During Rashaad O'Neal's was junior year, he was going into the locker room for football period and that is when he saw the black doll hanging by a noose. When he started to look around, everyone was laughing, not a single person took O’Neal’s side. No, this did not occur in the 1960s, this happened around 2005.
“That’s when I realized no one on my team had my back,” O’Neal said, vexed by his story. “I was a walking joke to them. All I heard was ‘Rashaad, you cannot take a joke.’ A joke is when both parties are laughing, and they were the only ones laughing.”
O’Neal’s was not an isolated case of racism at Jack C. Hays High School, which has a two percent black-student population. Living in Kyle between 1997 to 2006, O’Neal often found himself left out; his family was the only black family on his street, and he recalled that there might have been a couple of other black families in his neighborhood.
