@eapoe “wonder what the response would be if someone just stood on a soapbox on campus and advocated racism and violent behavior?”
I certainly hope it would not be tolerated. In my opinion, once the speaker advocates violence and breaking the law to harm other Americans, their campus free speech right has been forfeited. Students have a right to go to school without being harassed and threatened.
“Its the same type of fuzzy thinking that makes watermelon a racist symbol and not a fruit.”
So the people who sent anti-Obama emails decorated with watermelons were just expressing their fondness for fruit?
I think a lot of the differences in how we see stereotyping of different groups has to do with socioeconomic and power disparities. For instance, no one I know would get bent out of shape to see someone dressed as a one percenter for Halloween but dressing up as the white middle-aged homeless guy who sleeps in the doorway of the apartment building would be considered incredibly poor taste. Sometimes people put themselves in a position to be mocked (take Octomom for instance,) but generally as soon as someone has stopped reaping the social and economic benefits of infamy they no longer seem to be folder for amusement.
Perhaps that’s why the Mexicans in sombreros party doesn’t bother me while the Mexicans pushing lawnmowers one does. In the second case it’s clear students were posing as landscapers, generally a poorly paid position and one often filled by recent immigrants-making fun of, while I’ve been to a number of parties with Mexicans having fun in sombreros so to me it feel like it’s making fun **with/b.
But that’s just my perception. Someone else could see wearing sombreros as making fun of Mexicans or Mexican Americans. Since I’m not of Mexican heritage I can’t claim governance over what should or should not offend people who are. I do, however, think coming down as hard on the Bowdoin students as the school did was a mistake. We all need a little bit of room to make an occasional faux pas and learn from it.
@The GFG “On another note, D’s Latin class is playing a game called “Kill Caesar.” They did this last year too. No one complained about the fact that kids are being asked to pretend they are killing a European. Hmmm. I wonder what would happen if they role-played a different political assassination, such as of a non-Caucasian?”
Based on what I can tell from this, I can’t see any reason this would be a problem. Unless there is some evidence to the contrary, I don’t think that they are insulting Italians. Furthermore, it is a specific person. If it were “Kill the European” then that is a problem.
Oh, I am quite sure you could fill in the blank with any number of individual historical personages who were killed by an assassination plot and people would be very upset at the game.
I’m pretty sure the lack of scandal about killing Caesar is that it was 2100 years ago. We tend to be less sensitive about political crises that are that far in the past. I’ve never seen “Killing Tsar Nicholas II” in Russian class or “Killing Louis XVI” in French. Too soon, and too relevant to present issues.
It’s also telling that I doubt many of us could even name any African, Asian, or Native American king who was assassinated by his countrymen that long ago – or any time before the 20th century. I could not. I’m sure it happened, but non-Western history is generally not taught in U.S. high schools.
I agree with Hanna - “Kill MLK” isn’t going to go over well but neither is “Kill Kennedy”.
I’m genuinely curious though @thegfg - what on earth was the exercise in class called “Kill Caesar”? Did they act it out or what?
It seems to be a combination of the standard assassin game with some need to obtain clues to the identity of the student playing Caesar. From what I can tell, there is very little Latin involved; it’s just fun around the Ides of March. The point of the mention of this game is that there is no consistency regarding what schools allow and what they don’t. In an age very sensitive to school violence, you’d think this game would be ill-advised just because of the name. Heck, the children can’t even use real basketballs on the playground anymore because they’re dangerous, and a child making a “gun” out of a slice of cheese can get charged with making a terroristic threat. Yet a teacher can sponsor a game of assassin. The Bowdoin cafeteria can host a Mexican night (which at our college cafeteria involved decorations), and the administration can sponsor a Cold War night (pretty recent history and quite relevant to current US-Russian tensions), but a student Mexican “night” party is cause for punishment.
We can try to work backward to extrapolate some guideline that may have been applied in arriving at these disparate decisions, but it’s next to impossible to predict them in advance.
The way south Indians prepare Okra is not slimy, but fried and/or breaded with mustard seeds so the outside is really crisp. Yum. I wouldn’t mind being force fed a bit of that.
Let’s start at ground zero and predict the outcome of this scenario. Suppose the leader of an organization were to walk into your high school principal’s office and tell him they’d like to offer several academic awards to students at the high school, but the students must be of a certain race to qualify. What would the principal decide about that? My guess is he’d say "no, thanks. But for some reason, each year many of our schools do in fact honor the recipients of the National Hispanic Recognition and National Achievement programs.
Son’s campus has a “free speech zone” where students can spout off about whatever they want without fear of reprisal. Basically a soapbox “safe” zone to say whatever you want no matter how non-PC or PC the content. About as politically diverse as you can get. All at the same time.
@TheGFG
I support these awards. They seem to me to be part of the drive to set highly visible role models for other students in the same ethnic group. These role models are part of the drive to make academic success achievable and normal for students in that group. The feeling of ‘I belong with that group of achievers’ begins to grow. The vast majority of people follow the footsteps of others who are socially, ethnically and economically similar to them toward success. Those ‘others’ in America, at least until the feminist, civil rights and human justice movements began changing society were white boys/men. The power of the feeling of ‘belonging’ shouldn’t be underestimated. Just a few decades ago many who cleared the path to success for the non-white students today did so enduring much abuse and ridicule. There service to those that followed was powerful. They were brave and being subjected to regular emotional abuse leaves a mark.
How would you feel if your child, who loved learning, were treated by a teacher as one with no potential, were abused at school. Do you think this doesn’t happen anymore? Do you think it might be possible they would give up and drop out even though they had significant academic potential? Not everyone is thick-skinned. Nor should they be expected to be.
