Written by Nathaniel Mannor
On Wednesday, July 7, Coronado Mayor Richard Bailey held a press conference with parents from Coronado High School and members from Carlsbad and Oceanside to stand up for Coronado High School’s boys’ basketball team. The event comes following a victorious game for the high school team where students appeared to throw tortillas at the rival team from Orange Glen High School. The problem? Many of the opponent team’s members were Latino, thereby seen as racially motivated.
Mayor Bailey said at the press conference, “There’s a big difference between unsportsmanlike conduct, unsportsmanlike conduct that is racially insensitive and a racially motivated act.” He believes that the Coronado Unified School District board should apologize for a statement that describes the actions of the Coronado basketball team as “fueled by racism, colorism and classism.”
There are two other factors the CIF and school board overlooked. One is that Luke Serna, the alum who brought tortillas to throw, shared that throwing tortillas is a longstanding tradition at UC Santa Barbara. Serna stated he wanted his alma mater to adopt that tradition.
The second is that race was not the defining factor that led to the tortilla throwing. When Serna passed out the tortillas, almost all the students refused to toss them as they knew it would be racially insensitive. However, this didn’t stop the CIF from releasing a statement that charged the Coronado High School team with accusations of racism, even though one of their team captains was black. The other one was half black and half Hispanic.
The CIF concluded by saying, “The path towards real change comes with the development of empathy for those who are on the receiving end of this type of degrading and demeaning behavior, no matter the proffered intent of that behavior.” This statement openly claims that race was the key factor in every episode where two racial groups clash. When will the CIF and the Left learn that not everything in this country is racially motivated? They are teaching us to only view people in terms of their race and not the content of their character, but what else should we expect from the “Progressive” Left?
