Perry Traditional Academy is a predominantly black high school, located on Pittsburgh’s North Side and a five- to seven-minute drive away from my house. My brother-in-law graduated from there last year. (He was also a first-team All-City basketball player. He can’t beat me yet, but he is pretty good.)
On Friday, Perry traveled to Wellsburg, W.Va., to play Brooke High School. Brooke is the only high school in Brooke County, which is 98 percent white.
To showcase some of that Brooke County hospitality, the school thought it would be a good and appropriate and totally not-racist-at-all idea to greet Perry with a “Trump Perry” sign with an American flag etched on it, while the students seated directly behind the flag all apparently shopped at a Dollar Tree Fourth of July clearance sale.
And before you think to excuse this as just some asshole high school students being assholes, as someone who was once a high school teacher, believe me when I tell you that a sign that large wouldn’t be allowed to be displayed without some school admin signing off on it. Also, the lead picture for this piece was taken from the Brooke High School football team’s Twitter account at 10:30 a.m. Monday. I am not sure who runs this account, but I presume it has some official school oversight as well.
Of course, this all happened the same weekend that Darth Cheeto decided to lob insults at the predominantly black NFL players kneeling during the playing of the national anthem before games to draw attention to racial injustice and police brutality, and at the predominantly black NBA team that decided not to visit the White House.
Perhaps the “Trump Perry” sign wasn’t a direct result of Donald Trump’s words Friday, but they all exist under the same “Make America Great Again” umbrella. In Trump’s America, the pre-eminent cultural zeitgeist is racism, and it stretches from Washington, D.C., to every tiny Trump-supporting school district.
According to the schedule on its Twitter account, Brooke’s next home game is against Parkersburg South, a high school from Parkersburg, W.Va.—a city that is 95 percent white. I wonder if any “Trump Parkersburg” signs will be displayed then.