Toughen up you say? At what expense? What’s the personal and social cost?
In just a few decades America will be a country of minorities. This country cannot afford to leave anyone behind. The social, cultural and economic landscape is not one I’d want to live in.
@OhioMomof2, where she refers to her Mexican culture and her Mexican community and her Mexicanness.
That’s not the same as saying she isn’t American, which she clearly did say, right out front and center. I really don’t see how this is any different than my friend’s pride in being from his region of Italy and the cooking his grandmother from there taught him. Or his longing for her food and the family traditions, many common to their part of Sicily. I mean seriously, do you see one? Or any college student longing for home and the familiar, whether that is the country of parent origin or the ethnic community they grew up in stateside?
@thegfg thanks for the explanation. Our hs seniors play assassin but they have to do it off school grounds, the high school would love to ban it completely but now settles for that compromise.
Sombrero Impeachments Halted at Bowdoin
Sounds like someone engaged legal representation…
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2016/03/14/sombrero-impeachments-halted-bowdoin
mreapoe, the awards may or may not be a good idea. The question that should be addressed is whether there are logically consistent principles in place that govern decision-making about these sorts of situations. It seems to me that rather than rely on a fixed principle, school administrators and CC posters are making a subjective assessment of the current and historical social and power of the various actors mixed in with some national history in order to determine what is and is not acceptable. So that explains why there are no National Caucasian Achievement Awards or National Chinese-American or Indian-American Recognition Programs, yet there are awards for which only African-Americans and Hispanics are eligible. (My Hispanic son was a NMF and was mildly offended by the Hispanic Recognition Program. Just because he was born in South America doesn’t mean he needs a special program with lower standards so he can get an award. That’s a racist idea in his opinion.) There is no principle that states that schools will or will not give ethnically-related awards–it all depends. There is no principle that states they will only give ethnically-related awards to minorities–it depends on which minority. There is no principle they follow that stipulates there are to be no ethnically-themed parties–it all depends which ethnicity it is and what assessment they make about relative status. Russian-themed party? Acceptable. Mexican-themed? Unacceptable. This is odd, because I’d venture a guess that there are far more Mexicans from wealthy families studying at our top colleges than there are Russians from privileged backgrounds studying there.
Why is all this a problem? It’s a problem because it’s outdated and inaccurate at best, and racist at worst. This power assessment method of decision-making assumes that by virtue of belonging to a particular race or ethnicity, an individual has had certain privileges or lack of privileges. This is why black Africans from Africa can receive race-based preference in our college admissions despite the fact their ancestors were not victims of slavery in the US and that they may not have experienced any lack of economic or social opportunity due to their skin color. In 1950, one could universally assume that any black American was less privileged than any white American. In 2016, that can no longer be asserted. Think of the famous screaming girl from Harvard. Illogically, she was given leeway for her bad behavior due to her race because it was argued that her skin color had entailed social deprivation and thus her anger was just. In reality, she had had a more privileged childhood than most American kids her age of any race, and had enjoyed a rich Harvard experience full of opportunities.
IMO, our society is far too diverse and complex for racially-based decision-making.
Screeching girl was from Yale.
Yes, of course. I was trying so hard to avoid using the word screeching, since that had been deemed offensive, that I made a mistake on the school lol.
Last post on this digression, because I think we are moving away from where the thread is going. But yes, many people are proud of their heritage. I too am Italian (first generation) and as matter of fact my son is home on spring break this week. The first thing he asked for was Sunday gravy because the pasta at school “sucks”. And while I know the town where my mother came from, I don’t live in an Italian community, or talk about my “Italianess.” My neighbor left Vietnam with his parents and sister just ahead of the communists in the early 1970s. His wife owns a nail salon and makes awesome spring rolls (talk about stereotypes). To this day, she doesn’t speak much English. But all three of the kids are thoroughly Americanized. We have good friends where the mom was born in Ireland and left during the “troubles”. Some of the kids do Irish dancing, they attend Irish festivals, etc. But they also assimilate. I also happened to be born in a part of our state with a huge Puerto Rican community. And yes, some of my friends played the cuatro and the girls went to quincenerous (however it is spelled). I personally did my part for cultural understanding by consuming a lot of empanadas growing up. So yeah, ethnic pride is a “thing”, I get it.
I also believe that it is beyond debate that in prior waves of immigration first generation immigrants at times experienced massive discrimination (some much worse than what is going on now) and lived in segregated communities. But their children, for the most part, did not. The children went to public schools, learned English and became American. The goal of immigrants until very recently was to become part of the larger culture. I think that is something that is very different from the attitude exhibited in the Orient article:
and
I just find it discordant and a bit ominous that a young person in college would exhibit such a closed-ness. Forget about the “ignorant American” stuff, which I think is a requirement of young lefty faux intellectualism. This is a person who directly states that her “common culture” comes from her “Mexican Community”. She professes to no commonality of culture with her fellow undergrads, even those who are Latino. The fact that even this person’s Mexican friends weren’t close enough culturally to satisfy her because they didn’t happen to be from Jalisco and were “different” should give us all pause, because if we are no longer all Americans first, but rather Mexicans from Jalisco living near Italians from Calabria then what the heck is the point?
Personally, I am not interested in assigning blame to either the hillbilly rednecks or the California hippies for this cultural shift from the great melting pot to the “don’t touch my culture” attitude on display at Bowdoin. But it is very hard for me to understand how people don’t find the fact of it troubling.