High School Confidential

I'm having, what do you call them? Feelings? Yeah, feelings about something I read online the other day, get this, about my high school. Why should you care? Normally I'd say you shouldn't, but this is kind of a thing and I want to tell the world. Well, by the world I mean the five or six people who read my blog. If you're one of them, thanks!

Thanks people in the upper right hand corner of the screen!

I mean, how could you not want
to read about a school board meeting
in a town you've never heard of?

Here's the link. Next is usually the part where I make some comment about how you totally didn't read the article attached and then go on to explain it anyway and I'll do the second part, but maybe read this one? And then tell everyone you know? I'll get to why in a minute, but the article is about a school board meeting last week in the school district where I went to high school. At the meeting, parents accused Superintendent Micheal Pero of not doing anything about up the increasing incidents of racism at Pittsford schools.

Wait a minute...Asia's not
even a Mexican country...

The incidents include throwing the n-word around, jokes about nooses and slavery, bullying an Asian American student and telling him to go back to Mexico which-yeah, I don't know. Racists are, by definition, idiots. Oh, and there was also a Black History Month display about the contributions of black inventors that featured a bunch of white guys. This was at the elementary school, so I'm willing to believe that maybe the kids didn't quite understand what they were supposed to be doing, but like, where are the teachers on this one? The display was only taken down after a parent complained.

According to article, the parents who went to the meeting to take Pero to task can't even seem to get him to agree to call these incidents out as racism:

Nowhere in the definition of 'inclusion'
does it say you have to let kids get away
with racist shit. What else you got?

"If we called every incident out specifically by their category, I feel we're losing the message of our expectation that every single person who walks through this building deserves to be treated with dignity and respect. The word 'inclusion' means every one of our kids and families who fall into any category feels welcome and valued."

-Superintendent Pero 
on...uh...wait, what? 
Is he suggesting that-

  

"Well now who's being intolerant?"

-Michael Pero, flipping the script

-wait, what the actual-is he saying that if he calls racism out as racism he's risking making racists feel unwelcome because of their racism? Is this even real? Is this blood trickling from my ear? Look, I one hundred percent have no stake in the goings on of the school district I attended twenty years ago in a state I don't even live in anymore, but holy shit. Like, white kids calling black kids the n-word seems pretty cut and dry racism, doesn't it? I mean, how can he be in charge of educating children in 2019 without an understanding of what constitutes racism?

Anyway, according to the article the uptick in these racist dick moves seems to have-I'm sure totally coincidentally-line up with the 2016 election when a game show host lost the popular vote and still somehow became President.

And then, also coincidentally, said game show host spent the last couple years holding
rallies for himself in which he whips up nationlism and not-so-subtle white supremacy.
But again, I'm sure this is in no way related to all the emboldened white supremacists...

"Yeah, but the last President was
black, so, racism's over, right?"

-Far too many of us

At first, I definitely had a moment of 'naw...couldn't be.' I mean, that wasn't my experience at that school. It wasn't the most diverse environment in the world, but slurs and nooses? Impossible! But then I remembered that I'm not a person of color soooo...maybe my experience was, I don't know, not the same as it would have been if I were? Epiphany, right? Could that right there be the problem? Like maybe if white people kept in mind that just because we aren't personally experiencing racism doesn't mean it's been solved?

Yeah, you heard me. Dumb
idiots. Every one of them.

Ok, so startling realization that literally everyone in America who's ever been on the receiving end of racism already knew aside, should we be bothered more by the incidents described or by the attempt to keep them quiet? Like, both are horrible and disheartening, but kids are-and I say this as a former child myself-dumb idiots. The ones involved here are just parroting their dumb idiot parents. There's a chance they might someday come to their senses. But how can that happen if everyone's pretending there isn't a problem?

Like I said earlier, feelings. And again, I mention this because in addition to being a story about the district not doing anything about racism in schools, they're also not talking about it. The story itself has gone unremarked upon. I told my mom, who looked for it in the local paper and nothing. The only mention of it anywhere seems to be that one article I linked to above. It's like they're keeping it quiet to avoid bad press. Maybe I'm being very suspicious here. I don't know, but I mean, it's not like I'm talking about lizard people.

"But by calling the lizard people out for being lizard people,
you're loosing the message of tolerance for lizard people."

-Micheal Pero, defending lizard people