 | | Owatonna High School is in the predominantly white town of Owatonna, Minn. Black children make up about 7 percent of Owatonna High's 1,400 student population. | |
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| OWATONNA, Minn. — "I knew it wasn't O.K.," Kloey, 16, said. "I knew that for sure." |
| Late one Saturday night in February in Owatonna, Minn., Kloey posted a selfie on Snapchat with two of her friends. Kloey stuck out her tongue, Candace pursed her lips and Grace wore a wide-eyed grin. While singing along to a rap song in Kloey's car, Grace, who is white, used a hateful racial slur for what she said was the very first time. Kloey, also white, posted the photo on Snapchat to commemorate the occasion, spelling out the slur in the caption. |
| The post spread quickly among Owatonna High School's small population of black students, who had felt for years that racism had been allowed to quietly fester in their school. Not again, they said to each other in anger. |
| Teenagers flirt on social media. They pour out their souls. And all too often, in an era of viral videos, they show off their intolerance when it comes to race. High school students have been captured flashing the Nazi salute and singing Ku Klux Klan-themed Christmas songs. Teachers have dressed up as a border wall for Halloween and asked their black students to participate in mock slave auctions. The fallout from such episodes often looks the same: online apologies and outrage, and then everyone involved moves on. |
| But after Kloey's Snapchat post, something different happened in this town of 25,000 residents, where nearly 90 percent of the population is white. |
| With the prodding of black students, white Owatonna residents did what they had mostly had the luxury of avoiding: talk about race. |
| It hasn't been easy. Jeffrey S. Elstad, the Owatonna superintendent, said that what happened was a "wake-up call" for the predominantly white school. "Race for us is something that we don't have to think about all of the time because we are white," he said. "Our students and our families of color think about race all the time. As white people, how are we O.K. with us just, only when it's convenient, talking about race?" |
| Kloey's post helped set off a violent clash the following Monday that involved students, teachers and police officers. The scuffle ended with a black 16-year-old girl being tackled and arrested. That prompted the school's handful of black students to demand that the school take on its culture of racism. Their efforts led to messy, uncomfortable conversations that would have seemed impossible not long ago. |
| Struggling to Explain Why |
| Sitting in a Mexican cafe three months after the unrest, Kloey struggled to explain why she had felt so comfortable using the racial slur. Maybe it was because she had a relative who would sometimes use the word when talking about black people and then laugh, she said, so it did not seem meanspirited. Perhaps it was ignorance or selfishness, she said. |
| "I think it comes from a place of racism," said Abang, the girl who was tackled and arrested, recalling that she had told Kloey back in middle school not to say the word, but that she had continued to say it anyway. |
| After Kloey's post, many of Owatonna High's black students came to school upset. |
| "They're so quick to address situations about vaping, skipping school and everything," Eman, a 15-year-old Somali-American sophomore, said of school officials. "But when it comes to racism, they never want to address it. They never want to say, 'This is happening at our own school, we shouldn't be doing it.' It's not O.K." |
| To make matters worse, after Kloey's post had gone viral, two more Snapchat posts by other white students, both using the same offensive racial slur, began to circulate that day. |
| One was from a white student who posted a selfie flashing his middle finger, with a caption that accused Owatonna's black students of "playing the black card." |
| [Click here to continue to read the story.] |
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