Vandals target high school basketball player

This is completely unacceptable:

Racist graffiti showed up on car windows, in driveways and on garbage cans in the Truman neighborhood. But the most painfully personal was a message Shamarica Scott found down the road from her house.

"Shamarica is a dumb (derogatory term)," the tagging read.

"It made me feel really unsafe," said Scott, a 16-year-old black student at Fort Vancouver High School. "What did I do to get my name on the street?"

Shamarica’s not only a student at Fort Vancouver High School, she’s on their varsity basketball team:

Exploding on the scene. Watch out basketball community, here she comes. Shamerica Scott is a virtual unknown to the high school varsity basketball community. After playing JV for Fort Vancouver, and playing over the summer in the traveling team circuit with Premier Elite, she has raised eyebrows and made waves with the basketball crowd. So much so, that without a minute of "high school varsity experience" she has received over a dozen 'letters of interest' from college coaches around the country.

So these animals targeted a girl high school basketball player. Let that one sink in for a moment. But Shamarica’s not the kind of person who’s letting this get her down as you can see from her interview in the KPTV news story. I certainly wasn’t that well put together in my sophomore year of high school.

One can theorize on what kind of family inculcates this kind of patterning in their kids that engenders this behavior. Meanwhile, there’s a driveway that needs repair.

Long time readers of this blog will remember fundraising efforts from last year that resulted in a car completely repaired. Due to a local body shop that donated their labor, the fundraising ended up with a balance. That balance will now get applied to repairing the Scott’s driveway.

It is sad that this kind of fundraising needs to exist in this day and age. But what’s gratifying is to see a community taking a stand on this. We take care of our own in this community. You can help out with a small contribution at any local IQ Credit Union C/O Victims of Racial Vandalism Fund.

UPDATE: You can contribute online directly to the YWCA Clark County, just mention Graffiti Incident in the "In Memory Of" field. Donations to the YWCA are tax deductible.