Students and alums reveal racist culture at top Chicago private school
As an eighth-grader in 2017, South Chicago resident Randy Pierre boasted the grades and test scores to get into some of Chicago’s top high schools. His first choice was Whitney Young High School, a public school on the Near West Side where two in three students are people of color.
But Randy chose the Latin School of Chicago, an independent school on the Gold Coast serving predominantly white and affluent students. Latin tendered him a four-year scholarship worth more than $120,000 in tuition. His parents preferred Latin, and his sister, a 2014 Latin grad, praised its academic rigor.
She warned her brother, too: “She told me I would have some of the worst experiences I’ve ever had in my life there,” Randy said. “I didn’t believe her. I thought that maybe she just had a bad experience, that I would be different.”
But Randy saw for himself in the summer of 2017, five days into the school year. Randy said he was sitting on a school bus headed to a freshman orientation retreat when a white boy suddenly sat next to him and joked that he “didn’t have a father.”
And in the fall, a few months after a deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Randy was sitting at a lunch table in Latin’s cafeteria when several white boys began joking that they were planning to attend a KKK rally.
“I kind of just took it because I felt like if I showed that they were affecting me they would just keep doing it,” he said. “But it got worse, to the point where people, white people, were just saying the N-word around me as if I wasn’t there.”
Randy’s story is one of the hundreds shared by current and former Latin students accusing students and teachers of racism, xenophobia, and abuse at the college prep school, according to an anonymous Instagram account with more than 2,700 followers, Latin Survivors.
Similar pages have surfaced in recent weeks focused on other Chicago private schools. Another private prep school near Latin, Francis W. Parker School in the Lincoln Park community, and St. Ignatius College Prep, a private Jesuit school on the Near West Side, also have Instagram pages documenting students’ experiences with racism and anti-Blackness. Those revelations come on the heels of recent outcry over racist transgressions at other highly touted Chicago schools, including the private University of Chicago Lab Schools in Hyde Park, and Walter Payton High School on the Near North Side.
The spokesperson for Latin Survivors, a recent grad who spoke to Injustice Watch on the condition of anonymity, said the group was inspired by Black students who are leading social media campaigns exposing injustice at other top college prep schools across the U.S. The spokesperson said the group is also drawing inspiration from the ongoing uprising against white supremacy and police violence in America.
“We are acting in solidarity with movements across our country demanding structural change in the government,” the spokesperson said. “We’re demanding structural change in institutions that deprive many of us of a healthy high school experience.”
The spokesperson said that a group of current and former students is crafting a set of demands for Latin’s administrators that “span from increasing the power of marginalized students’ voices relative to the board of trustees, to hiring more BIPOC administrators and teachers and restructuring our required curriculum across the school to incorporate the stories and histories of our BIPOC and LGBTQ+ students.”
