The Kenmore East High School Girls basketball team near Buffalo, N.Y., took the usually empowering pre-game chants to a lower — and hideous — level when they made it a practice of chanting the N-Word before taking to the courts.
A dozen girls varsity players were promptly suspended for using the racial epithet and making crude racial remarks during practice. The episode exploded and came to light when the only black girl on the team, Tyra Batts [pictured left], finally snapped one day and leveled a punishing beating on one of the white girls after being called a “black piece of —-“ for protesting the all-white girl team’s pre-game ritual.
According to sophomore Batts, players would hold hands before the game, pray together and then yell “One, two, three [N-word]!” before going out onto the court. Batts said she was shocked and spoke out against the tradition when she first witnessed it before the team’s opening game on Dec. 2, but felt that if she struck out against it she would have been bludgeoned herself by her unsympathetic teammates.
“I said, ‘You’re not allowed to say that word because I don’t like that word,'” Batts said. “They said, ‘You know we’re not racist, Tyra. It’s just a word, not a label.'”
The Caucasian girls knew the chant was hurtful because they deliberately waited until the coaches and other adults existed the locker room to say the chant, but Batts didn’t initially report the tradition.
Of course, the head coach has not responded by press time to the questions about what she knew, but Batts said her teammates would routinely make disparaging remarks during practice, having conversations that was littered with “cotton picking, slavery and shackles,” when the coach was present and close enough to hear.
Batts finally retaliated, predictably, after protesting the chant one final time, and a white teammate called her a “black piece of [expletive],” just before the weekend break. Batts stewed in rage over the indignity the entire weekend. That following Monday, Batts zeroed in on the girl that called her out of her name and administered a pummeling — shoving her into a locker, punching her repeatedly and choking the offending white girl.
“It was a build up of anger and frustration at being singled out of the whole team,” Batts said.
Originally given a long suspension, Batts finally spilled the contents of her heavy heart before school administrators. An inquiry and subsequent suspensions followed quickly, media reports states.
“The minute an adult knew,” Kenmore-Town of Tonawanda School District superintendent Mark P. Mondanaro told the news outlet. “We started our inquiry and investigation.”
Batts’ suspension was reduced to five days, which she has already served, after the principal learned of the racial allegations, and Mondanaro said he personally apologized to her and her family. He also issued a statement condemning the incident.
“This type of insensitivity to one of our students is wrong, unacceptable, unfortunate, and will never, ever be tolerated,” he said.
Among the disciplinary action meted out to the team, every team member who chanted the words will receive suspended two days out of school and forced to sit out a game, albeit at different times. Their latest Saturday game was also forfeited.
What was most disturbing was the fact that a former student Amber Schurter, who was on the team last year and is bi-racial, said her teammates were not racist. She actually had the audacity to respond to the high-profile event this way: ‘If you don’t know the people on the team then obviously you’re going to think it’s a little weird.
‘You’ll look at them as kind of racist I guess, but I know that they’re not.’
Wow, Schurter. What a remarkable a person you are for being so understanding and accepting of a group of people who look at you as a lower form of being. Simply wonderful.
— terry shropshire
