Black in Fruita

I spent three years in Grand Junction before moving to Denver. We moved to a great extent because we felt that Denver was a better place to raise our mixed race children than Mesa County. The atmosphere of racial intolerance in Mesa County was pretty clear. The painful experiences of a 13 year old biracial middle school girl (in our one drop rule world, most people would consider her black) in Fruita, which is in the Mesa County School District, suggests that we made the right call.

Katrina Weimann, who is white, said she enrolled her 13-year-old daughter, Angelina, in Mesa County Valley School District 51 this year after the family moved back to Colorado from Kansas.

Shortly afterward, Angelina, whose biological father is black, became the target of racial slurs, said Weimann, an Aspen native. Angelina said one boy threw a rock at her after a volleyball practice, then called her a racial slur when she told him to stop. . . .

Two months later, a boy she considered a friend told her he would dress up like a member of the Ku Klux Klan for Halloween. . . .

But weeks later, a girl used the same racial slur. "She thought it was OK; it's a freedom of speech," Angelina said. . . .

The last incident occurred Dec. 5, when a student told her: "I'm going to hang you from a tree," Angelina said. At that, her mother removed her from Fruita Middle School, the town's only middle school. . . .

Fruita, a few miles west of Grand Junction, is 90 percent white, according to the 2000 census. Of the school district's 20,200 students, roughly 80 percent are white, nearly 17 percent are Latino, and a little more than 1 percent are black, according to the school's website. . . .

[T]he district has taken action and is working on providing transportation for the girl to attend Redlands [a school in one of the most affluent neighborhoods in the District aabout 17 miles from Fruita].

Most of Mesa County's black students probably live in either Grand Junction or Clifton.

Admittedly, this family thinks that another school in the district can work better, and maybe it can, but we weren't willing to take that chance. Notably, the District's solution has been to move the child to a different non-neighborhood school, rather than reform the school that the child attends in Fruita, a practical solution perhaps, but a depressing one that rewards racism as well.