‘Caucasian Club’ student ousted
Oliver Poole
The Telegraph
Oakley, California
Copied from the Calgary Herald, Saturday November 29, 2003
A white California teenager has been forced to leave her high school after she was branded a bigot and threatened with physical violence for setting up a “Caucasian Club” that she had intended as a forum for debating racial insensitivity.
Lisa McClelland, 15, established the new group in September as a whites version of the Black Student Union, Latinos Unidos, and the ALOHA Club for Pacific islanders that already existed for students.
Now, three months later, she has had to switch to another school district after her proposal resulted in her being ostracized by many of her peers at Freedom High School in Oakley, northern California. She was called a “white racist,” a “fat, white neo-Nazi” and “KKK girl.”
Gangs of girls threatened to beat her up and a teacher told her in front of a class that he’d rather see her “drugged out and pregnant” than on the news talking about her new club.
McClelland had stumbled into the midst of America’s continued struggle with its attitude towards race and racism, an attitude that struggles to successfully define what is derogatory and what is acceptable.
Her mother, Debi Neely, says she warned her daughter that she could be asking for trouble. “I tried to explain to her that it was a very touchy issue, but she kept saying ‘Why?’.”
McClelland, whose ethnicity includes Dutch, German, Italian and Latino, simply maintains: “It wasn’t supposed to be a big deal.”
After details of her new club broke on the local news, it quickly gained national media attention.
She kept repeating that she intended the club to be an opportunity for students to discuss white heritage and how their “whiteness” affected other ethnic groups. It would be open to all ethnic backgrounds, would work to promote diversity and was intended to organize trips to museums and discussions on history.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People warned that the club could become a breeding ground for white supremacists.
State president Darnell Turner took offence at the word Caucasian.
“Using that term opens up old wounds and we don’t need to go there,” he said “The club, in name, seems like a back-door approach to separation.”
The Question I want to ask about this article, why are white people singled out here? The where Black groups, Latino groups ect. But when some one tries to start a Caucasian group, why does it fall apart? Is it the word Caucasian? Should it have been called a "White Club"? Or is it simply that White people have no right to organize groups based upon the colour of there skin, while other people of different ethinic background do?