School Rivalries and Racism

A few days ago, my brother, a freshman at New Trier, told me an irritating story about something that happened at his basketball game. His team had easily won the game, and as they were shaking hands, a boy on the other team slapped one of our team's player's hands and spat the word "Jew" in an extremely offensive manner. I have lived on the North Shore for my entire life and never before seen any acts, nor have I heard any comments, that seem racist, anti-Semitic, etc. But it seems to me that school rivalries bring out the worst in everyone. At the New Trier- Evanston games, kids in the New Trier section shout out rude things to the players on the other teams, things they would never say if they were to see the players on the street.
While school rivalries are meant to be fun, the things some students do remind me in many ways of America in the 1800s. Similar to how difference in skin color empowered whites over blacks and made it ok to enslave them, and after slavery was abolished, segregate and oppress them, is the fact that because two students attend different schools, they each have the right to hate the other and have justification for inflicting violence on the other. There have been countless reports of violence, even shootings, at basketball games between rival schools in Chicago. When people find a difference between themselves and another set of people, they use this previously insignificant difference as rationale for why they are better, why it is ok not to treat the others equally.
In Huck Finn, during Colonel Sherburn's speech to the mob that wants to lynch him, he says "The pitifulest thing out is a mob; that's what an army is – a mob; they don't fight with courage that's born in them, but with courage that's borrowed from their mass, and from their officers" (Twain 147). Like the townspeople would not have had the guts to lynch, or simply harm Sherburn by themselves, students get the courage to shout rude things and to start fights at games from the being in the company of kids from their school; that is where they get that strength, but as Sherburn says, it's not real, it is borrowed. Unfortunately, this borrowed power gives some students a false sense of power and a reason to act violently towards 'rivals.'
I'm not saying that we should stop having rivals; I just think that maybe we should take them less seriously and show the other schools some respect, because really, kids at Evanston and Loyola are no different from us.