prejudice

1: injury or damage resulting from some judgement or action of another in disregard of one's rights...2: an adverse opinion or leaning formed without just grounds or before sufficient knowledge.

tolerance

1: capacity to endure pain or hardship

2. a: sympathy or indulgence for beliefs or practices differing from or conflicting with one's own. b: the act of allowing something

there's a battle going on in local school systems over a kids' rights to wear certain t-shirts. shirts with confederate flags, shirts that say "redneck and proud of it." shirts with a Black Pride X. i'm having some problems with this one though. i love the 1st amendment with all my liberal, tree-hugging, revolutionary heart, but there are things i believe are not covered by the 1st. any hate speech should be banned from environments like schools...because students don't have a choice whether or not to attend. broadly (and i'm not definitively advocating this), to be proud of being a redneck is to be proud of your status as a person who is prejudiced against certain other persons. to wear that shirt to school with the knowledge that there are racial tensions mounting and complaints have been made seems like a defiance of both school officials (more on this in a later entry) and of the students who originally made the complaints. which brings up the question of statement vs intent, which brings up huge murky sticky legal issues that i am not qualified to deal with. nor can i answer the question everyone is asking: who's in the right?

there is a particular case in which a student is suing the school for the right to wear his "redneck and proud" shirt. the school system's answer to this issue is a ban on all clothing referencing cultural or ethnic groups. period.

they're both wrong. first, the school system. to outright ban the wearing of clothing without explanation is a totalitarian act. by definition, individuals will rebel against tight control. by banning these shirts, the issue becomes a power struggle between students and administrators. what gets pushed to the background is the reason for the ban: the implicit nonverbal racism these shirts imply. second, the fact that students see wearing these shirts as a statement of their beliefs, or of their first amendment rights, without thinking who may be hurt. this might be something they did without thinking, but it's no less hurtful.

so what's the solution? the only one i can see is education. people need to be made aware that words hurt. teach kids from preschool that there are different ways to be; teach kids that there's no "them," because everyone is "us." that there's only one race, and that's human. in the short term? get those kids into a room with each other and make them talk. words start wars and end them. i know this sounds preachy. got a better idea? contact me!

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