LOS ANGELES — A number of Los Angeles elite private schools are facing accusations of racism on social media as personal stories of racial discrimination are being posted, mostly anonymously, on Instagram accounts created by students and alumni. 

LA Times intern Jill Shah wrote about this social media movement. Jill joined LA Times Today along with Sikkiim Hamilton who helped create one of these Instagram accounts.

The accounts reveal private schools that are striving to increase their numbers in terms of diversity, but haven’t really done more to make sure the environment is nurturing, safe, free of bias, microaggressions, and racism. 

“The Instagram accounts are a great racial audit of that, and one of my sources in the article is a diversity practitioner named Ralinda Watts. She said this is the most authentic racial data that these private schools can receive because they really show in personal terms the toll it takes for students of color to be in these environments where they’re facing these microaggressions, bias, and racism,” said LA Times intern Jill Shah.

Some of the schools mentioned are Harvard-Westlake School, Flintridge Sacred Heart Academy, Polytechnic School, and The Archer School for Girls.

However, Instagram accounts are being created for private schools all over the country, not just in Los Angeles. Many of these schools posted messages in support of Black Lives Matter, and for a lot of students and alumni of color, those messages seemed hollow because those schools have not done enough to combat racism within their own walls.

Sikkiim Hamilton, now a college sophomore, went to Oakwood School from Kindergarten to 12th grade. She described her experience as difficult because of the lack of diversity in students and staff. 

Hamilton said she always felt tokenized by the school, other students, and by her own teachers. She said there was a lot of microaggressions and small acts of racism, but there were also some larger events that took place that definitely had an effect on her.

“My sophomore year in a photography class, we were listening to music while were editing on Photoshop. My white photography teacher came out of the darkroom and she got a little bit angry because she thought the music was too loud. It was popular rap music at the time and it was just a YouTube mix, but instead of just telling us to turn it down, she said, ‘Why are you playing this kind of music?’ N-word this, n-word that, but she used the actual word and I was the only Black student in the class, and I was extremely uncomfortable. She never actually apologized to me, until I confronted her about it. It was just a humiliating experience,” Hamilton added.

When Hamilton reported the incident to the school, they told her they would look into it and take care of it. However, that teacher still worked at the school by the time Hamilton was a senior, and she tried making a report again. She got a similar response with no follow-up or action taken place.

Shah states that many of the incidents she found, were a combination of racism and ignorance and a lack of sensitivity.

“Part of it, I think, is that a lot of faculty just weren’t trained in anti-bias methods and often students who transferred from public school districts to private schools had this culture shock experience because they were going from a diverse environment where teachers were used to teaching diverse student populations to environments where faculty were not used to teaching a diverse population, didn't know when things were offensive or ignorant to say. So a lot of the incidents were that kind of insensitivity or just plain ignorance on behalf of faculty and administrators, said, Shah. 

During Hamilton’s senior year, there were a lot of classes where she was the only student of color. She said there were no kinds of required race curriculum courses. The only course related to race was one that she took as an elective during her senior year and that class was full of students of color.

“That was a big breath of fresh air, to see people that looked like me in an academic setting. Because oftentimes in class, even in history class, when we’re learning about race-related history, it’s oftentimes not a teacher of color teaching. There are no students of color, and it can be very uncomfortable learning about these traumatic events in history without anyone that can really relate to how that feels,” Hamilton said.

The head of school at Oakwood, which Sikkiim Hamilton attended, spoke to the LA Times. Jaime Dominguez said the administration investigated and resolved the incidents, but actions were not clear to students due to privacy concerns. The school said among other initiatives it’s now working on a way that allows them to share responses to such incidents.