Texas high schoolers set prices for classmates in 'slave trade' chat

A North Texas school district said that it had disciplined a group of students at a predominantly white school who had assigned prices to students of color in a Snapchat group message called “Slave Trade.” Messages sent by students at the high school in Aledo, Texas, about 20 miles west of Fort Worth, said one student was worth “100 bucks” while another was worth $1 — a price that “would be better if his hair wasn’t so bad,” according to a photo of the group chat seen by The New York Times. The group message was called “Slave Trade,” with emojis of a police officer aiming a gun at a Black farmer. Its name was changed at least twice after that to include a racial slur, first followed by “farm,” and later by “auction.” A note sent to parents last month by Carolyn Ansley, the principal of the Daniel Ninth Grade Campus of the Aledo Independent School District, described the messages as “an incident of cyberbullying and harassment,” adding that the “racially charged language” violated the district’s policies and code of conduct. But some parents were critical of Ansley for not explicitly calling the contents of the group message racist.…
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