I'll keep this short, since I rambled yesterday. One year ago, a bully victim in Clayton County, Georgia, was convicted and sentenced for fighting back against his tormenter with a pencil. The boy, Darryl Gray, left a scar on the bully's face. Darryl got 90 days probation, a $232 restitution fine (to the bully), and a permanent record. The bully got away with hitting Darryl, calling him gay, and urinating on him. But that was all in the past. Darryl's first response, the pencil attack, was caught and Darryl was punished. This all made national news, of course, and thousands of people were outraged at the injustice of it all. The question is, do you support Darryl's right to fight back, even if most of the bullying were done weeks or months earlier?
Of course, what Darryl did was wrong. Even a pencil can blind a person or even kill them, especially if used towards the face. I still can't think of a better solution for Darryl and I'm not sure I would have done differently if I were in his shoes. Can you?
The reason I ask is because people seem to think racism and old wounds have just disappeared into the past. The fairly recent Confederate Flag flaps in Georgia and South Carolina are good examples. Just because you may have forgotten the bullying and torment and terror the flag represented 50 years ago doesn't mean everyone has. Are we going to ask Southern Blacks to forget about what happened to them in their youth just because it's in the past? Or blackface. A recent comment here questioned what was so bad about a high school teacher wearing blackface to a school event. He commented that the movie "White Chicks" with the Wayans brother did not elicit such an outcry. Despite the fact that it was a lousy movie with a tasteless gimmick, there is no history of Blacks terrorizing Whites wearing "whiteface". There is a long history of White people terrorizing and lampooning Blacks with blackface. If you take these incidents at face value (despite the inanity of trying to compare behavior standards of movie stars vs high school teachers) and forget about the history, you're missing the real picture.
We should never forget what bullies and terrorists and racists have done. Move on? Yes. Forgive? Perhaps. Forget? Never. The victim never forgets. The bully doesn't remember or care. Which one are you?
15 comments:
The kid should be punished for the pencil incident, and the people running the school ought to be censured for letting it get to this point. I read about this story when it first came out, and, if I remember correctly, both the kid and his parents went to the school multiple times to report the chronic bullying going on, and were ignored. If they had done their jobs, then this kid wouldn't have had to use violence to protect himself.
Uh, Mike - we don't fly the Union Jack in the United States. And I'm not talking about issues that happened 2000 years ago or 200 years ago. I'm talking about something that happened in peoples' lifetimes. I did say move on. I also said that what Darryl did was wrong. Thirdly I said we should not forget. That means the people who can't get why blackface and Confederate flags and such are extraordinarily offensive to certain people need to remember that old scars don't disappear just because you want them to or because you have forgotten what caused them.
Mike, I agree with you that people are often over-sensitive in addition to being so crazy about not wanting to offend. It is perhaps for that reason that I will not apologize outright for the post on my site yesterday making fun of Sen. Santorum. If one thing is holy, it all is and by that logic, we'll never have any fun anymore.
I think that saying we are "erasing" history is a little strong. Primary histories, it has been said, are written by the victor. With that in mind, much of what has been recorded throughout human past has no doubt sought to cast the victor (often an agressor) in a positive light, doing away with any transgressions. I would say that a modern examination is so much erasing history altogether, but more carefully administering all of the facts.
Then again, it might not really matter in the long run since you are right that American students appear to be getting dumber by the nanosecond.
Incidentally, that baby died in 1996. I think Senator Santorum has had a few years to pick himself up off the floor, Mike.
As for your question Scott, I think that the fact that he has had to endure this bully for so long without any help from the adults that were supposed to help him, he should not get punished very much if at all. The kid had it coming! If there had been more damage I would agree with more of a punishment, but what else was this kid supposed to do? A person should be allowed to defend themselves.
I didn't have many bullies pick on me in school and certainly not for long, because no matter how big they were I never let them back me down. Toe to toe. Boy or girl. Sure they could probably beat the living hell out of me, but I sure wasn't going to make it easy for them and I sure as hell was going to try to do a little damage along the way. And the authority that we were supposed to go to was never helpful. If I didn't defend myself those people would have just tortured me worse and worse, because they would have no consequences to answer to.
What about the bullies; where's their parade?
And don't worry , some day the charmed existence the Jews have led for so long will finally end, and they'll suffer like the rest of us do!
