Why racial incidents in school are no surprise to me

It was a new building. New people. A new life started when I came to high school. Biology, geometry, everything’s a blur to me but this all changes when I go to my next class: Spanish.

I’m taking non-accelerated Spanish, unlike everyone I know from my middle school. In my class, there are no friends. There are seniors, juniors, kids from my history class that I don’t know. Although there is diversity throughout the school, in this class, I am the only Asian student.

Class starts, ends, and nothing eventful happen. A few weeks later, things change. Everyone’s somehow noticed that I always do my homework and before class starts, they come over and ask if they can copy my work. I let them. Then things change even more. If I leave my binder in class to go to the bathroom, people just grab my homework. They don’t say thanks, and I only exist when they need my homework.

Then a whole new level of frustration. They call me “chink”. According to Urbandictionary.com, a chink is “A term that originated during the Korean War and latter took on the flavor of a racist slur… A conjunction of a Chinese North Korean.”

They say things like: “The chink always does her homework; the chink is the teacher’s pet, I want to be in a group with the chink because she’ll do all the work.” It’s already bad enough that I’m being seriously offended, but I hate myself for not saying anything about it and that no one else is telling me to ignore the others. Everyone just sits, listens, and sometimes even laughs. I feel publicly humiliated and shocked that people would openly refer to me in a racial slur at school. I hate being in that class, but the drop/add deadline has passed, and we all know you need a foreign language to get into college. So I decide to stay even though I came to hate the class as well as Spanish.

As the year goes by, I change too. I stick my binder in my backpack and when someone asks if I’ve done my homework, I lie. I feel bad about lying, but at the same time I don’t. I don’t want to help anyone who calls me names and laughs at me. As immature and lame as I sound, this is the only thing I can do as payback. As the end of the year approaches, I go from someone who took racial comments lightly to a person who is sensitive toward racial comments especially when they apply to me. I can't watch a single Russell Peters clip about Koreans or any videos that parody Koreans without getting upset.

Three years later, I’m a high school senior and I’m sharing with the whole community a story I never even shared with my closest friends. For those of you who want to know what happened later, I switched to accelerated Spanish my sophomore year.

At first, my grades suffered. I struggled to keep up with my classmates, but I was lucky enough to catch up and learn and practice and love the language with the help of my teacher Senora Bares. What happened to me, although it was not a physical attack, was an attack nonetheless. Maybe I wouldn’t be able to apply to colleges that I am now applying to if I had dropped out of Spanish. Although I don’t hold the things that I was called to my heart, through the experience, I have lost all respect for some, and I learned that people often take things past ignorance and more toward hate.

I am sharing my experience now because I understand that people are shocked by what happened at Skyline, but I’m not that surprised. Although it's not clear whether the attack was racially motivated, my conclusion is that open racism isn't rare. Maybe it's because I’ve experienced it or maybe it's because I personally believe that little stereotypes and racial insults pile up to become a hate toward a race. None of us can deny that high school kids have heard and then told others the racist jokes they’ve heard, so although they might not be to a hate crime level, none of us should be surprised that these sorts of events happen.

Alisa Lee is a senior at Huron High School in Ann Arbor.