educationrace & culture

Prank calling a racist school

As Dan Sterlace pointed out a few days ago, a Mississippi public school was barring black students from running for class president and other offices. When I first heard about this story, I was saddened, outraged, and annoyed, so I dealt with it in the most mature way I could: I prank called them.

The image below is a copy of the election rules for Nettleton Middle School’s class officers.
2010 Class Officer Election Rules
Qualifications for class president including having a B average or better, a good attendance record, and WHITE SKIN?

I decided to check out Nettleton’s web site, and, to my surprise, evidence or racism was nowhere to be found!

Nettleton School\'s Home Page

If we’re racists, then why do the black people in this stock photo look happy?

In fact, on the middle school’s page, which my best guess and Google’s cache of the site tells me has been unchanged since this controversy made the news, you find that the principal and assistant principal both appear to be black women!

nettleton1
What? This school has a principal who, as a student there, wouldn’t have been allowed to run for class president?

Fortunately, after the news broke, the school reviewed the policy and removed it.

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3 Responses to “Prank calling a racist school”

  1. Kudos on the research.

  2. They had a PC policy to elect a black president every other year… and a white president in between… To hell with student body and the process….. God forbid the best person for the job gets elected or hired… that would be racist.

  3. I’ve read that they had a rotating policy, but I wasn’t able to find any specifics on how it had been rotated in previous years. (Perhaps if I would have asked instead of simply prank calling them, I may have been able to find out; I guess I’ll probably never know.)

    But I can see that, in 2010, black students were only allowed to run for 1/3rd of offices, and the more-prestigious the office was, the more likely it was to be white-only. I suppose there is a slight chance that all the presidents were black last year, but multiple sources have reported one complaint from a mixed-race person, saying she was told by the school board to “Go by the mother’s race b/c with minorities the father isn’t generally in the home.”

    Regardless, any race quota system should be eliminated. As JohnM said, (presumably sarcastically,) “God forbid the best person for the job gets elected or hired” I figured they could at least handle lame some prank calls.

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