way to reinforce the stereotype, folks…
why is this on the front page of BBC news today… but nowhere to be found on CNN? WTF is WRONG with this country?! and what’s going on here in the south? how is this still happening? and in the younger generation, too. even after being exposed to so much anti-racism propaganda through music and television, they’re still hatin’ eachother…
now, i know these are “just kids” that are mostly to blame for kicking this mess up and kids don’t often have that great of a grasp on the greater picture. i didn’t when i was in highschool, but i sure as hell knew that this kinda crap would have been seriously unacceptable and hateful in my community. someone is teaching these kids that this type of behaviour is acceptable. either directly or by their inaction, the adults in this community are giving them the go ahead to hang nooses in trees and beat the shit out of kids because they are of a different race. the school board should have expelled the kids who hung the nooses… that’s a hate crime. federal offense. the principal was fully correct to call for their expulsion.
how does this continue to happen, and how can communities fight it? how can we, as nashvillians, keep this from happening? how can we as southerners (even nominal ones like me) fight the stereotypes that history has left us?
May 24, 2007 at 1:02 pm
[...] The it’s all ashes in the end… blogger says: now, i know these are “just kids” that are mostly to blame for kicking this mess up and kids don’t often have that great of a grasp on the greater picture. i didn’t when i was in highschool, but i sure as hell knew that this kinda crap would have been seriously unacceptable and hateful in my community. someone is teaching these kids that this type of behaviour is acceptable. either directly or by their inaction, the adults in this community are giving them the go ahead to hang nooses in trees and beat the shit out of kids because they are of a different race. the school board should have expelled the kids who hung the nooses… that’s a hate crime. federal offense. the principal was fully correct to call for their expulsion. [...]
May 24, 2007 at 2:41 pm
Acknowledgement of racism in Britain itself is a fairly new concept.
They have their hands full with a great deal of institutional racism which predates our ENTIRE COUNTRY by oh, a few hundred years or so.
There’s still a great deal of guilt over there, and much disdain for all varieties of “black”–African, West Indian, Pakistani, Saudi–that have relocated to Great Britain since the death of the empire.
As a result, British media loves to point to the racism in America as a way to say “look how provincial, barbaric and uncooth this is!” They figure they can either guilt other brits out of being as racist as Dirty Americans OR they can at least feel superior to us.
May 24, 2007 at 2:47 pm
that’s very true. it’s the same in much of europe, as a matter of fact. maybe it’s due to having family that still lives in france, but i follow french politics pretty closely and THAT place has got race issues galore.
but i don’t feel like pointing fingers at others on this one, though they may point at us. plank and splinter, right? the point is that, though they are so loud in declaiming race issues in our culture, we are fairly silent. we should be the loudest voices in the conference room marked “racism in the south.”
May 25, 2007 at 7:18 am
Thanks for pointing this article and story out. It’s pretty terrible this stuff still goes on. I think the best place you and I can begin is within the communities and organizations we are a part of. (like Mosaic!). What do we do, or how do we start, those are great questions I think we need to be discussing in our churches…
May 29, 2007 at 6:20 pm
[...] who pointed out this story to me, writes: someone is teaching these kids that this type of behaviour is acceptable. either directly [...]