A video of a fight between two high school students went viral media this past weekend.
It showed a black student attacking a white student at Wake Forest High School in North Carolina, seemingly unprovoked.
The black student, Micah Speed, pulls the bag of the white student as he’s walking, causing him to fall.
When the white student gets up, he uses what sounds like a racial slur, calling Speed a “black piece of sh–” before he tries to walk off and is pulled to the ground again.
Fight videos are dime a dozen on the Internet, but this one took off due to the racial tension and its perceived resonance with greater America.
15-year-old Speed was initially suspended for 10 days following the altercation.
However, after protests by his classmates, his sentence was cut in half.
His friends say that he had been a target of racial harassment of another student. They even created a petition calling for the student he attacked to be suspended, which reached almost 35,000 signatures before it was censored for including the student’s name.
Speaking to WNCN, Speed says that he was picked on for months before the incident in the video occurred. The school did nothing to address the harassment.
“This is a kid that has been picking on me for two months plus,” he said. “A kid that I’ve walked away from every single situation, and you’re going to say that I attacked him”.
“I want to say I’m not a violent person. That’s not who I am … Everybody who’s known me and that knows me currently knows that I try to avoid confrontation and I usually laugh things off, but I was just pushed over the breaking point,” he said in another interview with ABC11.
“He said things like … I need to name my son ‘Convict’ and ‘Crackhead’ … because that’s what they’ll grow up to be,” Speed said. “He threw the N-word around very loosely, said things that I looked like I bathed in coffee beans and dirt.”
Speed says that the other student harassed him over his race since the beginning of the semester, and that the boy went one step too far on the day the video was shot.
“I got pushed over the edge when he said I’m going to kill you and your family,” said Speed, who says he left the classroom to distance himself from his harasser. However, the other student followed him out and continued to harass him, prompting him to physically respond.
Students at Wake Forest High School showed their solidarity with Micah Speed earlier this week. Per WNCN, the students organized protests through social media and sat in the halls, chanting his name and questioning faculty of the school to justify their suspension of the student.
Speed says that he’s unsure if he wants to go back to the school after the incident. It is unclear if the school will do anything about the harassment he allegedly faced.
Ian Miles Cheong is a journalist and outspoken media critic. You can reach him through social media at @stillgray on Twitter and on Facebook.
