…this video of a “genocidally racist” high school girl should have been the lead story on MSNBC for five nights running. There should have been a minimum of thirty stories about it on Salon, and Danny Glover and Harry Belafonte should have been locking arms and marching through town singing “We Shall Overcome.”
The reason the story didn’t go national is simple: The girl who recorded the video isn’t white. She’s Desirae Fernandez, a Latina. So the national media had no interest. The Elk Grove Unified School District announced that Ms. Fernandez was no longer part of their student body, and everybody went about their business…until this month, when the district decided to hold an “anti-racism” open meeting. A Pleasant Grove senior, Rachael Francois—who is black—caught the attention of the press with stories of antiblack racism she’d encountered at the school. Now reporters from bigger markets became interested, because the villains in Francois’ tales are white.
It didn’t appear to matter to the Bee’s dogged scoop-meisters that Francois apparently straight-up lied to them. “It really makes you feel different from everyone else, especially going to a predominately white school,” she’s quoted as saying. According to the Bee’s own figures, whites make up only 38% of the student body. They comprise the largest plurality, but the school is in no way “predominantly white.”
