racist girlsIt's 2012, right? Just checking. Because after watching the racist rant recently posted on YouTube by two white girls from Gainesville High School in Florida, I had to wonder if we'd somehow traveled back to a time before the civil rights movement. How is it even possible for two kids to be this hatefully bigoted and ignorant now? We have an African-American president in office, for the love of god.

And here we have two girls who think it's okay to not only say things like, "You can understand what we are saying, our accents, we use actual words. Black people do not," but to then post those comments on the Internet?

I'm truly at a loss. The teens, who are "no longer students" at Gainesville High, have since made a formal apology -- given the death threats they've been receiving since the video went viral, I'm not particularly surprised. But are they really sorry -- and do they know why they should be?

Or, taking that line of questioning a step further, do they even know what they did wrong in the first place? My guess, because these girls are so young, is that they just adopted the attitudes and beliefs of the adults around them. At the very least, you've got to figure the authority figures in their lives never went out of their way to talk about tolerance and acceptance.

So who's really at fault here?

I'm not placing the blame solely on the girls' parents; teens definitely have minds of their own, which are apt to be influenced by just about anything or anyone. Still, I'm reminded of the lyrics to a song from the musical South Pacific, "You've Got to Be Carefully Taught" ...

You've got to be taught
To hate and fear,
You've got to be taught
From year to year,
It's got to be drummed
In your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a different shade,
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught before it's too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You've got to be carefully taught

I just hope that whoever taught those girls what they professed to believe in that video now realize the harm they caused.

Do you think the racist teens in this video learned how to hate from their parents?


Image via NormBarStool/YouTube