‘Embarrassing’: KC-area principal runs on court to make team remove racial unity shirts

BY MELINDA HENNEBERGER

When Park Hill South’s interim principal, Kerrie Herren, ran out onto the volleyball court last Tuesday and demanded that the girls take off their “Together We Rise”warm-up shirts that instant, “it was just embarrassing,” said Abbie Day, the senior who’d proposed the shirts as a symbol of racial equity and inclusion.

Was that message a problem in the Riverside, Missouri, school, where just shy of 70% of the students are white? Was it the sight of three raised fists, in three different skin tones, that wasn’t acceptable? And why the on-court ambush, when the players had proudly worn their new shirts at an away game on Monday night, and again to school on Tuesday, without any problems? 

“The coaches tried to be like, ‘It’s OK,’ but he was not taking that,” Day said. “He seemed angry.” In the moment, she and her teammates were more mortified than they were mad, though that came later. Players on the opposing team, from North Kansas City High School, had worn the shirts, too, in solidarity, and Herren asked some of them to take them off as well, without realizing they weren’t even his students.

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www.kansascity.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/melinda-henneberger/article246250265.html