A TikTok from a student at Oregon’s Tigard High School, laden with racist slurs, has caused a huge reaction from classmates, who are now staging walkouts and protests.
Hundreds of Tigard High School students walked out of their classrooms on Wednesday, December 2, after watching a video of a classmate using multiple racist slurs.
The video sees a female student repeating racist terms for black people, Asians, Muslims, and Latinos, laughing about it on camera.
Before long, the video had been seen by much of her classmates at the school in Oregon, initiating a shockwave of events with students making sure she doesn’t get away with it.
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“I didn’t believe it, I was like, ‘No way,’” said Sean Sorko-Ram, 17, a senior at Tigard, speaking to NBC News. “You hear someone say the N-word, you hear things here and there, but all of them together in one video. … The best word I can use is flabbergasted.”
Sorko-Ram also said it was hard to be too surprised, adding that she is “desensitized” to language like that, with fellow classmates having called her an “ape” and using the N-word during her earliest years at the school.
High school and district officials told NBC that they couldn’t comment on whether the student is still on campus, but noted that a range of punishments are explored in these situations — though expulsion is usually not one of them.
“What students are reporting are from their personal experience,” Principal Brian Bailey said. “If we are hearing more reports of these situations it could represent an uptick in hate speech. It may also be influenced by our collective and continued work to encourage students to speak out and report these incidents.”
