Dyson said the boy called his grandson the n-word and threatened to go home and retrieve his father’s gun and shoot him.

“He said he felt sad and scared. It’s ridiculous for a 6-year-old to be subjected to this,” Dyson said in an interview Tuesday evening. “You never feel as powerless as when your children suffer something you can’t immediately fix or resolve.”

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In a letter to families, the school’s principal, Liz Whisnant, said “the incident did not include any language about race or ethnicity” but that “harmful” language was used and a “threat of physical harm” was made. She said a third student was involved.

“We responded immediately by removing the student from his peers and taking a number of actions that involved communicating directly with the parents of the three students involved,” she wrote in the letter.

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A D.C. police report on the incident says a nearby officer was flagged down after the “verbal altercation.” According to the report, a student threatened two other children with his father’s gun if they kept cutting the lunch line.

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The D.C. school system said the allegations are under investigation.

D.C. Public Schools “is committed to maintaining safe and welcoming environments for students and staff,” the school system said in a statement Tuesday. “We will provide Mann the support it needs to adequately address this issue and continue to partner with our school communities to ensure meaningful learning and positive interactions occur within all of our school buildings.”

The alleged episode comes just days after a blackface incident involving students at a top-performing high school in the Maryland suburbs. Walt Whitman High School in Montgomery County serves a mostly white student body.

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Earlier this academic year, a fifth-grader at Francis Scott Key Elementary, a mostly white elementary school in Northwest Washington, directed a racist slur at three black classmates during recess. The Washington Post reported that the school struggled for months to contend with the incident, examining whether the campus was inclusive to families from all backgrounds.

Dyson said he rushed to the school Tuesday when he learned of the incident. He said he, his wife and his son, who is the father of the 6-year-old, met with the principal. The family said it met again with school leaders Wednesday. Dyson first tweeted about the incident Tuesday afternoon, writing, “Welcome again to Trump’s white racist America.”

Dyson, who has written books about race relations in the United States, said his older grandson was pulled out of Horace Mann, which is near American University in the Wesley Heights neighborhood, after being called a racial slur on campus last year.

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He described the community around the school as white and liberal, a place where most people wouldn’t expect an incident such as this to transpire. But Dyson said he wasn’t surprised it happened.

“It is one thing to deal with this from a sociological perspective, or a relatively objective perspective, but this does hit home,” the professor said. “We’ve got to address the situation and talk about the extraordinary hostility and racism and tension that prevails in this culture.”

Dyson tweeted about the incident again Wednesday, posting a video of himself reflecting on a meeting he had that morning with school leaders, law enforcement and the family of the boy who allegedly made the threat.

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He said the meeting was productive and the participants acknowledged the seriousness of the incident.