A photo of four West Michigan high school students appearing to mock the death of George Floyd in front of a Black Lives Matter decal has been reposted and shared across multiple platforms in the last few days.
It wasn’t long before the owner of the car in the photo saw it pop up on her timeline.
“I was like wait a minute that's, that's my car,” said Kendra McBride.
McBride had the decal, which reads ‘I Can’t Breathe Black Lives Matter’, specially made earlier this year after the death of George Floyd, who died after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck.
Floyd had repeatedly said ‘I can’t breathe’ in the last moments of his life.
In the widely shared photo, the four teens are holding their throats pretending to choke themselves while surrounding the empty car.
“It's really shocking to see such young kids doing something so stupid and it might seem so innocent to them, but it's really not. I don't think they totally understand the situation,” McBride, of Orleans, said.
“It’s disgusting.”
She says she thinks the photo was taken this past weekend when she stopped at Meijer with her two kids in the Grandville area.
Many posts about the photo have linked the teens to Grandville High School, though the superintendent confirmed that not all those pictured are Grandville students.
McBride said she’s spoken with Roger Bearup, the superintendent of Grandville Public Schools.
“I hope that the school does do enough punishment for them to understand,” she said. “It's not even just about the Floyd death. It's not about police brutality, it's just everything that, you know, the Black community has ever went through. That’s what the Black lives movement is.”
Bearup said he could not give details on what consequences the students were facing, but that it was being addressed despite it happening off campus.
“While I cannot go into school details, I can assure you that we are working through this with our students involved,” he wrote in an email. “Although away from school, we have a duty to address this in the ways we are able, so that our students can learn and grow from this disappointing experience. We will not tolerate any form of racism or racial injustice in our schools and certainly will continue to learn and grow with all of our students as this behavior is not appropriate at any time or place. “
Grandville students Imani Ellsworth, a senior, and Sierra Broussard, a junior, say the way the school has responded to the photo is a sign of progress at their school, which is 76% white.
“From my freshman year until now, there has been tremendous growth with them having an action plan on how to hold those individuals accountable,” Ellsworth said Thursday night, ahead of a meeting with school administrators.
Ellsworth and Broussard said they both saw the photo during school on Wednesday, Ellsworth said she felt infuriated seeing it.
“For me to be an African American girl at 17 years old and to wake up and see already disgusting things and vile things on the Internet from people all over the world, but for it to be our own peer group in our very own town at our own school in our classes, then it kind of hurts and, like I said, it infuriates us,” Ellsworth said.
Racist actions by their peers isn’t new to either student, but Broussard said it’s become a norm.
“I think, you know, with us being the minority we have become very tolerant and somewhat submissive of those racist comments and just their ignorance sometimes," she said. "We need to speak out and speak up and I think that's what we're doing here today,” she said.
Ellsworth and Broussard along with a group of other students met with school administrators Thursday night to discuss how to stop this from happening again.
“I say this all the time, even if, like I said I'm a senior, so even if change doesn't happen overnight, even if it's not while I'm still here at Grandville, I definitely want to see improvement after I leave, and I've seen, like I said tremendous growth from when I was a freshman to now,” Ellsworth said.
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