I think white people need to realize things will calm down eventually. Like right after you get in a fight with your wife, you tip-toe around for a while, make extra nice, and soon things return to normal. We all just need to chill. I really don't see race relations as being more strained than before, in fact I see quite the opposite. For all it's detractors, I think the whole PC thing has helped, or at least done nothing to harm, the atmosphere between the different races in this country. So calm down, everything will work out fine, no matter how much the governmant does to screw it up.
And come on, cuddling a fetus is crazy...crazy and funny.
There are still plenty of racial problems. It is just far easier to pretend that there is nothing going on than to actually deal with it.
There are still plenty of racial problems. It is just far easier to pretend that there is nothing going on than to actually deal with it.
Well I am not sure you can ignore something when its right in front of you.
How can you ignore the looks of a security guard who keeps staring at you in a store when you aren't doing anything wrong just because you are black?
This is just an example and you can't do anything about it unfortunately but how can you just ignore it?
I got a little pissed off at my boss. During the last round of hiring, when they were going to be hiring 7 new employees, I had a friend of mine interview, and I know he's qualified. He didn't get the job. The seven people that they did hire were ALL black women between 25 and 35. Not that I mind working with any of them, they all turned out great, but my friend was just as qualified, if not more so than any of them, so I think there's a definite emphasis on hiring minorities here. All I really want is for them to hire a blonde girl every once in a while.
I agree, Mike, that there is a reverse evolution about racial acceptance. My former boss was a 60-year-old jackass...I mean, man...from Tennessee. In spite of the fact that he himself was a gay male and had probably been subject to a fair amount of discrimination in his life, he would make really inappropriate racial comments on a fairly regular basis. He would comment on things that would never even have occured to me to base on someone's race or nationality.
My grandmother, one of the most well-mannered women alive, still sometimes refers to black people as "colored." I find it pretty offensive (and also mildly amusing because it's just so absurd), but she is 89 and I'm not inclined to ask her to change at this point because she's been saying it her entire life. And as far as I know, she has no interest in becoming a Grand Wizard, so I think we're safe.
Speaking as someone who was bullied during High School I have to say that yes, what he did was justified. I remember when bullies tormented me during class and the teacher did absolutly nothing. If kids think that no one will listen to them they will lash out. I certainly think that bully may think twice next time.
I think that the child did what he could, considering the circumstances. Now I think using a pencil on a bully in a school situation is extreme, but the kid had a right to defend himself. The bully will leave him alone. The school system should look at their own failings before trying to down the kid.
And with the racism issue, people don't always do things like blackface in order to be racist. No, thats called ignorance. If we don't study history and examine throughly the horrors of the past, then we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past. If it was a perfect world, White Chicks would have have never been made.
Kroopa Shah- that is a very good question. I myself am quite aware of many of the problems that non-whites face in this country and it always facinates me how other whites can just look past it as if it really isn't going on.
In some respects things have gotten better, but the racism in this contry hasn't gone away it has just gone covert.
Yeah....
My ten foot pole happens to be broken at the moment. Consequently, I will not be touching the "minorities playing the victim" item on the docket. That was brave of you, Mike.
I think a lot of you are forgetting some things. One, the United States is one fo the least racist countries in the world. Arab countries make it not very pleasant for non-Arab non-Muslim people (that's why there are almost now Jews or Christians left in middle east Arab countries). The Japanese? it's hard to be openly racist when there's less than 1% population of a different race. Same goes with China, except there the racism is region by region, not countrywide. Europe and South America have their share of racial tensions. In France a few weeks ago there was a protest by mostly white schoolchildren, and they were attacked by gangs of blacks and Arabs, who, in their own words, wanted to beat the dirty white Frenchies. Australia has had well publicized problems integrating the aborigines into their modern country. Africa? Well besides aparthied, which, though ended, still cats a long shadow over South Africa, you can add in the recent racially-motivated problems in the Sudan, Somalia, Liberia, etc. You name the country, I can find worse racism than in the United States. Not that I'm saying we should just stop trying to be better, just that people like to hype our problems like Americans are a bunch of racist assholes, when in fact we're far more tolerant than most societies on this planet we all have to share. Heck, even the recent trend of anti-Arab racism in this country has an obvious cause. If Arabs hadn't been behind the worst terrorist attack to ever hit our shores, then Arabs wouldn't be so suspect to the average American (except the average American Jew, who sees venomous anti-semetic tirades delivered from the pulpit in mosques all over the world every day, and who probably has distant relatives affected by suicide bombers in Israel).
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