"AnAmericanCitizen" <NoAmnesty@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
news:bqsrk3996340isgaj03mc8o1eepud781nn@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> 9-year old suspended for 'hate crime'
> Robert Anglen The Arizona Republic
> Nov. 27, 2007 03:05 PM
>
> 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 cir***stances 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 re****ted 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.
>
> Officials at the Wa****ngton Elementary School District, who are supposed
> to oversee
> Voinovich, wouldn't comment about the boy's suspension. They said only
the
> principal
> is qualified to talk about it.
>
> Well, the boy's mother is talking, and she is angry. She has also
removed
> her son
> from the school.
>
> "I want parents to know . that principals can abuse their powers,"
Sherry
> Neve, 35,
> said. "Principals need to have pro-active supervisors. I want the
parents
> to know
> that the principal was influencing my son in a way I wouldn't want him
to
> be raised."
> Neve said school officials didn't advise her of the incident until
several
> days after
> they questioned her son. When Neve objected to the suspension during the
> conference,
> Voinovich told her that she didn't have any rights; that parents give up
> their rights
> to discipline when they send a child to school, the tape shows.
>
> "If you don't want that, you can take him out of here," Voinovich said
> tersely.
>
> Neve insists that her son is not a racist and that he never
differentiated
> a person's
> color until the school made it in an issue.
>
> "We were raised to be color blind," she said. "My children were raised
the
> same way."
> But let's assume for a minute that the boy actually made the comment.
Does
> this make
> him a racist and guilty of a hate crime? Or does it make him a confused
> 9-year-old in
> need of counseling?
>
> Instead of taking an op****tunity to educate the boy and get to the root
of
> the
> problem, the principal taught him another lesson altogether: It's OK to
> feel like a
> racist as long as you keep your feelings to yourself.
>
> Kids often say the darndest things. Apparently, so do principals.
>
This is the kind of mental terrorism one would have expected during the
Cultural Revolution in Red China or in Vietnam after the fall of Saigon or
in Stalinist Russia. I hope the boy had a nice 3 day vacation and enjoyed
his brief freedom from the indoctrination camp. Since when did mentioning
the color of a person's skin become a thought crime?
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