1960s and seventies like they were in the forties and 50s but we had to know and understand those things from their perspective. And I shared with my children things that they, they've never experienced, but I did. So we know that the trauma gets handed down generation after generation and we know that trauma can have an impact on educational attainment, trauma and can have an impact on the capacity to deal with relationships. Trauma. Trauma is, is a very powerful and impactful. Um, um, um, situation here in the United States of America in America has been traumatic from day one. Speaker 1: 04:17 And as we mentioned, there was also a recent incident at Poway high school during a football game. How common are these incidents? Speaker 2: 04:25 Well, you know, it's, it's interesting we asked the question, how often do, uh, police officers shoot unarmed African American men and women running away from them? And folks used to disbelieve that these things were happening as well. We know that people would not be facing the consequences until we started seeing them actually show up on social media, sometimes in live action walking, watching black men die on camera after being shot by a police officer for no good reason. And then the police officers don't face consequences. So they were probably happening. And we found out from testimony from students, African American students who go to San, uh, um, faculty at the high school that this is not uncommon. This is United States of Americans 2019. Now in 2015 we might've thought something different was going on, but with the election of Donald Trump and the rhetoric that we see coming out of the White House, it's no surprise that we're seeing more of this come to the forefront, but has been going on for 400 years. Has it been going on a up behind the cameras and away from a discipline, uh, of folks knowing that it's going on? Of course. Speaker 1: 05:18 And a lot of people find it shocking that this kind of thing is still happening in 2019. What do you say to them? Speaker 2: 05:23 I say 60 some odd million people voted for Donald Donald Trump. So I don't know why you're shocked that almost half an almost not quite half of the electorate elected someone who's clearly made public statements, clearly made racist statements, uh, clearly made xenophobic and homophobic statements that, that why anyone would be surprised at the, in this day and age, if you are surprised, is because you have not been, you either have not been paying attention or you've been paying attention and putting your head in the sand. Speaker 1: 05:47 I've been speaking with Clovis, Monterrey, president of the San Diego branch of the NAACP. Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you for having us.