Political Correctness Gone Mad!!1

[pErvinalia]

School tries to stop "Dump Trump" shirts being worn by students.

Yvette Cabrera in Newport Beach, California

Wednesday 4 May 2016 05.10 AEST
Last modified on Wednesday 4 May 2016 09.07 AEST

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For months, 16-year-old Angelina Alvarez of Costa Mesa, California, has heard the message loud and clear from Donald Trump: Mexicans are rapists and criminals; illegal immigrants should go home; infectious diseases are pouring across the border from Mexico.

It’s a message of xenophobia that has been drilled home not just from Trump’s pulpit on the campaign trail, but closer to home for Angelina at Newport Harbor high school.

Donald Trump's tirade on Mexico's 'drugs and rapists' outrages US Latinos

Since last fall, Newport Harbor students who are Trump supporters have worn their politics on their T-shirts at school, which is 38% Latino and 52% white. But Angelina and her friends became particularly alarmed last week when anti-immigrant, anti-Mexican, derogatory graffiti was chalked throughout the campus including the words “fuck illegal aliens”, “wetbacks” and a heart drawn alongside Trump’s name.

“With Donald Trump, [students] are more open about their hate and the things they say,” Angelina said.

After the anti-Trump protests last week, where one of Angelina’s 13-year-old friends was choked and punched, the Latino students had had enough – she and half a dozen of her friends wore Dump Trump T-shirts to school on Friday to make their feelings known.

But the school was not happy.

At the end of her math class a security guard showed up. The principal, Sean Boulton, wanted to see Angelina in the main office – and he wanted her to change out of the Dump Trump shirt.
Students were asked by the principal to remove their anti-Trump shirts.
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Students were asked by the principal to remove their anti-Trump shirts. Photograph: Daniel A Anderson

Boulton insisted that they remove the shirts for their own safety. But that argument didn’t make sense to the students, who felt they were being held to a double standard. After all, their Trump-supporting classmates had worn their pro-Trump shirts on campus since the start of the school year.

“They’ve worn the shirts all this time, and we wear a shirt for one period and we get called up right away,” Angelina said. “It’s not like we’re doing anything violent. We’re just standing up for ourselves.”

It’s not like we’re doing anything violent. We’re just standing up for ourselves
Angelina Alvarez

For Angelina and her classmates, the issue went beyond T-shirts. They told administrators that the derogatory graffiti, some of it still visible on Friday, and other incidents on campus, such as verbal harassment, had made them feel like they were under attack.

Boulton said the school had addressed the graffiti by removing it but was unaware that other students had targeted and harassed Angelina and her classmates with racial slurs.

“There’s certainly a lot of things that go on on campus that are inappropriate … and as information surfaces we don’t just ignore it. We react and we’re proactive in trying to resolve it,” Boulton said.

Newport Harbor high school is not alone in dealing with this heightened tension on campus. A national school survey conducted by the Southern Poverty Law Center and released last month found that teachers have encountered a spike in “the bullying, harassment and intimidation of students whose races, religions or nationalities have been the verbal targets of candidates”.
Angelina Alvarez, 16, skateboards to Newport Harbor high school in her Dump Trump shirt.
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Angelina Alvarez, 16, skateboards to Newport Harbor high school in her Dump Trump shirt. Photograph: Daniel A Anderson

As the Poynter Institute’s media and medical ethicists pointed out last year: “Such speech is a classic ploy to sow divisiveness and generate fear. That his message finds a home at all should be alarming. It’s one thing [to] argue about immigration policies. It’s a completely different thing to condemn an entire ethnic group.”

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016 ... MP=soc_567

[JimC]

That's where school uniforms are useful - no opportunity for any form of political advertising via t-shirts...

[cronus]

Keep fascism local and small scale. School uniforms are the way to go.

[JimC]

Keep fascism local and small scale. School uniforms are the way to go.

Exactly! Of course, I make all my students give me a fascist salute at the beginning of every class, and every now and then I have a purge...

[JimC]

From the title, I'm expecting rEv to be creating a series of these threads.

The next one will be "Political Correctness Gone Mad!!2"

[laklak]

I was suspended for 3 days from high school for wearing a black armband on the first Vietnam Moratorium Day protest in '69. A radical, man!

[JimC]

I was in my final year of school, and an apolitical nerd in '69. In '70 I went to Uni, where there was booze, drugs, women, rock and roll and crazed Marxist protestors! I rapidly succumbed to them all!

[Svartalf]

I'm envious, when I wasss in Uni, I did not get any girls, or see any drugs, it was just work...

[rainbow]

Keep fascism local and small scale. School uniforms are the way to go.

Exactly! Of course, I make all my students give me a fascist salute at the beginning of every class, and every now and then I have a purge...

Magnesium sulphate will do that.

[pErvinalia]

14915140_1296581813727288_5601261298173205439_n.jpg (32.31 KiB) Viewed 1827 times

[Brian Peacock]

At my daughters school a boy was suspended for having a big afro he refused to have cut. When he returned he'd had his head shaved.

[pErvinalia]

A mate of mine got suspended from our Grammar school for having a bad haircut. His sister had tried to do it with scissors. It was all fucked up. So he had to have it shaved down to blade one to hide the chippy-choppiness. But you weren't allowed to have anything shorter than about blade 3 or 4 at school. So he was suspended for another couple of weeks until it grew longer.

[Forty Two]

If they allow some viewpoints to be displayed on t-shirts, then they can't discriminate based on the viewpoint. A public school must be viewpoint neutral.

The school is allowed to have dress codes, but those dress codes have to be evenhanded, and content-neutral. If they have uniforms, then nobody gets to display dump Hillary or dump Trump t-shirts. However, a public school can't allow pro-Trump t-shirts without allowing the opposite.

This bit misses the entire point -- "As the Poynter Institute’s media and medical ethicists pointed out last year: “Such speech is a classic ploy to sow divisiveness and generate fear. That his message finds a home at all should be alarming. It’s one thing [to] argue about immigration policies. It’s a completely different thing to condemn an entire ethnic group.”" Of course condemning an entire ethnic group is different than arguing about immigration policies. But, neither of those things is validly silenced where speech is allowed. If a student wants to "condemn" an entire ethnic group, and viewpoints are allowed on t-shirts, then that ought to be permissible to. It's not up to public officials to dictate which political opinions are valid.

[Brian Peacock]

[Scot Dutchy]

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