A Glendale elementary school principal has admitted to telling a 9-year old boy that it is OK to have racist feelings as long as you keep them to yourself.
“As we said to (the boy) when he was in here, in your heart you may have that feeling, and that is OK if that is your personal belief,” Abraham Lincoln Traditional School Principal Virginia Voinovich said in a tape-recorded parent-teacher conference.
The boy was suspended for three days this month for allegedly committing a “hate crime” by using the expression “brown people.”
In an interview Monday, Voinovich would not address her comments, first saying she didn't remember the incident, then demanding a copy of the recording and finally insisting that she could not talk about a student's discipline.
The circumstances of the boy’s suspension itself raise troubling questions about student discipline, interrogation and oversight at Abraham Lincoln.
According to school officials, the boy made a statement about “brown people” to another elementary student with whom he was having a conflict. They maintain it was his second offense using the phrase.
But the tape recording indicates this only came out after another parent was allowed to question the boy and elicited from him the statement that he “doesn't cooperate with brown people.”
After that was reported to the boy's teacher, he was made to stand in front of his class and publicly confess what he'd said.
The boy maintains that he never said it; that the words were put in his mouth by the parent who questioned him. That parent happens to be the mother of the student with whom he is having a conflict—and she happens to work for Abraham Lincoln as a detention-room officer.
The tape indicates that rather than just spouting off with racial invective, the boy was asked first why he didn't want to cooperate with brown people by the parent/school official.
In court, this might be called entrapment. Not to mention a conflict of interest.
Now, what the hell? How else should a NINE YEAR OLD describe people who are brown? If an hispanic student had said he didn't get along with white people, would that be a crime?
How is it remotely ok for the school to empower another PARENT to interrogate a child without his own parents present, and then suspend the child for repeating words the interrogator used?
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Brown people is not a racist slur. Period. This is fucking ridiculous.
You have to realize that most Christian "moral values" behaviour is not really about "protecting" anyone; it's about their desire to send a continual stream of messages of condemnation towards people whose existence offends them. - Darth Wong alias Mike Wong
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CaptainChewbacca wrote:The tape indicates that rather than just spouting off with racial invective, the boy was asked first why he didn't want to cooperate with brown people by the parent/school official.
Pig: Why won't you cooperate with brown people?
Kid: I never said I wouldn't cooperate with brown people.
Pig: YOU SAID "BROWN PEOPLE"!!!
Surely mentioning he is a child is agism and the journalist should be suspended from the paper?
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Julhelm wrote:Maybe he was supposed to say carpetknitters?
Maybe I'm ignorant, but how is that a racial slur?
My bad, it doesn't translate well into english.
Then again, how about saying "coloured people"? Is that also racist? After all it's what they taught my entire generation to say back in the late 80's because saying "black" was totally racist.
This reminds me of something that happened to my cousin, who's 10 years old. He and a friend had to do some project for school, and they decided to write a comic strip. They decided that the two main characters should be colored impossibly bright(neon blue, hot pink, etc.). Logically, they wanted to call the comic strip "Two Colored Dudes." Perhaps fortunately, my aunt put the kaibosh on that, and they came up with a different title. But, like the kid in the article, they had absolutely no idea about the connotation of "Two Colored Dudes." It was the adults who got their proverbial panties in a bunch.
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Julhelm wrote:Then again, how about saying "coloured people"? Is that also racist? After all it's what they taught my entire generation to say back in the late 80's because saying "black" was totally racist.
That's exactly what my grandmother says! She calls 'em "colored people", but that's so 1960s!
The "operative" word in the late 1980s was "black people". Now it's "African-American"
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MKSheppard wrote:That's exactly what my grandmother says! She calls 'em "colored people", but that's so 1960s!
The "operative" word in the late 1980s was "black people". Now it's "African-American"
I thought it had gone back to black now?
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Julhelm wrote:Then again, how about saying "coloured people"? Is that also racist? After all it's what they taught my entire generation to say back in the late 80's because saying "black" was totally racist.
