RECENT student.
When my wife was in 8th grade in a Chicago suburb (around 1969), a new girl started going there. She was from Nebraska, I believe. Anyway, three of them were walking through the breezeway between buildings and a group of black girls were walking by and started hurling insults at them.
Now, my wife and the other girl knew how it worked and told the new girl to just ignore them and everything would be fine. But being from a “normal” area, dealing with reasonable people, she turned to them and said something along the lines of “can’t we just be friends”. At this, the black girls attacked and my wife and her friend scattered as this girl took a beating that put her in the hospital.
It’s hard to get past that.