Simi evaluates racist incidents in California high schools

As of this month, two different California high schools have experienced incidents of hate activity involving students.

A high school basketball game Feb. 11 ended in a xenophobic chant by students of Righetti High School in Santa Maria. “Where’s your passport?” was chanted after Righetti lost to St. Joseph High School, which has players from Puerto Rico and France.

At the beginning of Black History Month, a photograph of a group of students at the Martin Luther King High School in Riverside began circulating on social media. The picture showed eight students posing in front of a Confederate flag and a Trump 2020 banner with a student holding a swastika symbol.

The Panther spoke to Professor Pete Simi, who researches white supremacist groups about these incidents.

“I think a few things are happening,” Simi said in regards to high school students being involved in hate activities. “The time in a person’s life, adolescence, where they sometimes are engaged in different kinds of behaviors where they try to figure out their own identity and that may involve demeaning other identities as a way to search for their own.”

High school students may be influenced by peers to view other groups in a negative fashion, things they have been raised around, in terms of family life and social media, Simi said.

“White supremacist propaganda is very prevalent in cyber space and digital environments and we know adolescents are spending time on different social media platforms. Many of these platforms unfortunately have a lot of racist propaganda that’s floating through and kids are exposed to it,” Simi said.

Chapman was involved in hate speech when former student, Dayton Cole Kingery, was filmed using racist and homophobic slurs in a classroom

“That incident demonstrated a very clear expression of racial hatred and homophobic hatred and what I would call a clear expressions of white supremacy,” Simi said.

The first step when incidents like these happen is honesty, according to Simi.

“It all starts with honesty and not treating these incidents as one off, isolated incidents. The problem exists. We are seeing this nationwide,” Simi said. “We have to think in those terms, there may be specific things we’re doing here at Chapman that can make us more susceptible and increase the likelihood of incidents like the one we saw two weeks ago. To some extent that the person felt comfortable doing those things and we have to ask ourselves tough questions, ‘What are we doing that even unintentionally might make a person feel comfortable expressing that kind of hatred?’”