BSO- Texas A&M University is conducting an investigation after a group of students visiting campus from an inner-city Dallas high school were harassed Tuesday with racial slurs and a demand to “go back where you came from.”
About 60 juniors from Uplift Hampton Preparatory were touring the campus, according to state Sen. Royce West, D-Dallas, when two black students were approached by a white woman wearing Confederate flag earrings. West said the white woman showed the students her earrings and asked them what they thought about them. Then a group of “white male and female students” began taunting the students “using the most well-known racial slur that’s directed toward African Americans,” said West, whose district includes the Uplift Hampton Preparatory campus. A&M staffers who were accompanying the students on the tour called campus police. No one was charged; the responding officer told people at the scene that the harassers were expressing their First Amendment rights, according to West. University officials are now reviewing the incident, West said. I am not going to sit here and endorse the use of the most degrading racial slur in the English language, but this whole situation was kind of a blessing in disguise, no? Nothing worse then accidentally ending up somewhere you're not wanted. In middle school I got a second hand invite to a pool party of a girl that disliked me, and wouldn't you know it, she wasn't too happy when I showed up. Super awkward. I would have loved to have avoided that situation if I could have. If she had come to me prior and said "don't even fucking think about showing up you loser" I would have been mildly insulted, but I wouldn't have had to engage in a one-on-one confrontation once I got to the party. That's pretty much what happened to these kids. Let's call it an orientation of discrimination. Nothing will narrow down your list of potential colleges like some good old fashioned "southern tradition". Honestly, choosing a place to attend school is hard. Especially since nearly every tour consists of all the awesome aspects of the university in question. Not too often you get to see an institution's dark side before you are already enrolled. I'm sure this situation was degrading in the moment, but I bet the black kids that ended up at Missouri without realizing they were on the brink of a full blown race war wish they had something like this happen to them. It's all a matter of perspective. As a non-black person it's tough for me to say this with any certainty, but I think I would rather know the places I am not welcome before locking myself into spending a significant portion of my life there. If that pool party had lasted 4 years I don't know what I would have done, and people weren't even heckling me about my skin color.
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