RICHMOND – Racist comments targeting his Chinese daughter left a father concerned about the response from Richmond Middle School officials.

The incident is the second in two weeks. The first, involving a black youth, led the teacher who made a racist comment to resign.

Marine veteran Bradley Baska said the latest incident involved his daughter, but his concern started five years earlier with his Chinese son. Both children are U.S. residents.

WRESTLING

“It started when we first moved to Richmond in 2016. Both my kids are half-Chinese; my son was born in China when I lived there,” Baska said.

After returning to the United States, Baska said he wanted to live in a small town and Richmond fit the need.

“I’m from the country and I like smaller schools,” he said.

The first school-related incident targeted Baska’s son during a wrestling event.

“One of the kids there held down my son and yelled in his ear that he hated Chinese people, Chinese people should die because they eat dogs. My son was very upset,” Baska said.

Deciding the boy who had made the comments might not have realized the impact of what had been said, Baska approached that boy’s parent, a district worker.

“She went nuts. She started calling him every name in the book, me every name in the book, stood in the middle of the gym and screamed I (Baska) ’effin hate white people,’ grabbed my son’s feet, grabbed my son’s hands and had people waiting in the parking lot to try to beat us up when we left,” he said. “I eventually had to call the police and got a police report.”

The result from the school, Baska said: “Nothing was done. My son had to deal with her for three years.”

A FAMILIAR INSULT

“My daughter’s in seventh grade,” Baska said. “And today (Oct. 14), three children started telling her, ‘Why don’t you go eat a dog? Chinese people eat dogs. Please, stay away from my dog. Don’t eat my dog.’ Stuff like that.”

“It happened in class and outside of class,” his daughter said.

In one of the two classrooms, a teacher heard the comments, she said.

“He just told them to get back to work,” she said.

Baska said he is not angry with the teacher, but wonders whether racism directed at Asian-Americans is treated as less hurtful than racism directed at black youth. He based his musing on the Richmond Middle School teacher who resigned after making a slur two weeks ago and on another incident from a few years earlier that also involved a black youth and drew metrowide attention.

“I don’t want to be super-blaming. When (teachers) go through this type of training, and I was a teacher, … they really concentrate on African-Americans; and the teacher could maybe not have put two and two together and realized saying, ‘Don’t eat my dog’ to an Asian student is a racist statement.”

His daughter did not fight the bullies, Baska said.

“My daughter did exactly what she was supposed to do. She immediately went to the office and reported it,” he said. “They then allowed those kids to do it the rest of the day. The whole rest of the day, they followed around my daughter saying those things.”

No one from the school called to tell Baska about the incident, which he heard about only after his daughter had returned home, he said.

“If my daughter hadn’t told me, I would have never known,” he said, later adding, “I went up, when my daughter came home crying from school, to talk to the vice principal.

SCHOOL RESPONSE

Assistant Principal Kelley Logan acknowledged receiving the report and announced an investigation would follow, Baska said, but he felt that the administration should have separated the children immediately, rather than allowing the abuse to continue that day.

Baska said he talked to district Assistant Superintendent Ginger Jones, who offered an apology and asked what could be done to make his daughter feel safe at school.

The girl said she is concerned bullying could continue, or maybe worsen, because she told on the bullies.

“They’re still going to do it, and they (could) do it even worse, because (they think) I’m a crybaby or I’m overreacting or something like that,” she said.

One of the three students involved in the incident had bullied his daughter previously and once threatened physical violence, Baska said. But his daughter still wanted to return to school the next day after being the subject of slurs, he said.

“She really had an adult feeling about this. She said, ‘Just because there’s a few jerks at school who are being mean to me doesn’t mean I don’t want to go to school and be with my friends and learn.’ So I was very proud of her about that.”

The day after the incident, Baska said he heard again from the school, with the administration suggesting removing his daughter from the setting where the bullying had occurred. Baska said that idea amounted to punishing the victim.

The next call the same day informed Baska the administration had talked to the parents of the main person responsible for the bullying and the student had been moved to different classrooms to separate that child from his daughter.

Moving the student is best, Baska said.

As Richmond’s superintendent of schools, Dr. Greg Darling could not address Baska’s complaint about bullying directly for legal reasons. But he talked generally about how the district addresses bullying.

“Teachers have had training on dealing with bullies,” he said Monday.

There is no single way to deal with the variety of ways bullying might become manifest, Darling said.

“We do different strategies with different students at times to aid in preventing bullying,” he said. “There’s different strategies for different situations.”

Before taking action, the administraiton gathers the facts, Darling said, including from the students involved.

“We go through the channels, we have negotiations, we meet as a group and then we also discuss with parents different strategies on how to approach (issues),” he said. “I can’t speak on this direct scenario, but I know we work on preventing bullying. Teachers had some different training and professional development, and we continue to work on that, too. We take it serious.”

A RESOLUTION?

There is no streak of anti-Asian sentiment running through the district, Baska said, and he understands children may say childish things as they develop social skills.

“But that doesn’t bother me as much as the response from the school district both times,” five years earlier and now, he said.

Whether more should be done to prevent anti-Asian bigotry is not something Baska has thought through, he said.

“I’m not sure what to feel at this point,” Baska said.

‘If my daughter hadn’t told me, I would have never known.’

BRADLEY BASKA

MIDDLE SCHOOL PARENT