This is absolutely disgusting.  What callous sociopath is so lacking in empathy that they could stand by and allow a woman to give birth shackled to a bed then rip her newborn child away from her?  Apparently the answer is law enforcement and border patrol agents.  It breaks my heart to think that these women risk everything for a better life for them and their children, and this kind of degrading abuse is what potentially awaits them.  It’s horrible.

anarchyrosegarden:

I’m not sure what is worse: the horrible and abusive conditions these human beings were forced to endure or the nationalistic and racist comments following the story, which exemplify the attitudes that allow these deplorable acts to continue.  Where is the empathy? The last time I checked, we all have mothers. Would anyone want their own mother to suffer under such circumstances, would they debate the “legality” of their citizenship or would they simply want the shackles removed?

Before every game, the girls’ basketball team at Kenmore East High School have a disturbing tradition. 

“The whole team before our game has a ritual of saying 1-2-3 and then the N word,” says Tyra Batts, the only African-American member of her Buffalo-area high school team. “It’s a tradition that’s been going on for years.” 

When Batts joined the team this year, with dreams of going on to play college basketball, she noticed her teammates would secretly huddle up for the alarmingly racist chant before every game. 

“I would argue about it and say to not say it,” Batts said in a home video submitted to the Buffalo News, “and they would tell me they’re not racist, it’s just a word. There was nothing I could do much before the game because I was outnumbered.” 

After confronting one of her teammates, she says she was verbally attacked with another racial slur. After that, the confrontation got physical and Batts was suspended for five days for initiating a fight. “It was a buildup of anger and frustration at being singled out of the whole team,” she said. 

When school officials didn’t dig around enough to find out why the fight took place, Batts’ parents called a local radio station and shared her story with the community. Finally, the school got a clue. Kenmore-Town of Tonawanda Superintendent Mark P. Mondanaro launched an inquiry and released a statement saying: “This type of insensitivity to one of our students is wrong, unacceptable, unfortunate, and will never, ever be tolerated.” By Friday, the students who allegedly engaged in the chant were suspended for two days and the entire team was penalized with canceled practices, a game suspension and the return of a sportsmanship award earned last year.

But Batts isn’t satisfied. There’s the fact that she’s considering not playing on the basketball team anymore, and she’s still being penalized with three more days of suspension than her teammates. “I’m getting a lot of feedback that the team should be suspended for more than two days, longer than I have, because I actually fought for a reason,” she said. “I didn’t just do it out of nowhere.” 

While her teammates are now required to partake in “cultural sensitivity training”, the administration hasn’t commented on changing their own staff policies. 

According to Tyra Batts, the chant was only a fraction of the racist remarks she’d been subjected to from her teammates. While her principal and school superintendent have personally apologized to the Batts family, officials may want to focus on larger efforts administrators can make to change the school’s culture. 

Why did it take Batts’ parents’ public plea for this outrageous tradition to be stopped? And how had no coaches or staff members heard this long-standing tradition taking place? School officials claim the students were secretive about their chant and after the fight broke out, administrators didn’t get the “full” story because students were only in school one half day.

While it’s never okay to use physical violence, Batts’ reaction was a last-ditch effort in a situation where everyone had turned their backs. The school should be looking at why it had to get that far before a single student’s voice was heard.

Now, other students at the school are sending their own message on Twitter. “Our school is racist” one student tweeted. Another classmate wrote simply, “I’m soo embarrassed to go to kenmore east.”

marchoftigers:

reetodd:

It seems sad to me that people allow words to have this power over themselves. Words only have damaging qualities when you, the person having words directed at you, allow them to damage you. Derogatory terms for races, sexes, sexual orientations, religions, “curse words”… they are just words. Stop…

Actually, I beg to differ. A lot of these words have killing power, seeing as slurs are oftentimes the last thing you can hear before you die. So the saying should go: 

“Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can definitely kill me.”

I completely agree that historically and even currently the words appear to have power as they are used almost as an excuse for evil people to do evil things and have others sympathize with them.  It’s the idea of stealing the excuse from them and have observers see the victims as people.  If the bigots have no words of any significance to describe their victims other that words that are commonly accepted as no differnt today than if someone one called you buddy, jerk, guy, or any other socially accepted insult/term of endearment (they often seem to be the same thing for whatever reason), than any sympathy for the violence is negated.  If saying (That [fill in the particular slur] had it coming!) has no power, then it is simply translates to “That person had it coming.”  It would be like saying, that jerk had it coming, or that asshole had it coming, or that dude had it coming.  Saying that some dick had it coming rarely causes sympathy within the community at large.

Destroy the percieved power, destroy the excuse.  Sorry that was so long.