Funny pic here for what’s a serious subject, but I had to go with something high school-related since no photos of the graffiti in question have been released.
I went to Richard Montgomery High School in Rockville, MD. After graduating, I went to Wisconsin for college and stayed in Madison for a total of 18 years until I moved back to Rockville last spring.
Rockville is the county seat of Montgomery County, which is an incredibly diverse suburb directly north and west of DC. According to this study, Rockville is the 9th most-diverse city in the country, and 3 other cities in Montgomery County are in the top 10.
Naturally, Richard Montgomery’s students are similarly diverse as the area in general. The school is 29.5% white, 24.7% Asian, 24.3% Hispanic, and 17.5% black, among others. While that report doesn’t break out students by religion, there’s a large Jewish population, including myself.
That diversity is one of the things I absolutely love about Rockville, and the DC area in general. It’s a Very Good Thing®. Here in Montgomery County, we’re proud as hell of this diversity. I mean, I can walk from my house to Joe’s Noodle House, and at my gym, as a white dude, I’m often in the minority.
My wife, who is from Wisconsin, but has lived in places like the Berkshires in Massachusetts, St. Paul, and Tucson, had only visited the DC area with me before we moved here. But in our very first week living here, she said something to me like, “I went to the store and it was incredible, literally every kind of person was there, I love it!” I was like, “yup, welcome to Rockville.”
This is all to say, it ain’t no fucking MAGA country around here.
The other day, I opened up Chrome on my phone, and I saw a link to an article with the headline: Swastika Spray Painted on Rockville High School. There actually is a Rockville High School, which is the next one over from RM. But when I opened the article, lo and behold they were talking about RM. (The next day they updated the headline to specify it was RM, which is a high school in Rockville, but not the Rockville High School. Whoops.)
I have to admit, seeing stuff like this happen around the country is always disappointing, but I felt a little bit shocked when it happened at RM. In this community, one of the most diverse in the country and one that LIKES IT THAT WAY.
Apparently, this was the second racist incident at the school in a month. The other one, was someone took red plastic cups that had been stuck in a fence to spell out SENIORS, and rearranged them to say the N-word.
Seriously.
Oh, and two years ago on Valentine’s Day, this happened:
On the morning of Feb. 14, a school employee walked into a second-floor special education lab and found that someone had covered the white board with racially charged language. The messages said “Trump power,” “Slayer,” “we rule,” “we are the best,” “all white,” “white power” and “no n***rs” with the word “blacks” written underneath, Cpl. Rick Halverson of the Rockville police said Friday. The n-word was misspelled.
Now I know high school kids are bastards in general, but it’s really hard to not draw correlations between certain politicians’ public statements, and the rise of certain other people’s racist-ass bullshit behavior.
But I’m not getting into that, because more than anything else, I’m just disappointed.
Fuck these fuckers. They picked the wrong town. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to console myself with some house veggie noodle soup and Spicy & Tasty Fried Tofu from Joe’s.