Racism remains alive and well in the United States, and anyone who tries to assert otherwise doesn’t know what they’re talking about or doesn’t care to consider the facts. It transcends any one incident and makes itself known far and wide.
In Texas back in 2016, race ended up a key issue in an incident of violence at a private school when, while on a sixth grade field trip, three white students wrapped a rope around a black classmate’s neck and dragged her to the ground. A jury has just ruled in favor of that victim, granting her financial compensation.
The students behind the original incident had previously bullied the victim, although there’s little apparent publicly available reason as to why — although it’s not like middle school bullying is some easily comprehensible matter in the first place.
The victim’s mother only learned of her daughter’s injury — which consisted of an extremely obvious rope burn — after she got back from the trip in question. The school did not, apparently, do anything to address the incident when it actually happened.
Mother Sandy Rougely asserted back in 2016:
‘That just tore me into pieces. It looked like somebody ripped my daughter’s neck off and stitched it back together.’
They eventually slapped the school — Live Oak Classical School in Waco — with a lawsuit. The legal team at hand ended up seeking millions of dollars in damages, although the new jury ruling only granted $68,000 in compensation. They awarded $55,000 covering “physical pain and mental anguish,” $10,000 for the associated “disfigurement,” and $3,000 for medical expenses.
During the lead-up to the verdict, family lawyer Levi McCathern had asserted that the victim’s race played into the school’s negligence as exemplified by their inaction in the face of the violence. Just this week, he asserted:
‘If it had been a little white girl they would have been on the phone with her mother within the hour.’
The school, via their lawyer David Deaconson, unsurprisingly rejected that assertion, although their alternative explanation for the incident doesn’t exactly fit. Deaconson has said the whole incident was an accident and students had been pulling a rope up into the air and it hit the victim in the neck when they let go. Available photographs of the injuries, though, show wounds stretching around the victim’s neck, not just on one side.
Both involved parties expressed at least a degree of satisfaction with their case’s outcome. McCathern acknowledged that his efforts for much higher compensation than they got were symbolic, while Deaconson was satisfied the school wasn’t found guilty of “gross negligence.”
The whole incident represents just the tip of the iceberg of racial tension in the United States, something that has been inflamed majorly by President Donald Trump himself. He’s at present carrying on, for instance, with the idea that an approaching group of migrants from Central America is an “invasion” that must be stopped with military force.
They’re simply people seeking asylum, though, something the U.S. has long granted. Trump’s continued rhetoric makes the country dangerous, at times, for the Texas girl in question to grow up in.
Featured Image via YouTube screenshot
