*Blue and white are the school colors at Connecticut’s East Hampton High, and for years, students there have recited the colors at rallies, chants and cheers at games: “We say blue, you say white! Blue, white! Blue, white!”
Home games are reportedly often dominated by “white outs” (where fans wear white shirts to games), and the senior class has a special chant for themselves: “White! White! White!”
Well, WFSB-TV reports the school has decided that all that white ain’t right. Principal John Fidler penned a note last week saying that due to the “current social climate across our country, our use of the ‘White’ cheer is under suspension. Please show your pride in our town and in our school through other means when cheering on our teams.”
As you can imagine, that didn’t sit too well with students.
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“It’s not really that big of a deal to me or to any of our sophomore class,” student Kylie O’Brien told WFSB. “I don’t understand why it’s a problem now.”
The station said Jordan Michnowicz wrote on Facebook that “this stuff has me outraged they are trying to take a simple chant that our school has done for years and years. They are trying to make it about race.”
Brandon Kochuk noted that only seniors say, “white” — and not “white power or anything involving race.”
Superintendent Paul Smith told WFSB that the chant has “kind of outgrown just being done in our gym and at pep rallies and there’s a time and a place where the cheer is appropriate and a time when it may appear insensitive.”
School officials met with the senior class last week to discuss the issue, and Smith told WFSB the chant is not suspended.
“He is not telling them what they can say and can’t say in the gym at the games,” Smith said, presumably referring to principal Fidler. “He wants them to come, but he also wants them to reflect the positive things they do outside of the gym as well.”
Watch the report below about all the hoopla over the use of the word “white” in the school’s cheer:
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