These teens were expelled for sending extremely racist texts. So they sued their school.

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Two white Chicago students who were expelled from their private Catholic high school after their n-word riddled texts were made public are suing the school, saying in the complaint, filed Monday, that they were “used as scapegoats.”

The teen girls, who are identified only as Jane Doe and Jane Roe in the lawsuit, are suing two administrators at Marist High School in the Greenwood neighborhood of Chicago to be let back in the school–or at least to recoup their $65,000 in tuition and fees during their more than three years as students there. The girls are also seeking $1 million each in damages for invasion of privacy and emotional distress that comes from being labeled as racist for sending n-word-filled texts.

As the Washington Post reports, the ex-Marist students were involved in a group text of 32 students who went on a religious retreat together in late September, where they focused on expressing themselves freely and without consequences.

The tread apparently turned to discussing the death of Joshua Beal, a black man from Indiana who was recently gunned down in the neighborhood by an off-duty cop.

“I FUCKING HATE NIGGERS,” one student wrote, according to court documents.

“HAHAHAHA,” another Catholic school student replied.

“same,” another teen on the group message wrote.

A fourth student offered up: “there’s a difference between black people and niggers, fuck the niggers.”

After screenshots of the messages were posted to Twitter, Marist principal Larry Tucker and Beth O’Neill, a dean at the school, wrote in a November 7 letter to the teens’ parents that they were “devastated” by the controversy surrounding the messages. While the two students, along with three other girls, were originally suspended over the texts, Tucker and O’Neill, who are named as the defendants in the suit, told the girls that they were expelled three days later. It wasn’t clear if the other three female students, who aren’t involved in the case, were also expelled.

But Steven Glink, the attorney for the students, told the Chicago Tribune that the racist texts were “somehow edited” by another student who doesn’t like them and has a “personal vendetta.”

“It appeared to be more of an outwardly racially hate-filled statement when the context was removed,” Glink said.

At this point, white teens posting racist garbage on social media–and then those posts getting circulated widely on social media–has happened so often that it’s become a shitty trope. Do better, teens.

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