Officials at a public high school in San Francisco have placed the school’s baseball coach on administrative leave because, they say, he yelled some gibberish at an Asian-American player that was perceived to be mock Chinese.
The suspended baseball coach is Don Papa, reports the San Francisco Chronicle, in the second of two breaking stories about the incident.
Before his suspension, Papa was the head baseball coach at Galileo Academy of Science and Technology.
The incident leading to Papa’s suspension occurred on Feb. 24 when the Galileo Lions were playing a varsity games against the Lick-Wilmerding High School Tigers.
Papa was shouting something at the Asian-American player — a Galileo team member — as he stood on first base. The player did not appear to understand what Papa was saying.
It was then that Papa yelled the alleged gibberish.
Nakia Kashima, the father of a second Galileo High baseball player, told the Chronicle that Papa screamed “at the top of his lungs from the dugout in a fake Chinese dialect, ‘Ching, chong, something, something.'”
Kashima reported the incident to school officials.
After an apparently very lengthy investigation, San Francisco Unified School District officials placed Papa on paid administrative leave this week.
Further details are scant.
“Mr. Papa is not coaching the Galileo baseball team,” school district spokeswoman Gentle Blythe told the Chronicle.
Papa, 66, has been teaching — as a social studies teacher — and coaching at Galileo for 25 years.
He has not commented publicly.
The incident is somewhat reminiscent of a “bias incident” that occurred back in 2013 on the august, Ivy League of campus of Dartmouth. An unidentified Dartmouth student allegedly walked past two students of some Asian background, made eye contact and spoke a bunch of possibly Asian-sounding syllables. (RELATED: Dartmouth Student Who Spoke ‘Mock Chinese’ Remains On The Lam)
Dartmouth’s impressively large “Bias Incident Response Team” sprung futilely into action. As far as The Daily Caller knows, however, the Dartmouth mock Chinese speaker remains a fugitive even to this day.
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