Arheel's Uncle
Senior Reporter
Racist images handed out at East Sacramento school. Here’s how the district’s responding
Two students have been suspended.
Racist images handed out at East Sacramento school. Here’s how the district’s responding
Marcus D. SmithTue, March 14, 2023 at 9:53 PM AST·2 min read
Two Black teenagers were suspended from an East Sacramento school after a fake dollar bill with racist imagery against Black people circulated throughout the campus on Tuesday.
Sacramento City Unified School District officials acknowledged the incident in a statement to Kit Carson International Academy families, saying they are handling the incident with the “utmost seriousness.”
“Sac City Unified strongly condemns the use of racist language or material and has taken swift disciplinary action against the two students involved,” the statement said.
The fake dollar bill included a racist anti-Black caricature. The top displayed a website containing hateful, racist comments.
A now-deleted message was posted on the Facebook page of Kit Carson principal LuTisha Stockdale about the incident. “I’m sooooo pissed!!!!! To answer your question 2 Black students made these and were passing it around,” the caption to Stockdale’s Facebook story post read.
Efforts to reach Stockdale were unsuccessful Tuesday.
The district is also providing support for students and staff who may have experienced trauma or harm as a result.
“One student printed it, who gave it to another student, who gave it to somebody else,” district spokesman Brian Heap said. “We don’t know how widespread the dissemination was on campus. We do know that more than one of these were handed out because the principal actually saw some on the ground.”
“It really speaks to our need as a district to do more in terms of fully educating kids about the history behind this word and just try to clear up some of the (misconceptions) they must have that lead them to use it so cavalierly,” Heap added.
Sacramento attorney Mark Harris was contracted by the district in 2022 as a diversity, equity and inclusion monitor and serves as a liaison to the district during incidents of racial misconduct.
That included a vice principal subjected to racially derogatory statements online, and a separate incident at Kit Carson where a teacher used a racial slur twice in a discussion with students.
“I’ve been on an emotional roller coaster today. This is the third time we’ve had perpetrators of a racially motivated incident identified as African-Americans,” Harris said.
“It’s pretty bad when our kids, for whatever reason, think that it would be popular for them to have a negative depiction of our own.”
Harris referred to an incident where a Black student at C.K McClatchy High School wrote “colored” and “white” over water fountains on campus. Another incident happened at Rosemont High School last year when officials found a Black student wrote racist graffiti on a campus hallway.
