2-4-6-Hate

By Tom Owens, Teaching Tolerance. Posted November 20, 2006.

Imagine a classroom teacher detailing ways to taunt and name-call, drilling her students on chants designed to humiliate another group of students. Who, anywhere, would expect that to happen?

But in school gyms and stadiums, such behavior -- sometimes characterized as humor rather than humiliation -- often is the norm. Racial, religious, ethnic or socioeconomic differences between teams often increase the volume of intolerance, and win-at-all-cost boosters may ignore or even encourage such verbal venom. "We're talking about respectfulness," said Michael Josephson, founder of the Character Counts Coalition and creator of its Pursuing Victory With Honor program. "It's respecting everybody -- yourself, your fellow students, your opponent and the game itself."

Josephson brings it back to the classroom: "You don't have a right to yell out insults (at a school sporting event) any more than I could stand over your shoulder in class and boo and hiss every time you made a mistake." How nasty have trash-talking high school fans become? Consider a few examples from around the nation:

In 2003, white fans at a Show Low, Ariz., high school heckled a visiting Apache basketball team with this class- and race-based chant, assigning second-class citizenship to Native Americans. Many in the crowd dismissed the fan behavior as a joke -- a tactic often used to discount or minimize the damage done by racialized language.

Harold Slemmer, Arizona Interscholastic Association executive director, said that more adults than students were involved in the jeers. State administrators ordered the entire school to complete the Pursing Victory With Honor sports program. Slemmer said that no fan incidents have been reported since.

In February 2006, students at Douglas Freeman High School in Richmond, Va., were banned from attending the district tournament quarterfinal basketball game at their school. Dr. Edward Pruden Jr., Freeman's principal, chose the one-game punishment in response to how his students, a week earlier, had singled out a star player on an opposing team. When arch-rival Mills E. Godwin High School visited, fans of the Freeman Rebels repeatedly heckled a player on the Godwin team, chanting references to the gay-themed movie Brokeback Mountain.

The cheer defied school policy -- a policy emphasized throughout the year and even sent home in a letter to students' families. The school specifically prohibits cheering against opponents, especially when cheers ridicule an individual player.

These assorted insults came in March 2005, when Lake Oswego, Ore., hosted Portland's Lincoln High. Lake Oswego students singled out Lincoln senior Omar Leary, after a baseless rumor swept the stands that the black player was a 20-year-old who had been held back. The local newspaper quoted Lake Oswego's student body president saying that her community wasn't a haven of racism. "People are looking for some excuse to bring us down," she said. "They are looking for some way to draw out the stereotype."

The stereotype to which she referred was not race, but affluence. Lake Oswego parents and students complain that their team has played road games hearing "Daddy's money!" -- a chant targeting Lake Oswego's privileged image. By contrast, a nearby Oregon City basketball team gets heckled in other ways. Chris Snethen, a blogger, documented chants of "white trash," "food stamps" and "trailer trash" in February 2005. "No -- we're rednecks!" became Oregon City's rebuttal chant.

"The chants are common when Oregon City hits the road," Snethen said. "I attended a game in inner-city Portland earlier this season where the home crowd started chanting about trailer trash. The Oregon City kids laugh it off. ... They wear their redneck/country [reputation] as a badge of honor."

Finding a 'soft spot'

In Massachusetts, Provincetown High School teams have fought back against offensive cheers. Because the town has a well-known population of openly gay residents, the teams have been bombarded with anti-gay shouts from opposing crowds.

Provincetown softball and baseball teams traveled to Nantucket in 2003. Both visiting squads were peppered with anti-gay insults. As a result, Provincetown's principal and athletic director complained in writing to their Nantucket counterparts, characterizing the fan behavior as "an assault on the students of Provincetown High School ... (and) ... an assault on the entire Provincetown community."

The Nantucket principal responded, threatening to ban all Nantucket students from the stands to quash the epithets.

See more stories tagged with: sports cheer, chant, racism

Tom Owens, a children's book author living in Central Iowa, is a frequent contributor to Teaching Tolerance magazine, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

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