Ceasing to honor Jefferson Davis, Mississippi public school renamed for Obama

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2017/10/19/ceasing-to-honor-jefferson-dav.html

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Hell yeah.

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This is great. Beyond monuments there are all kinds of glorification of people from the past. Street names, buildings named after them, monuments, parks, etc. More specific to this instance i think that renaming the school is quite relevant, these kids are being closely tied as part of their identity whatever it is named and having it named after a Confederate (and it being a primarily black school) is really something. I’m glad and proud of those kids in enacting some change.

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The Reich Wingers will shit themselves over this.

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What is the team mascot going to be?

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Their overnight fundraising event can be the Obama Llama Pajama-rama.

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Crap, it’s a magnet school. Effectively a private school funded by the tax dollars of those whose children are not permitted to attend. You have to be recommended to get in.

Sorry to be the party pooper. But perhaps the name of a person who stood for elitism and segregation was more appropriate for this school.

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I wonder how many polo shirt wearing douchebags would show up to the school with tiki torches the next few weeks? And how many hundreds/thousands more people would show up just to laugh in their faces about their hissy fit about the name change?

Whoa, Mississippi. Didn’t see that coming.

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Can we stop associating polo shirts with alt-right assholes? If this continues I have to throw out half of my wardrobe …

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I get your point but still think the name change is quite relevant and i would hope that this news will encourage other schools in similar situations to consider changing their name to something else.

Also it’s a pretty elite charter school from what you say but 90% of its students are black. So we’re going to shit on the school because it’s private and ignore that it’s giving these black kids some opportunity?

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At the bake sale, they’ll have Obama Llama Ding Dongs.

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Just imagine how Charlie Chaplin must have felt.

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My first thought too. Basically guarantees the school will get bomb threats, both fake and real.

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“Opportunity beckons”

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I love Mississippi because whenever anyone tries to invoke the lost cause myth, I can just throw Mississippi’s Declaration of Causes of Secession right back at them. Here’s the first two paragraphs:

"In the momentous step which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course.

“Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.”

It goes on like this for a while.

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I’ll both applaud the idea behind the name change and also decry the way the magnet school system makes privileged black families complicit in the segregation of education. Best I can do :slight_smile:

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They say history is written by the winners, but in this case the losers are the ones desperately trying to re-write it.

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