By ERIC THOMAS
Courtesy Kansas Reflector
Two instances of antisemitism at high schools have surfaced in the last few weeks in eastern Kansas.
The instance at Blue Valley High School created the most headlines because of how flagrant and reckless it was. School administrators for the Overland Park school found the press box for their athletic stadium damaged on the eve of the holiday honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
The vandals — all under age 20 — are accused of breaking windows, trashing equipment and painting racist, homophobic and antisemitic slurs on the walls of the structure that sits atop the school’s bleachers. Four people have been charged, according to the local news media.
Student journalists at Lawrence High School reported and commented on the second series of incidents: a string of racist and antisemitic graffiti in bathrooms at the school.
Lawrence High School student journalist Jackson Green said the graffiti occurred at the end of the fall 2022 semester and continued into the current semester. In one incident, a swastika approximately two feet tall by two feet wide appeared to be etched into the wall using a sharp object, according to Green.
(A note of disclosure: I am director of the Kansas Student Press Association and helped the students decide how to handle the story — specifically, whether to publish images of the graffiti.)
Green said that he and a friend saw another swastika drawn with pencil in a bathroom. They reported it to a teacher, photographed it and then erased it.
“When living in Lawrence, you kind of think that you’re sheltered and protected from things like that,” Green said. “And you sometimes meet with the harsh realization that you’re not. So it’s disappointing to have to see that. And it’s scary.
“We know that these things can provoke violence. That’s the first thing that comes to mind. Who did this? Why did they do it? And are they going to continue doing it or are they going to do something worse?”
Racist and antisemitic messages like these poison our schools. Many students attend school while distracted with fear about mass shootings, let alone the targeted violence of hate crimes suggested by these messages.
Vulnerable students should not be made more insecure.
Educators know that students can’t learn when they are afraid. When students fear guns, bullying, a teacher or hate like these antisemitic images, they cannot concentrate on lessons about comma splices, ecosystems or verb conjugation. And they certainly can’t focus on the vital social lessons embedded in school. They can’t flourish.
Because these are both large high schools in Kansas, some might be tempted to criticize the schools themselves. But consider how, where and when these instances happened.
Students broke into school grounds after hours to vandalize the press box. And students hid in bathrooms at Lawrence High School, behind locked doors that shielded them from administrators. (The student vandals in Lawrence have not been identified.)
What can a school do to prevent the bigotry of students — cultivated during time away from school — from quietly infecting its hallways?
Lawrence’s principal, Jessica Bassett, has one answer.
“Incidents like this demonstrate that we still have work to do in helping students learn to respect one another no matter their differences,” Bassett wrote in an emailed statement. “I am hopeful about change as I watch our students and teachers actively working to develop a schoolwide campaign to combat hate.”
Bassett’s response shows dedication and faith in the power of schools. While I share that faith, I worry that students encounter hateful messages so potent and alluring that schools have only so much traction to combat them.
If a young person drifts down a YouTube rabbit hole of racist rhetoric, spending hours listening to antisemitic misinformation and Holocaust denialism, how can a school combat that with occasional training? Years of growing up in households governed by bigoted stereotypes similarly seem too powerful.
Add to those forces the influence of celebrity.
Green, who covered the racist graffiti in the Lawrence bathrooms, said that written underneath the image of one swastika was the word “Yeezy,” a reference to the rapper Kanye West. Along with the message of “I hate Jews” the vandals wrote “Kanye was right.”
Last year, West’s comments about Jews drew widespread condemnation but also, to Green’s eye, copycats.
“That’s when we started to notice the shift towards more hateful things,” Green said. “So it all happened relatively quickly after he made those comments on interviews and the Twitter quote that we’ve all seen plenty of times. And that’s when it started — not long after that.”
Add to West’s ignorant comments the delusions of NBA star Kyrie Irving and the xenophobia of many in President Donald Trump’s orbit, and it’s no surprise that young people sound embittered and bigoted.
One suggested intervention that schools could consider? Communicating the presence of racist and antisemitic rhetoric to its parents, students and community. Parents these days know how often schools communicate about lockdowns, drills or security threats. We receive text messages, emails and app notifications.
While messages describing hateful language aren’t as urgent, parents should hear about them.
The hesitation to share creates feelings of distrust for students like Green.
“It was very obvious it was trying to be hidden,” Green said about his school’s response to the earliest incidents of graffiti. “And there was no discussion coming from it. Like, my parents did not know until I told them what I had seen and what I had heard. So there’s also no acknowledgement from administrators.”
Julie Boyle, executive director of communications for Lawrence Public Schools, wrote that “the board of education does not have such a policy; however, the district values school families as partners in their children’s education and works to keep families informed.”
Based solely on these incidents, we might also be tempted to draw conclusions about a localized rise of antisemitism in Kansas. However, recent research suggests — and the experiences of many American Jews confirm — that these acts of vandalism in Kansas mirror a disturbing national trend. Antisemitism is rising in America.
Last week, the American Jewish Committee released its 2022 report, titled “The State of Antisemitism in America.” Imagine being a Jew in the America that this report describes.
- 82% of those surveyed believe that antisemitism has increased in the past five years.
- 41% believe that the status of American Jews is less secure than a year ago.
- Young Jews were 17% more likely to encounter antisemitic remarks than the overall Jewish public.
Most to the point of these instances in Kansas, 16% reported that a familiar Jewish institution had been targeted with graffiti.
This all shows how young people in Kansas high schools unfortunately have access to scattered fetid pools, filled with the toxic sludge of antisemitism.
To revise Trump’s rhetoric, these are the swamps that America needs to drain.
Eric Thomas directs the Kansas Scholastic Press Association and teaches visual journalism and photojournalism at the University of Kansas.