Brittany Counts on Inman High School

AH: What were some of the major issues that happened at school, I know that some schools had fights and racial tensions, where there anything like that happening in Inman?

BC: Lets’ see, we had people who, it is a really, really small country town, its’ like I mean if you drove through this town, you would think, oh, time has stood still, like we still have the local ice cream shop, where you can like get three scoops of ice cream for $0.95 and a hot dog for like $0.50 and a lot of ways the thoughts of the people has stood still too even more so than the town because it was the way that they were raised and so they raised their children that way and there was a huge, huge problem when President [Barack] Obama was running for his first term, it got so bad that we were not allowed to wear anything supporting him, if we had it on our cars we had cover it up or take it off if we could because of fear that it would cause issues, race issues, there were people who would wear shirts portraying him as a monkey or just other animals and there were lots and lots of racial slurs that we never pointed directly at me, but they were put toward some of the African American friends that I had and whenever an individual would get in trouble or get caught yelling these everyone in the group, but me. They would be like, “why are you singling her out?” “Well she doesn’t count,” and so that was a big issue for me because how I can be sitting here and I am the one that doesn’t count? “Oh well this applies, they are ghetto and you are not” and so that was a huge huge thing people always constantly tell me that “you don’t count when we say this because everybody elese they are loud that they are ghetto and they do all of this and they wear all this long weave and the long nails and they just don’t act intelligent. They do not put up that façade, almost that they do not act like you so therefore when we call them this name, we are not including you.” And we never have like fights revolve out breakout because of it, we had people who were African American and Caucasian who were just kind of liked looked at weirdly because, if they had predominately Black friends, they would be like “yeah, you kind of fit in” and if you had predominately White friends, then “oh they are traitor, they are not really Black at all, they just don’t acknowledge the fact that they have Black in them at all” and so, I tried, I did my best, I had friends of all races and I am thankful for that, but at the same time it was just kind of like, when people would meet me they would get to know me really well, it was not like it really changed their views on other African Americans or the African American community in a whole, it was just kind of like, well there is Black people and then there is Brittany Counts. And so I was like, I don’t understand because Brittany Counts is Black

BC: So I really don’t understand why I don’t get put in with this category and it is like, “if we saw you no way in the world would we grab our purses or feel threatened, but if we saw so and so we would probably turn around and go in the opposite direction and cross the street.” And so that is like there were a lot of things said, but nothing genuinely carried out.