Amy Strickland is an assistant principal at a high school in Norfolk, Virginia. She has a personal twitter account.
Back in June she tweeted a picture of seven couples going to the prom. The couples were all interracial - the men were black and the women were white. And Strickland captioned the picture “Every white girl’s father’s worst nightmare”.
The tweet was noticed about a month ago on Strickland’s Facebook page and brought to the attention of the school administration. But no action was taken. Several students have now walked out of classes in protest.
I think the thread title makes my opinion clear. Now I can’t stop a person from being a racist if they don’t want to stop. But who is stupid enough to think they can get away with making their racism so public? I guess if you’re dumb enough to be a racist, you’re dumb enough to not to hide it.
As for the school administration, they screwed up by apparently not making any response to the situation. They should have at least acknowledged the problem existed and told people they were investigating it.
And I’m sure there will be a few racism apologists who will pop in to say there was no problem here until the students protested. They’ll argue that racism isn’t a problem; it’s complaining about racism that’s the real problem.
The problem is that someone so stupid is an Assistant Principal. It really doesn’t matter what she meant she should have known it would not be viewed favorably by some people.
Wow, I’m really surprised she still has a job.
The person who is one step down from being the representative of the entire school made those remarks about the students at her very own school and nothing was done?
That’s amazing.
To give an almost certainly undeserved benefit of the doubt, she might have meant “every white girl with a racist father”. No, I don’t think she meant that either.
That was a phenomenally idiotic thing for anyone to say, but particularly someone who is in authority over a large number of children who are struggling through adolescence and figuring out who they want to be.
Just to be clear, i don’t think the students in the picture were from her own school. She was retweeting a joke from a joke website.
None of this make it any better, or excuses it, of course. It’s just as offensive, no matter who the people in the photo are. I, too, am amazed that she still has her job. But the students in the picture were not from this particular idiot’s school.
That is, indeed, jaw-droppingly stupid, and racist. The question is what, if anything, the school administration has the legal or moral authority to do about it. Do they have a policy in place about disciplining teachers for things they post on their private social media?
True, although Washington himself argued in his famous Atlanta Exposition address that blacks should not push too hard for social and politically equality with whites, or for access to higher education. They should, he said, be content with industrial and vocational education, and should focus in the short term on manual labor and the “common occupations of life.”
He said that political rights and social equality should only come as “the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing.” He explicitly advocated social segregation and economic cooperation, arguing that “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”
All that stuff really pissed off some other prominent black leaders like W.E.B. Du Bois, who referred to Washington’s position as “the old attitude of adjustment and submission.”
Huh. Seems more likely to me that this person was making racist assumptions about the intolerance of white parents (as opposed to being a white racist herself).
It also strikes me that using the phrase “idiot assistant principal” is redundant.
Are you kidding? Did you really think that i was suggesting that we should incorporate those ideas into our own thinking about race? If you did think that, you can kindly go and fuck yourself.
Jesus, are some people around here fucking retarded. Did you miss the post where i said:
My point was merely that, despite his own reputation as a hero of black advancement, Booker T. Washington himself held some rather problematic ideas about racial equality. While the fact that this incident happened at Booker T. Washington high school might seem somewhat ironic, Washington himself, despite his incredibly laudable efforts in support of black advancement, was not really down with full social equality. Thus, it might not be as ironic as it first appears.