Look, I work in industries that are dominated by white men, and are obsessed with optics when it comes to handling other white men.
Anal means it’s applied to white people.
Belligerent means it’s applied to brown people.
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You’re leaping to a conclusion that matches your preferred sensationalized narrative, not the facts.
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You’re leaping to a conclusion that matches your preferred sensationalized narrative, not the facts.
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Did you refuse to leave when asked? That seems to have been the trigger for getting the LEO involved.
I’ve been arrested twice for talking back to cops. My take-away from that is that cops don’t like smart-asses, not that cops are anti-Semitic. They might also be anti-Semitic, but that’s a different discussion.
Certainly not one that can be taken seriously. It is pretty easy to sit back in a comfy chair and lob criticism at people for trying to do their job under difficult circumstances.
The school staff repeatedly informed parents and students that only school-issued decorations would be permitted. Some of this (eg Hmong students not permitted to wear small jewelry items reflecting their culture) seems unnecessarily restrictive to me. However, judging from student interviews in the Sacramento Bee everyone but this student seems to have got the message…unless he too got the message but decided to make the graduation all about him.
If this incident triggered a discussion of commencement rules, that is a good thing. The president of the Elk Grove school board (who incidentally is not white) says that they will review policy, but has also reaffirmed that "there was no intent to discriminate against the student as the same rules applied to every graduate.”
With 30K high schools in the country I doubt it is hard to find examples which are hotbeds of authoritarian racism. From what I know of Cosumnes Oaks, it is not the example people seem to be looking for.
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Interesting, the original article that I read didn’t have that fact in there… I grabbed the link above because it didn’t seem to have as much distracting stuff on the page.
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Enforcing racist rules is still racist. Race is not merely a function of the melanin content of one’s skin. Indeed, it’s far more about heritage. The student was ejected for displaying his. You can say he was ejected for not getting prior approval to display his heritage, and perhaps he was, but the rule requiring him to do so is still racist, and thus so is enforcing it. You can say the administrators were just enforcing the rules, and perhaps they were at that, but do you want to live in a world where those with power, however great or small it may be, enforce rules with automatic obedience, and then hide behind those rules like sniveling cowards? Do you want to live in a society where no one takes responsibility for our systemic legacy of racism, where we abdicate our moral duty to each other to change things, where it’s regarded as shameful to not pass the buck? And is that the example you want adults setting for the future’s heirs?
Lets be clear, the problem here isn’t the administrators in and of themselves. Don’t direct the outrage to them. Fire them and more like them will simply take their place. Ours is now a civilization-wide game of hot potato. So powerless and so meek we now feel in the face of the stymieing complexity of our world that we attack only the proximate agents of our cultural flaws and collective failures. We break off the end of the stick and leave the roots to spring forth another and another and another without end. Our justice is shallow, and so injustice overgrows us.
Direct instead that outrage toward a culture that rewards obsequiousness and punishes standing for what’s right and rational.
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glory is an opinion.
Could you stop characterizing and start quoting?
A bit of a leap on my part, yes.
So, what troubles me isn’t what you’re saying or how you’re saying it, it’s that your come across as pretty actually IRL angry over what amounts to petty bullshit. Granted, that’s me characterizing you, but have you actually read you?
Also, your logic includes a fair number of fallacies. That’s a fact.
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Working at a school that was twice sued over its policy is the least persuasive fact, right?
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It seems to me that your wrapping several broad-stroke assumptions into that statement, some of which may have to do with your judgement of the peanut gallery.
If I were to do what you do and jump to conclusions about people’s states of mind, you would appear to be reveling in your disgust with other people’s disgust at the administrators. But I won’t do that because I’m not arrogant enough to psychoanalyze people I’ve never met through the internet based on a few forum comments.
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Solid professional judgment — wish there was more of it around.
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The person that asked him to remove the kente was a teacher who was also the student activities director. Other teachers came and supported the request.
Teachers are under attack all too often in their workplace (see http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2011/2011002.pdf), the last thing they need is a presumption on the part of the internet keyboard army that they are not doing their best in a difficult and underappreciated job.
The irony here is that Cosumnes is a paradigm of what such schools should be, with a very good track record of success with students from a broad mix of backgrounds and of positive student-teacher and parent-teacher relations.
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might makes right? noted.
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That’s an unreasonable assumption, esp. at a school. What was happening there was a “teachable moment” sort of situation.
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If these officials consider a teenager wearing a kente cloth to be “difficult circumstances” necessitating a police escort, then those officials need to find different, less stressful jobs that don’t involve interacting with teenagers.
However, judging from student interviews in the Sacramento Bee everyone but this student seems to have got the message…unless he too got the message but decided to make the graduation all about him.
Uh, this was his high school graduation. It was “all about him”.
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I haven’t got a problem with asking the student to comply with the dress code. I do have a problem with their disciplinary choices after he chose not to comply. It appeared the authoritarian who was involved with the discipline was an admin, perhaps they were a teacher. Regardless of their role, they deserve condemnation for their response to the student’s behavior. Armed law enforcement officers should never have been permitted to have been involved.
I think all teachers would be benefitted by joining in a strong, clear condemnation of authoritarians in schools who inappropriately pull in security/LEOs to harass students (regardless of race) merely for being strong willed while not causing any actual problem other than temporary embarrassment to the authorities.
Not really irony, rather this is exactly the kind of failure we should be vigilant against and be careful to condemn to ensure they don’t lose that track record.
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But… but… I talk back to teachers, admins, ceo’s, investors like every day and don’t get LEO called on me.
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No, it is the actual situation. The school apparently took their dress code seriously - we can disagree with that, that is an issue for that school’s community - but they put considerable energy into warning students and parents in advance of the ceremony that deviation would not be permitted. During the ceremony this student violated this dress code. The teacher, whose job it was to do this, asked the student to remove the garment. The student refused. The teacher had to make a decision in real time what to do next. Deciding on his own to ignore both the mandates of his job and the open disrespect of the student was an option, but I don’t think it is fair to say that by not taking this option he was being a racist asshole.
What would you have had him do in this situation? As I’ve said above, I don’t know what I would have done, and I think it is cheap and unreasonable to criticize this teacher without offering a reasonable positive alternative action.
[quote=“AcerPlatanoides, post:190, topic:78756”]
might makes right? noted.[/quote]
You hate teachers? Noted.
The context of my statement was a response to nemomen’s distinction between administrators and teachers.
They didn’t. The difficult circumstances (should I assume you genuinely didn’t understand my posts, and aren’t just trolling?) was that the decision had to be made in real time, as this big school event was taking place.
Well, it is now, but it shouldn’t have been. See my post above.
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Internet comments don’t count.
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Their decision was to call the police and escort Mr. Holmes out of his graduation. That is wholly inappropriate and an insane overreaction.
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