White Teens in Alleged Blackface Captured at Six Flags: 'Disgusting'

Two white teenagers have been accused of wearing blackface and harassing Black visitors at a Six Flags in Illinois.

Footage from October 9 showed the teens lining up for a ride, their faces smeared all over with black paint. One of them asked a Black rider, "You like it?"

Visitor Asiah, who posted the video seen over 1 million times on TikTok, said Black customers were also Airdropped a racist meme. The screenshot image showed a Black child holding a toy, along with the message, "Buy me one." A response read, "No. Black people can't be sold anymore."

Asiah said on TikTok, "We got stuff AirDropped with the name 'jigaboo jones' when there [were] no other Black [people] around."

The posts sparked swift outrage on social media, with viewers quickly identifying the white teens as students at Grant Community High School in Fox Lake, Illinois.

"Hi @GrantBulldogs! One of your students, Isaac Handley, decided it would be funny to go to @SixFlags in blackface and ask some black children if they liked his and his friend's painted faces," said a Twitter user. "This is disgusting behavior!"

In a statement to Newsweek, Grant Community High School said it "condemns racism in all its forms in the strongest terms possible," calling the actions of its students "racially insensitive" and "extremely disappointing."

"When this video came to our attention, we took immediate action to share our concerns directly with the students, their guardians and appropriate officials," said school officials.

Newsweek reached out to Asiah for comment.

A culture war over children's education about race—often grouped under "critical race theory"—has stormed across U.S. schools, sparking book bans and arrests at chaotic school board meetings. Meanwhile, blackface scandals continue to plague school communities.

In January, parents in Iowa sued their Black child's school district after a TikTok video showed a student wearing blackface while another pretended to beat him, finally mimicking an execution-style shooting and holding two thumbs up. Last year, an elementary school staffer in Oregon wore blackface during a protest against COVID-19 vaccine mandates.

Rhae Lynn Barnes, Assistant Professor of History at Princeton University and an expert on the history of blackface, told Newsweek that blackface was actually part of U.S. school curriculums for over a century. Since the Civil Rights Movement, the caricatured makeup has continued to circulate among young people.

"Part of what is happening with young people, specifically young white men, is bonding through shock value," said Barnes. "Teenagers push boundaries and test limits. Few things are more shocking than blackface, and it has always, sadly, served as a form of class or cohort cohesion building through this grotesque form of othering."

Once a feature of stage performances, blackface has grown more accessible to young people through social media, said Barnes.

"Blackface is a cultural and visual language that lends itself well to online jokes and impersonations," she said. "There is also the element of anonymity—instead of hiding behind a blackface mask on stage you are behind the glow of your cell phone or laptop screen, where you are shielded from the immediate repercussions of your actions."