I heard that chant in elementary school, but I never chanted it. If I had, my Mother would’ve washed my mouth out with soap. There were no black kids at my elementary school, and I’d like to think that if there were, at least some of the kids wouldn’t have chanted it. But I’m probably kidding myself about that. Trigger warning: the rest of the chant was “come on (blank) beat that white .“ as the other kid was inevitably white, the assumption of course, was that calling someone black was the ultimate insult. I thought it was dumb, but I wasn’t anywhere near as disgusted as I should’ve been.

I never heard the chant in junior high school, perhaps because there actually were a couple of black guys there. They seem to me to be very popular, because they were good athletes. But because I was seen as a weirdo and a nerd, I never got to spend enough time with them to see how their friends treated them.