Student's racist Facebook posts roil Fresno school district

The video posted on Facebook is deeply jarring: a ?14-year-old white girl in full blackface, laughing, mugging for the camera in what appears to be a private home and declaring, “Who said I can’t say (the N-word)?”

Another video of the same girl is also making the rounds on social media; in this one, she is surrounded by friends, again spouting the most offensive racial epithet in the English language, but this time doing so on the campus of Bullard High School in Fresno, where she is a cheerleader. The videos began circulating via Snapchat in the middle of the week, and on Friday, a community activist posted the blackface snippet on her Facebook page, eliciting hundreds of angry comments.

The offensive images have roiled Bullard, which is in the wealthiest neighborhood in an otherwise impoverished school district, and underscored the racial tensions in California’s fifth most populous city.

“Even though we’re in California, we’re a very old-time, conservative town, and this racist behavior is very embedded in our community,” said Stacy Williams, the community organizer who posted the video on Facebook. “There’s a deep-rooted history of white people using their power over people of color in our city with little to no accountability.”

A teacher in the Fresno Unified School District sent Williams the video on Thursday night. Williams, a financial adviser who graduated from Bullard in 1994, said she “did due diligence” before she posted the video on her Facebook page, where she later commented that “When our schools create a campus culture of hate & racism, & act in complicit silence, we as a community must protect our children.”

Fresno schools Superintendent Bob Nelson described the girl as a 14-year-old Bullard student. He declined to release her name or punishment because “she’s a minor.”

“It’s very serious,” Nelson said Saturday. “We need to hold her accountable for her actions and the implications thereof. I don’t want to diminish the significance of the pain and anguish that this causes in others. That being said, I want to do more than just see people attack one another on social media. It doesn’t help us do the very real work we need to do.”

A meeting with the student body is in the works but has not been scheduled.

The last week of school begins Monday.