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.
