Two white girls in blackface grunted and swung their arms like apes. They jumped up and down to music playing in the background, moving in front of a camera, sneering as a third girl recorded them.
The six-second video snippet was recorded about two and half years ago, but it resurfaced this month, thrusting Poly Prep Country Day School in Brooklyn, one of New York City’s elite private schools, into the national conversation about racism.
On Friday, hundreds of Poly Prep students, dressed in black, walked out of an assembly, filtered into the hallways and staged an hour-and-a-half sit-in, which was first reported by the Polygon, the student newspaper.
That same day, on the eve of the holiday weekend honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the video of the Poly Prep students was lumped on social media into a montage of other racist imagery from that day that swept across social media: white male students wearing “Make America Great Again” hats who had surrounded and mocked a Native American veteran of the Vietnam War outside the Lincoln Memorial, a viral video from the University of Oklahoma of a female student with her face painted black and using what sounded like a racial slur.
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