When a POC is taunted, they are obligated to walk away without escalating the situation in any way (for a recent example, see the remarks made about the black FedEx driver in this thread).
When a white person is taunted, they are obligated to be an obnoxious, threatening little shit who’s just standing up for themselves. (
to both of those sentiments)
Ah yes, the life-ruining shame of being called out for doing something bad that has destroyed the lives of so many white men, who go on to suffer the grave consequences of, say, sitting on the Supreme Court or triumphantly returning to the comedic stage to joke about masturbating in front of women and calling trans teenagers snowflakes. The horror.
To pick up from my comment in the previous thread: I went to a different private Catholic high school in the same diocese as CovCath when I was growing up. In my senior year, we put on a performance of The Sound of Music at a nearby theater. Before one of our dress rehearsals, some of the kids decided to save themselves some time and take advantage of the more private facilities at school, and changed into their costumes before walking to the theater.
Some of them were playing the Nazis in the final act. You can probably imagine how that went down with the neighbors.
Those kids got a serious dressing-down from the teacher who was directing the play in front of the entire cast, and were very nearly suspended. When there is institutional will, it is possible to do the right thing and call out kids’ stupid, shitty behavior rather than make excuses for it.
To be sure, my school was hardly a beacon of progressive values. Like CovCath, it costs a fortune to go there. It was and is overwhelmingly white, both in terms of student and faculty composition. While girls are admitted (a development which predated my attendance, but was still fairly recent), there are plenty more boys than girls in each grade. We literally shared a parking lot with a church. The fact that changing into a costume with a swastika on the arm didn’t throw any sort of alarm bell in my classmates’ heads makes it pretty clear that there was a hell of a lot of white privilege floating around. But the contrast between the education and upbringing I received there, and what had to have gone on at CovCath to produce these little shitheads, is stark. Anybody attempting to excuse or justify the behavior of these boys is telling on themselves.
