A Pittsburgh high school basketball game turned ugly – in a truly weird way. Racial tensions escalated after two students at Brentwood High School dressed in banana suits at a game, and hurled racial slurs toward the students of predominately black Monessen High.
EXCLUSIVE: Stop It Five! Newt Gingrich’s Coded Racism
According to the Associated Press, the costumed Brentwood students were thrown out of Friday’s game after they ran past the Monessen fan section.
However Brentwood’s district superintendent, Ronald Dufalla, said in a statement Wednesday that after he reviewed game tapes and talked to school officials, he hadn’t, “seen no other activity that confirms the allegations made.”
The two students in banana suits, he said, have done that at previous games “without incident.”
“The high school students are emulating college students they have seen on television who wear costumes during the collegiate contests,” Dufalla said in email Wednesday to The Associated Press.
“No high school team, Monessen or otherwise, or their fans are being singled out. This is just something the students do.”
Parents said they heard slurs from Brentwood students including “monkeys” and “cotton pickers.”
Superintendent Linda Marcolini told The Valley Independent that she planned to report the conflict to the Western Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association, which oversees high school sports in the region.
“Basically, I feel (Dufalla) sugar-coated the situation,” Marcolini told the Independent. “I’m not happy with that, and I feel like I’ve not been told the whole story or the truth.”
Marcolini said Brentwood officials owe the Monessen school district an apology.
As for the two schools, district officials investigated the incident by speaking to unspecified students and staff members who attended the game and will try their best to reach an “amicable resolution” between schools, executive director Tim O’Malley said.
