Six months after a girls’ high school basketball team in Worcester faced a wave of online racist attacks, the city’s schools are pushing back vocally and vowing to protect their student-athletes from future incidents of bullying or harassment in sports.
“Our student athletes have been targeted. You have stepped onto the fields, courts, and tracks to represent your school and the city of Worcester with pride skill, and heart, only to be met with cowardly racist slurs from the sidelines or posts on social media,” schools Superintendent Brian Allen said Tuesday inside a high school auditorium filled with more than 700 students. “That ends today. It is time for the entire Worcester Public Schools to draw a line in the sand.”
The schools are collaborating with the Worcester NAACP and YWCA of Central Massachusetts in a Stand Against Racism campaign aimed at raising awareness and speaking up in the face discriminatory-based bullying.
Following a basketball tournament last March between Worcester’s South High School and Andover, racist social media posts targeted the Worcester team.
Racist taunts, cyberbullying and abusive coaching in school sports are part of a growing trend in the state, an ongoing investigation by GBH News has found.
Worcester schools have reported several incidents to the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association since 2023, part of a state effort called Addressing Hate in School Sports that’s been trying to combat the problem by tracking incidents and training school leaders.
Some critics — including coaches, lawmakers, advocates and parents — have questioned the project’s effectiveness.
In Worcester, school leaders and student athletes are calling for concrete action against the problem, encouraging everyone to speak up when the bullying or racists acts unfold.
“When a harmful joke echoes across the field … when a racist comment flashes across the screen, seen by hundreds but named by none, it gets hard,” said Olive White, a senior at South High School. “To stand against racism ... means breaking the uncomfortable silence.”
State Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell roused the students to a standing ovation after sharing the narrative of her own emotional trauma as a child and calling on the racially diverse teenagers in the audience to look at their own biases and actions.
“We can stand up here and talk about what we’re going to do, but it doesn’t matter if you don’t cement in your heart
— when you look at another human being that they are indeed a human being. If you don’t do the work … to overcome any stereotypes you have yourself, any hate, anything that would get in the way of you seeing someone else as a human being,” she said.
U.S. Rep. Jim McGovern, the Worcester Democrat, said the bullying and racism playing out in schools and in youth sports in Massachusetts are part of a national trend modeled by the leaders in Washington.
“When the most powerful people in our country normalize discrimination against people because of the color of their skin, or who they are, or where they come from, it has an impact,” he said. “It makes people think that it’s OK to act that way, and it desensitizes others to behavior that all of us here agree is reprehensible.”
