Maybe in another time, the scene at an Orange County high school football game might have felt different: the home team fans dressed in red, white and blue chanting, “USA!” “USA!,” after a touchdown.
But this is an age of polarization from President Trump on down, of us versus them, of viral accounts of racist rhetoric and bullying in schools — and the home team’s campus is mostly white, the visiting team’s almost entirely Latino.
The Southern Poverty Law Center has collected disturbing anecdotes nationwide: white students in Arizona raising a Confederate flag during the pledge of allegiance at an assembly, a Georgia high school teacher reporting students who repeated an offensive phrase about women, and joked “about Latino students ‘going back to Mexico.’”..