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| If you see blackface here, please leave this page. It’s for intelligent people. |
A few days ago, I commented on a post on Ethics Alarms regarding the high school principal in Sherman, Texas who declared that the musical Oklahoma! contains “mature adult themes, profane language, and sexual content” “would come in third place in a battle of wits with a sack of hair and an anvil.”
Gentle Reader, I hereby retract that characterization. It appears that Sherman Principal Scott
Johnson was merely a good soldier, enforcing the dictates of a superintendent and
school board that can’t decide if the Victorian age was a little too
permissive. So… Johnson appears capable
of giving that anvil a run for its money.
The good news is that the international attention this case
received resulted first in a decision to re-instate the original student cast
but in a shortened “kids” version of the musical that would have cut the solo
from Max Hightower, the trans student at the center of the controversy, and
finally—when the students and parents refused to accept that utterly stupid
“compromise” or the notion that Oklahoma!, of all plays, ought to be bowdlerized—a
return to the original version with the students the director cast.
More to the present point, when compared to Jeff Luna, the
principal at Muirland Middle School in La Jolla, California, even the folks who
did make the idiotic decisions that led to the kerfuffle would appear to embody
all the best attributes of Solomon, Socrates, Confucius, Albert Einstein and Leonardo
da Vinci rolled into one. We do sorta
know what Ado Annie means when she laments her inability to “say no,” after
all.
I was about to say that what Luna did surpasses credulity, but, alas, it does not. There are a lot of adjectives that do apply—“boneheaded,” “irrational,” and “unconstitutional” come to mind—but unfortunately “unbelievable” has no place on the list.
Last month, a Muirland 8th-grader identified as J.A.
attended a high school football game, looking like he does in the photo
above. That is, he wore eye black, just
as he’s seen countless football players (and not a few baseball players) do; I
won’t bother you with the literally dozens of photos of players of all races
doing so. Now, whether eye black has any
direct practicality is a matter for debate.
It started as a means of keeping glare out of the eyes. I have no idea whether it actually does that, and even if it does, it doesn’t
require the amount used by J.A. But that,
of course, is irrelevant.
There’s little difference between J.A. and those fans who
paint their faces red because their favorite team is the Alabama Crimson Tide
or who wear “cheeseheads” to support the Green Bay Packers. Maybe the allure is primal, maybe it’s that
face-painting is linked to war paint.
But there’s no “maybe” about the fact that used as J.A. did, it’s
completely and utterly harmless… not to mention the fact that, according to the
Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE),
“many game attendees wore face or body paint.”
There were, of course, no incidents at the game in question,
and literally no one took any offense. That’s
because most people have more than a couple of brain cells. Not so, apparently, the Idiot Luna. A week or so after the game, he called J.A.
and his parents to a meeting, at which the boy was suspended for two days and
barred from attending future athletic contests.
Why? Because, according to the official paperwork,
J.A. “painted his face black at a football game,” which qualifies as an
“offensive comment, intent to harm.” In
other words, Luna would need to undergo a couple of millennia of evolution to
attain the mental acumen of pond scum.
You can read an excellent delineation of the facts in the letter from FIRE’s Director of Public Advocacy Aaron Terr. A brief précis: 1). J.A. “emulated the style
of eye black worn by many athletes.” 2).
“J.A. wore his eye black throughout the game without incident.” 3). “J.A.’s non-disruptive, objectively
inoffensive face paint was constitutionally protected expression.” 4). “The complete lack of disruption is
unsurprising, as the sight of fans in face paint is familiar to anyone who has
ever attended a football game or other sporting event.” 5). “The claim thar J.A.’s face paint
constituted blackface is frivolous.” 6).
“Muirland Middle School has no authority to discipline J.A. for his
non-disruptive, constitutionally protected display of team spirit.”
The only part of this missive with which anyone could
reasonably demur even slightly is the characterization of the eye black as a
display of “team spirit.” I doubt it was
necessarily that, but it was certainly inoffensive, non-disruptive, commonplace,
and constitutionally protected. Terr needs
to be more polite than I do, so I’ll allow his characterization of the assertion
of blackface as “frivolous,” as opposed to the more accurate “fucking ridiculous.”
But, as they say in the late-night infomercials, “Wait! There’s more!” The family appealed the suspension, but the
appeal was denied by the San Diego Unified School District, suggesting that
they, too, are cognitively impaired. The
correct response, of course, would have been to uphold the appeal and fire
Luna.
It’s difficult to tell if Luna is a Social Justice Warrior run amok, or simply a sports-ignorant walking example of the Dunning-Kruger effect, like the buffoons a few years ago who decided that the universally recognized gesture to denote a 3-point shot in basketball was a gang sign. Ultimately, that distinction doesn’t matter—willful ignorance and blinkered paranoia are all but interchangeable—but it does matter that, alas, the situation is worse than even FIRE suggests.
Whereas it is obvious that J.A.’s actions are utterly innocuous, and that the punishment is about three steps beyond absurd, that isn’t always the case. Racial animus does indeed exist, and it is occasionally manifested at sporting events; there was a case less than an hour from Chez Curmie a year or so ago.
I’m not going to get into whether expression that actually is
offensive is constitutionally protected on school property. Racism and its
cousins in prejudice are unethical even if legal. Luna and the district have demeaned all
attempts to protect the Others (whoever that might be in terms of race, religion,
gender identity, etc.) from harassment based simply on who they are.
What is at play here is a variation on the Boy Who Cried Wolf. When we accumulate enough examples of utterly inane allegations being brought by authority figures, we start to discount all such claims, even those which have merit. J.A. and his family are bearing the brunt of this outrage, but we all suffer the consequences.
This is a slightly edited version of an essay that first appeared as a Curmie’s Conjectures post on Ethics Alarms.
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