There doesn’t seem to be a day that goes by without some idiot in Texas engaging in some newsworthy idiocy.
Just days before over 100 people gathered in North Richland Hills to voice their support of Richland High School’s mascot name, the Rebels, despite its Confederate origins, the?Fort Worth Star-Telegram?got their hands on records that indicated a Richland Rebels softball coach, Brenda Jacobson, had been reprimanded for making racist remarks toward a black student.
During the 2014 season, Richland High School softball coach Brenda Jacobson had been accused of calling a black player’s hair “nappy and nasty,” as well as telling another black player “that the sun is more attracted to [her] because [she is] black.”
Kenzie Wilson, a junior, told WFAA that her refusal to jump into a puddle of water prompted Coach Jacobson to tell the other students that Wilson refused to jump “because there is water on the ground and black people don’t like water.”
Another accusation leveled toward Jacobson states that see told a player who cut their leg, “See, everyone is white on the inside.”
To make matters even more despicable, the school did almost?nothing about the incidents. Aside from the formal reprimand, Jacobson was allowed to maintain her position with Richland High School’s softball team and was merely given directives to follow in the future.
That’s it.
Stories like this are why I don’t swallow the hardtack being sold as “post-racial America.” While we can sit here and relegate this Richland High School softball coach as little more than an “isolated incident,” the question I ask is how many times and in what frequency do isolated incidents need to manifest before we can stop lying to ourselves and look at systemic racism as the problem it really is?
