A Michigan school district’s parent meeting about racial discrimination turned ugly Monday when a Latino man, speaking about the adversity that his kids had faced in the district, was reportedly met with heckling.
Adrian Iraola immigrated to Saline, Mich., from Mexico City in 1980 and sent all three of his children — now grown — to Saline Area Schools. Iraola was recounting to a group of parents the effect that the racial slurs had on his children when a man in the crowd yelled, “Then why didn’t you stay in Mexico?”
The exchange was captured on video and the man, identified as Tom Burtell was asked to leave the meeting by another woman in the crowd.
Article submitted by, Texas Patriot.
From The Washington Post:
The exchange, captured on both video and audio, has rocked the town of Saline, a mostly white suburb in eastern Michigan that had already been grappling with an instance of racism between students. In a Snapchat group between high school football players, two teammates had used racial slurs and talked of “WHITE POWER” earlier this year, the Ann Arbor News reported.
Monday’s meeting was meant to address the group chat and explore how Saline schools could move forward. Yet it also provided a firsthand example of some of the issues plaguing the school system, Iraola told The Washington Post.
“We wanted to tell the audience that this [kind of discrimination] was alive and well,” he said. “We were very surprised to see that, right then and there, is the ignorance manifested by those comments.”