Arizona high school student's racism even offends Arizona

Welcome, to a level playing field!

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Oh hell no.

and calls for blood

nobody has asked for blood.

because of the inherent stupidity of a couple of high school students.

Amazingly I managed to never make a single nigger joke all the way through high school, neither did my friends.

Maybe your low standards for yourself and your friends should not be policy?

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300 words and no point that I could clearly discern. I guess apart from the fact that you do not agree with me and find my idiom odd (sincere apologies for English not being my first language - should we instead see how well you do in Kalmyk or Russian?).

Letā€™s try this again. I think Internet crowds piling on to random people for being caught doing something stupid is a disproportional response, does not accomplish much of anything positive, and mostly serves to help those people feel better about themselves.

Specifically, this was to the point of the photo going ā€œviral on Facebook and Twitterā€, as per the article.

Now, you apparently think that such virality and mass outrage are justified becauseā€¦ ?

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I donā€™t. I think it is an act of profound insensitivity and white privilege that these girls did it. Who were they threatening violence towards or intimidating when sending it to a private circle of (AFAIK) white friends?

Sure, theyā€™re fā€™ing idiots and I think that they should get more than a dayā€™s suspension but I donā€™t think it is the same as if they sent it to a fellow black student with a ā€œget out!ā€ attached to it (for example).

I think this is likely an act of stupidity and ignorance as opposed to explicit hate. Iā€™d give them at least two weeks off to think about it all though.

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This too is social media.

If you didnā€™t mean to offer this conversation that same criticism, then I redact my criticism of your criticism as it applies here. I wonder if there is some element of my response, though, which stays valid even in hotbeds like fasc-book etc.

I only mean to defend rhetorical philosophy through liberal application of snark.

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Please excuse my propensity for jumping in.

Didnā€™t they do this in the corner of the gym where the panorama was being shot, potentially within eyeshot of 700 or so of their peers?

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Arizona is the Florida of the southwest.

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You present a remarkable number of false binaries about what other people think about a third partys character.

It really distracts from a discussion of behavior and teachable moments.

Maybe thatā€™s a slippery style, more than a tranalation error?

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Do you have information that I havenā€™t seen on the particulars? Do you know if any other students were there, the race of these students, or even if their activities were seen by anyone other than the girls in the photo and whomever took the picture?

Are there any black students in their school?

Iā€™m not excusing their behavior but it is a long way from a threat of violence toward another student based on what little we know about it.

Maybe heā€™s in Florida?

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Letā€™s go back to disagreeing now :wink:

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Dampizona?

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I think youā€™re more of a schlemiel than a schmuck.

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I donĀ“t understand that question. Talking like what?

Yes, I did offensive things in high school and I believe I explained well enough why I did them. They didnĀ“t reflect my actual values at all, in fact they represented the exact opposite. To repeat my example, if you can understand why Sid Vicious wore a Swastika shirt, you can understand why I used to do what I described. At the same time I used to have street fights with Neonazi skinheads. There is a lot of youthful anger and confusion involved in such things.

Maybe I donĀ“t understand the dynamics of American society well enough and it is unthinkable that teenagers there would do something offensive that doesnĀ“t represent their actual thinking just for the sake of offense or to have a cheap laugh. Maybe these girls are just blatant racists. I canĀ“t say for sure, maybe you can. IĀ“m pretty sure though that putting on a hysterical media circus because of their behaviour instead of having some intelligent person have a serious talk with them about it is not going to help things.

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Who cares about who and what they are? Why are you focused on that, instead of what they did?

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Interviews with several kids of colour in the video in the linked article, all of whom spoke about their reactions to the behaviour and to the picture and to its posting on social media.

FTA

That was taken off to the side somewhere

6 girls went off on their own

Itā€™s unclear whether this was in the same room, with many witnesses some of whom were black, or in the limited privacy of another room in front of only other racists, or somewhere in between.

Thereā€™s been talk of it originally being posted to only a private group of what we can imagine are mostly racist peers. Except that one such peer chose to ā€˜leakā€™ the image. Perhaps as protest, perhaps to spread racism. We donā€™t know.

As it pertains to the idea of an imminent threat of hateful violence (that phrase taken from the Wiki page on Hate Speech in the US), Iā€™ve already made known my dislike of only the purely legal ramifications being considered earlier in this topic. I donā€™t think this should be the only angle from which we should consider their behaviour, and I guess, the ramifications of it, both social and as it pertains to the official punishment position taken by the school.

Obviously the picture is out and the damage is done, fomenting this type of racist attitude and behaviour.

Iā€™m not sure how to go about attributing degrees of harm if taking into consideration the ramifications of the place and intent of the picture, seeing as it was eventually put on social media, and then ā€˜leakedā€™.

Do you think the privacy and perhaps subsequent unintentional (at least from the perspective of the original group of friendly racists bar one) leaking of the image mitigates the harm done? Does it mitigate the intention of harm insofar as this kind of racism does harm?

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I care about who someone is when they do something like that. How can you completely separate the person from their actions? Based on my own experience they may be racist assholes that can rot in hell for all I care or they may be somewhat confused teenagers lacking the awareness to judge their actions correctly. In that case I would like to make them understand why outward behaviour matters as much as inner values and maybe help them become better people.

If they had murdered someone, then there would be no discussion. But what they did may be expression of real racism or it may be stupidity and lack of judgement.

The status of the ā€œn-wordā€ in America is funny. On the one hand, itĀ“s one of the most offensive things you can say, on the other hand itĀ“s omnipresent in the kind of music and media teenagers of all ethnic backgrounds consume constantly. I donĀ“t think itĀ“s too hard to see how that could lead to an unfortunate situation like this.

Edit:
By the way, IĀ“m getting the impression that people here are operating under the assumtion that trying to understand the people behind an action automatically makes you an apologist. How?
How can you hope to understand a problem in society by just looking at the effect and not the motive?

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Tonight you can embarrass my wife, ruin the furniture and wreck the rug, but please donā€™t say ā€œIā€™m sorry.ā€

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I canĀ“t say I know who Mister Rogers is, but next time IĀ“m going to try to get the cookie monster to give you the middle finger, seeing as it is okay to insult your counterpart in a discussion as long as you use some beloved pop culture character to deliver the message for you.

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