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Originally Posted by OldDog
You never need apologize for not answering me sooner. I am at best a part-timer here and often don't visit for days at a time.
Those things might be defended by someone somewhere as free speech, but I've not seen that defense applied legally. And when prosecuted as trespass or vandalism I don't recall free speech being evoked as a defense.
Putting Shaun King aside, that's very ugly. Don't all states have rules against bullying and harassment? The school officials should be called out if it's true and they aren't doing anything about it.
Do the students in this "movement" really want to have a dialogue? It seems like they only want to be heard and not to hear. That's not a conversation.
All this talk about "spaces." I guess libraries aren't considered to be "safe spaces."
http://www.mediaite.com/online/dartm...hy-white-fcks/
Dartmouth parents should be asking for a refund. |
They are protected as free speech. There have been some attempts by state governments (not federal) to ban nooses, but it's met with sporadic success and a fair amount of pushback, mostly revolving around what constitutes an actual threat and what is free speech. And a peace symbol written in feces is just as much vandalism as a swastika, but one has a much different effect than the other. They're not equal.
What the students are doing, with the sit-ins and the screaming and the protests, is calling out schools that, as they see it, are not doing anything about bullying and harassment. In the case of the 14-year-old honor student, he's being more polite about it, but you know, Dr. King and Malcolm X had very different approaches to civil rights and yet somehow both of them ended up shot dead by men who disagreed with them. The nation has a long history of responding to pleas for equality and change with violence, and eventually something is the feather that breaks the camel's back, and then people push back with anger and shouting and shoving.
I saw a bit of it in my son's Pre-K class last year. It was a rambunctious class of kids, but there was one, in particular, I picked out as the problem kid in class (I volunteered a lot so I was there a lot). However, that kid was not the one the teacher or the school decided was a disruptive influence. The kid they did single out, to the point of telling the parents the child should only come to Pre-K three days a week (this is a PUBLIC school, I should note, that was receiving state and city money for its Pre-K program), was not, in my opinion, anymore disruptive than the other one, but one was white and the other was not and guess which one was the one whose parents were getting called almost every day?
Again, I know the kids look like shouting a**holes in videos out of context (and from what I read in the article, there were a few who probably are just a**holes, who were called out by the other protesters for acting like jerks). But the shouting comes after a lifetime of little digs, comments, and a lot of blatant racist crap, like what that 14-year-old in the Daily News article deals with. And I hope, after the shouting, the dialogue will really start. The last thing Dr. Wing Sue said in that lecture I attended, was that it's pretty much too late for all of us who were listening to him- by the time you're an adult, your biases are pretty much set and it's very hard to change them (although you can always work to intellectually recognize them, even if you can't change your emotional response). The hope lies with the younger generation, and the best thing they can experience is repeated exposure to and contact with people from different backgrounds than their own. So yeah, why we as a culture object so much to busing and school desegregations continues to make me sad.
I love talking cultural and political issues with you, OldDog. Always a pleasure and I always learn something.
