INDIAN MASCOTS GUARANTEE
RACIAL CONFLICT IN SCHOOLS

This letter to the United States Commission on Civil Rights addresses school administrative responsibility and liability for racial conflict which Indian Mascots guarantee in schools. Children are immature and time after time will choose to solve conflicts with threats and violence. Indian mascots are a racial conflict and racial conflicts between children are especially volatile and destructive. Any school which uses Indians as mascots also has the promise of racial conflict in their school. This conflict may come between students or even more likely between teachers and students or perhaps between students from other schools.

This letter was submitted as evidence to the Department of Education, Office of Civil Rights, April 4, 2001 in a formal complaint against the Little River Kansas School district #444, (redskins) for their encouragement of two racial hate crimes against a Native American family.

The purpose of this letter is to,
1. Encourage schools to change before a violent incident takes the life of a child.
2. Provide rationale and encourage students and their family's to sue those school districts which place students at risk in racial conflicts.

Matthew Richter, 1131 Iron Horse Rd.
McPherson, KS, 67460

March 12, 2001

US Commission on Civil Rights
624 9th Street Northwest, Suite 700
Washington, DC 20425

Commissioners,

INDIAN MASCOTS AND THE GUARANTEE OF VIOLENCE IN YOUR LOCAL SCHOOL

In Kansas Hutchinson News headline reads STUDENTS ARE FRONT-LINE DEFENSE IN SCHOOL VIOLENCE. School administrators are encouraging kids to set up what the kids call a snitch network to counter school violence. Kids are not going to solve this violence. Kids are going to help but educators and parents have to get at the roots of the problem, turn it around and make our schools safe. Our schools are terror zones. They are operating with fear.

In the mean time the school prepares evacuation plans, and fail safe cell phone networks to call 911 and emergency medical services. These plans are derived from measures developed by minimum security correctional facilities after decades of experience with inmates. But these are your children that you just sent off to school these are not criminals in a prison.

Take a good at these plans, nowhere, NOWHERE in them do they say take out a root problem of conflict which centers around racism in our school. Any school which has an Indian mascot has a racial time bomb ticking away inside their classrooms, in their hallways in their athletic activities, in the parking lot and in the community around them. Children do not solve conflicts with maturity and reason they threaten, harass and commit violent acts.

Face the facts. Today's school environment is one of violence, intimidation, threats and fear. Yes, fear. Fear for the safety of our children. You can put up metal detectors. You can hire security guards. You can establish what the kids call a snitch network. You can even park an ambulance outside the school with a swat team in it. But is that how a school is kept safe?

To reduce violence you must identify sources of conflict and eliminate them. NO school administrator, school board member, teacher or guidance counselor will tell you the Indian mascot and the debates around them are nice intellectual events, they are a rolling racial conflict. Call any one of these administrators or superintendents at an Indian mascot school and ask them if they would welcome a debate in their school about the impact of the Indian mascot. You are going to get a NO in every single one of these calls. They know they have a racial conflict on their hands and they hope you don't care enough to ask for safe schools and trigger the whole landslide of racial conflict which every mascot school now sits beneath.

What the plans don't say is the school intends to gamble with your child's life. They will wait and see if a racial conflict over the Indian mascot comes to a violent end. When it does, the school will blame the children who are involved. They also will blame you the parent for it because of a bad home life. The school will blame the TV for violent entertainment. The school will blame violent video games. The school will blame rap singer Eminem for violent music. The school will blame the Indians for talking about the Indian mascots and tell them to go back to the reservation where they belong. But they will keep this guaranteed racial conflict in your schools because they would rather play a game with Indian racial identity than make the school safe.

You folks who have been sitting there quiet and shaking your heads at school violence and then turning your back on a solution need to ask yourselves why you let a racial conflict breed in your school system? You know that children are threatening and shooting each other in situations much less heated than the debate about Indian mascots.

YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE

What you folks in your town are being set up for by your local Indian mascot school is to take the blame for any violent act committed in the defense of Indian mascots. Face it folks, read the editorials in the local newspapers, the racial hate threats on the Internet and through the mail. Read the racist remarks the rape threats coming from the debate at these mascot schools. Then look again, everyone of the school boards who want to get out from under the responsibility for keeping a racial conflict in their school asks you the public to vote on whether to keep the mascot or not. They do not do what the Minnesota State Board of Public Instruction has done and eliminate the Indian mascots and therefore eliminate the racial conflict.

When the racist remarks are made they blame you the public. When the criminal threats are made such as at Little River High School, they blame the students who made them. They keep the racial Indian mascot and the time bomb sits ticking until something triggers another racial incident. Then there are more threats and intimidation's and it all centers around some school's Indian mascot racial based identity.

What are you going to say when some child kills someone over the Indian mascot? "Oh, if only we had known we wouldn't have voted for the Indian mascot!" The school going to going to blame you and you are all going to blame the Indians for even talking about it in the first place. But that won't bring back the life a dead child who died in an Indian mascot conflict. Can't happen here you say? Where does it happen? Colorado, California, Tennessee, start making a list because school violence is a life threatening issue in every single school in the USA. Tell me honestly that you like the idea of gambling with the lives of our precious youth over a racial based conflict? Tell us why, in today's climate of school violence you would even hesitate to remove a known source of conflict in your school system? Why?

People, you all know that somewhere, sometime, some kid for any reason you want to pick, reasonable or insane is going to get a knife or a gun an blow somebody away over the Indian mascot issue. Then what do you say to the parents of the dead child? Those Indians are to blame so we will see you at the funeral? What do you say to the parents of the shooting child? If those Indians had only shut up and quit telling us to open our eyes to a racial conflict it would have been okay! or Do you just say see you at the prison where they are going to lock up your 16 year old son for murder?

How much warning do you need from the minority community who know how racism takes the lives of children before you eliminate a racial time bomb in your school district? We have been warning you for years already. Stop the violence and make our schools safe.

**********************

People do not listen to me about this racial conflict because their brains are dead and their hearts are hardened to accept violence. I want you to read what is out here and the kind of mail I get. I want you to imagine that you have received these threats so you will know what it is like. I am enclosing copies of two criminal threats made by persons in Little River Kansas. McPherson County Kansas Sheriff, Kansas Bureau of Investigation and the FBI all will verify their authenticity as they have investigated them. One is known to have been made by a student at the High School where they have a Redskins Indians identity and law enforcement has been unable or unwilling to identify the sender of the rape threat and the death threat.

I am also enclosing a hate letter from a Washington Redskins fan. In it you will see how the Indian mascot encourages hatred against African Americans too. These letters are vile and you will not like to read them but you must. They come from children or childlike adults. What ever way you might explain, rationalize or try to minimize the content of these messages they are real and they know the contemporary hatred that is attached to the Indian mascot issue.

Sincerely,

Matthew Richter

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