This Week’s “Pranks:” KKK Imagery at Arkansas HS and “Bloods & Crips” Party at Dartmouth

Here are two stories that got our attention this week. The first one is out of Arkansas, where, according to reports, a local high school “became a canvas for graffiti with racial undertones the night before school started.”

“You can’t do that,” said Superintendent Dr. Melvin Bryant. “That’s a no-no.”

Pictures have already circulated on social media showing the painting that reads “The South will rise again” on walls at Stuttgart High School.

Pictures of the alleged student suspects wearing white hoods with a caption saying “the KKK is back” has also made its rounds.

Meanwhile at Dartmouth College, another example of “When Frats Go Racist” occurred. This is what The Boston Globe reported:

The e-mail invitation sent out the night of July 26 was short.

“Midnight,” it read. “Bloods and Crips Party.”

More than 200 came that night to the green-shuttered, brick Alpha Delta fraternity house that stands in the heart of Dartmouth College’s campus — the fraternity memorialized in the 1978 film “National Lampoon’s Animal House.”

The party, whose theme invoked two infamous South Central Los Angeles street gangs, took a disturbing — and, for Dartmouth, disturbingly familiar — twist.

“It then turned into a ‘ghetto party,’ with racialized language, speech, and dress,” Jordan Terry, a Dartmouth sophomore and president of the college’s NAACP chapter, wrote in an e-mail to college leaders.

Administrators decried the actions of guests at the party. The fraternity acknowledged behavior that was “insensitive and thoughtless.” And a bucolic campus was left again to ponder how it had wound up here, in the spotlight for students gone rogue.

“Incidents such as this, which violate our sense of community and mutual respect, have no place on our campus,” Dartmouth administrators said in a prepared statement last week.