That's exactly what my grandmother says! She calls 'em "colored people", but that's so 1960s!
The "operative" word in the late 1980s was "black people". Now it's "African-American"
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Julhelm wrote:Then again, how about saying "coloured people"? Is that also racist? After all it's what they taught my entire generation to say back in the late 80's because saying "black" was totally racist.
That's exactly what my grandmother says! She calls 'em "colored people", but that's so 1960s!
The "operative" word in the late 1980s was "black people". Now it's "African-American"
The mindlessness of these terms leads to people referring to black Africans as African-Americans, or black guys in the UK as African-Americans.
In Brazil they say that Pele was the best, but Garrincha was better
In Canada it's black. I don't think we use the term African-American...I believe it's US that did that.
Black makes the most sense. All caucasians are called white. So the exact same fair reversal is black. And brown is ALSO a proper term for a race. There were at one time an accepted 5 major races. White, red, yellow, brown and black. None of them are racist in context.
Carolus Linnaeus original model had just four races, white, yellow, red, and black. His protege, anthropology founder Johann Blumenbach, completed his mentor's color-coded race model by adding the brown race, "Malay", for Polynesians and Melanesians of Pacific Islands, and for aborigines of Australia. As well as the mixed blood of the Latinos.
You have to realize that most Christian "moral values" behaviour is not really about "protecting" anyone; it's about their desire to send a continual stream of messages of condemnation towards people whose existence offends them. - Darth Wong alias Mike Wong
"There is nothing wrong with being ignorant. However, there is something very wrong with not choosing to exchange ignorance for knowledge when the opportunity presents itself."
SancheztheWhaler wrote:
The mindlessness of these terms leads to people referring to black Africans as African-Americans, or black guys in the UK as African-Americans.
You also have silliness like expat Afrikaans calling themselves African-American and being technically correct link
It's black. If they're in America, they're fucking Americans. What do you call them if they're in China? Sino-Africans? We don't split hairs with whites, so this bullshit "African-American" term for any African who isn't donning tribal wear and doesn't get ghetto/rap/whatever is annoying.
I love how some people also can't wrap their minds around the idea of white Africans.
Admiral Valdemar wrote:It's black. If they're in America, they're fucking Americans. What do you call them if they're in China? Sino-Africans? We don't split hairs with whites, so this bullshit "African-American" term for any African who isn't donning tribal wear and doesn't get ghetto/rap/whatever is annoying.
I love how some people also can't wrap their minds around the idea of white Africans.
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Admiral Valdemar wrote:I love how some people also can't wrap their minds around the idea of white Africans.
One of my father's co-workers is a white South African. There were issues with the United States' public school system when his kid listed himself as an "African-American" on a standardized test or some such. The teacher noticed, asked the kid to correct it, and rather than do so he decided to argue the point. Apparently it spiralled out of control in such a way as to eventually involved the school's administration.
Just to address how some people here seem to think that young kids cannot be racist. From my personal experience, yes, they can very well be fairly racist.
As for the article, I'm having a little bit trouble of interpreting what the story exactly is. It seems like the school officials said that he said something about brown people while in conflict with another boy but the article states that this didn't come out until after he was interrogated about and asked why he don't cooperate with brown people. Perhaps he said it before they started asking him why he said it on tape. I have a feeling that this article is leaving out some details.
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"If scientists and inventors who develop disease cures and useful technologies don't get lifetime royalties, I'd like to know what fucking rationale you have for some guy getting lifetime royalties for writing an episode of Full House." - Mike Wong
"The present air situation in the Pacific is entirely the result of fighting a fifth rate air power." - U.S. Navy Memo - 24 July 1944
nevermind I reread the article and it seems to stay consistent. Still seems pretty odd to me. Having the partent of the other student to the interrogation was pretty dumb though.
Brotherhood of the Monkey @( !.! )@ To give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the gift. ~Steve Prefontaine Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer are in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe.
