Thursday, March 28, 2024

Freshman Admits Posting Racist Message that Sparked Berkeley HS Protest

Berkeley High School protest, Nov. 5, 2015
Berkeley High School protest in Berkeley, Calif. )Nov. 5, 2015)

*A Berkeley High School freshman has confessed to leaving the racist message on a school computer that prompted thousands of students to walk out in protest on Thursday.

“I think the student is really aware of what this caused on our campus,” principal Sam Pasarow said, according to ABC affilate KGO. The student was interrogated and admitted to posting the message only after digital forensic analysis was performed on the computer, the station reported.

“The student is going to face pretty serious consequences,” Pasarow told KQED’s Devin Katayama. “I’m certainly a leader who believes in [repairing] harm in lieu of traditional discipline.”

As previously reported, the racist message was discovered on a library computer at about 12:30 p.m. on Wednesday, according to school officials. In addition to using the N-word, it read: “KKK FOREVER PUBLIC LYNCHING DECEMBER 9th 2015.”

The discovery of the message prompted the massive protest Thursday, with a majority of the Northern California school’s 3,000 students walking out of class for part of the day. Somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 students turned out, district spokesman Marc Coplan said.

Led by the school’s Black Student Union, the protesters first gathered outside the school for about an hour in the morning and then moved on to the old City Hall across the street.

They later went to the University of California at Berkeley. Most students had returned by the end of the day, Coplan said.

During the march, students were heard chanting “we got that unity!” and “say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

The incident was not the first of its kind in the past year. Last October, school officials discovered a noose hanging from a tree. And, in the spring, the school yearbook was altered to state that a group of minority students aspired to be the “trash collectors of tomorrow,” forcing the school to distribute stickers to place over the altered text.

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