Monkey sounds, "white power" and the N-word: School racial harassment ignored under Trump [View all]

Source: Salon/Propublica

Published December 20, 2025 6:00AM (EST)


In Colorado, students taunted their Black classmates by playing whipping sounds on their cellphones and saying they should be shot “to make us a better race.” The only two Black students in a small district in Ohio were called the N-word by white peers starting on their first day. They got accustomed to hearing slurs like “porch monkey” and being told to go pick cotton. And at a school in Illinois, white students included Confederate flags in their PowerPoint presentations for class assignments and shook a school bus as Black students were exiting to try to make them tumble off.

In each case, the U.S. Department of Education’s civil rights arm investigated and concluded that school districts didn’t do enough to stop racial hostility toward Black students. It struck agreements with those districts to require changes and to monitor them for months, if not years. They were among roughly 50 racial harassment cases the OCR resolved in the last three years.

But that sort of accountability has ended under the second administration of President Donald Trump. Nearly a year since he took office, the department’s Office for Civil Rights has not entered into a single new resolution agreement involving racial harassment of students, a ProPublica analysis found.

“The message that it sends is that the people impacted by racial discrimination and harassment don’t matter,” said Paige Duggins-Clay, an attorney with a Texas nonprofit that has worked with families who’ve filed racial harassment complaints with OCR.

Read more: https://www.salon.com/2025/12/20/monkey-sounds-white-power-and-the-n-word-racial-harassment-ignored-under-trump-partner/

---

Centuries of this type of thing that has been unrelenting in the U.S., and that continues to be fueled by supremacists like those who occupy the WH today.