Dude, do you have eyes? It looks like she took a glittery Confederate flag and wrapped it around herself. I didn’t look at the picture until I read your post, so I was expecting it to look ambigious. But it certainly doesn’t.
First impression: should the school have banned her from wearing this dress? Probably not, in my opinion.
Should she be suing the school for money? No. Surely there’s a way to sue for public redress (haw haw) without specifying a monetary amount. Couldn’t she just have demanded the school rescind or amend their policies?
So it doesn’t matter how many people find something offensive, as long as it’s not intended to be offensive? “Sorry, Jews, I’m not wearing this swastika to offend you, but to honor my great grandfather who fought bravely for his homeland in a totally non-holocaust-related context”. Riiiiiiiiight.
The blue stripe looks to me to be a single piece of fabric that loops around much like those ubiquitous yellow “Support Our Troops” ribbons. That’s not how the Confederate battle flag* is designed.
How far removed from the actual flag design would it have to be before it becomes acceptable to you? (This question can be directed to anyone complaining of the dress, not just kung fu lola.) If she had left the stars off the blue field, would that be OK? What if the blue ribbon didn’t cross anywhere but just spiriled around her? What if it was maroon, white and blue instead of red, white and blue? What if it were orange, green and yellow? Where along the color chart do you want to draw the line between acceptable and offensive?
- Earlier I referred to this flag as the stars and bars. This is incorrect. See this page.
School dress codes are one thing - prom dress codes are another. Students do not check their First Amendment rights at the schoolhouse door, but prom is extra-curricular, and a school can put whatever restrictions it wishes on the dress and activities of students at such a function.
I think it is a well-designed dress, and fairly attractive. But it represents something the school thinks is disruptive, and they have every right to forbid her to wear it. I hope she goes down hard.
bnorton, the design would be fine if she had left the stars off of it. Then, it would merely suggest the attle Flag. I would still find it offensive personally, but it would pass the “blatant” test for me.
Here’s an interesting problem: An ex-girlfriend had, locked in a cedar chest, a blanket woven by her great grandmother (who was of German extraction) around the turn of the 20th century. Imagine, a beautifully-crafted, intricately-adorned, antique piece of folk art, perfeclty preserved. What a family treasure, right?
Except it was covered with swastikas. Once upon a time, the swastika was considered an auspicious sun symbol, and to display it was to confer good luck. The blanket was given as a gesture of love to my ex’s grandmother long before the swastika took on its sinister identity as a symbol of genocide, and was passed on each generation with the same intent. I think it would be wrong to call my g.f. a Nazi because she treasured it. She felt rather sad because she couldn’t display it, though I think it’s just as well, as keeping it locked away also insures it stays in good condition.
Symbols are funny things. Banning them willy-nilly strikes me as an odd way to stamp out hate, especially when intent is never allowed to be taken into account.
I wonder what her dad, Heavy has to say.
Nor apparently for you, how few are offended:
Bolding mine.
We will forever be debating just where to draw the line between reasonable concern for the feelings of others and kowtowing to the hypersensitive among us. I think we’d be better off if we all developed thicker skin. Hell, that’s one of the reasons I post to this board.
I understand her cousin, Howdy, was OK with it.
Can’t display it? Hogwash. It sounds like a beautiful piece and she should display it. If people ask either fight ignorance and explain the history of the symbol or tell them to go fuck themselves.
This, like the Barbie is Queer and the Straight Pride shirts, are all exercises of free speech. Would people be pissed over it if it wasn’t saying something?
The entire thing is a tempest in a fucking teapot. If she had been allowed to wear the damn dress to the damn prom without the freaking principal having a hissy, there would have been no trouble, no strife, and no damn lawsuit. Ten to one no one would have raised the issue if the principal hadn’t started it.
Slavery existed, no doubt about it. It was a bad thing, no doubt about it. But all the “let’s stamp out everything that can even remotely remind us of slavery” is going too damn far. Some black people wear clothing that is more typical of Africa than the USA; why don’t we get excited about that?
Goddamn revisionist history makes me fucking want to fucking puke.
I just want to know where she’s getting all this false imprisonment stuff from. Keeping someone out of somewhere does not a false imprisonment claim make. As for assault, well, who knows. There could very well have been something. 1st amendment rights? That’s funny and I guess a very, very creative argument may be made.
But false imprisonment? The mind boggles. 
Did that girl fall asleep in a tanning bed? Yikes.
I can’t help but think that this was a calculated ploy by the girl or her parents to suck money out of the school district. She knew the dress was forbidden and she wore it anyway. Now, if I was in charge I probably would have just let it slide, but she still disobeyed the school. Whether or not the dress is in poor taste is irrelevant; the prom was a privately funded extra-curricular event. Nobody is forced to go to it.
Also wiggumpuppy is correct in saying that the Confederate battle flag was almost unknown as a symbol of “Southern pride” until the Brown decision. Not saying people shouldn’t be allowed to display it, but it is a little funny that it didn’t pop up in a big way before then, and it’s also funny that they chose to use the battle flag instead of the peacetime flag as a pride symbol.
Didn’t the principal prevent her exiting the car in which she arrived?
I’m completely lost. The reason why people don’t get excited about black people wearing things typical of Africa (whatever these things are) is because things associated with Africa are not, in general, offensive. Things associated with the Confederacy are.
Your argument is fucking stupid. It’s like saying we shouldn’t get worked up about the swastika because Jews wave around the Star of David. Um, the two things aren’t comparable at all. And as noted previously, the flag isn’t offensive purely because of its relationship to slavery. It’s a symbol of racism.
Before you go puking at the revisionist history, find out a thing or two about the thing you’re defending. It’s not really all that defendable, IMHO.
I agree that the principal should have let her slide on this one. She was all ready to take a stand on this; it would have been best to take away her platform by ignoring her. However, I can also see how the principal barred her for the benefit of the other kids. The Confederate flag IS offensive to many. I would find it hard to enjoy the prom if I had to look at that thing, however “pretty” it was.
Well, she was a very sensitive person, about as left-wing as it gets, and was distinctly uncomfortable with the idea of being viewed as a Nazi sympathiser. She had the good sense not to burn the thing, but she also had the good sense to keep it under wraps, lest her sentimentality get her into trouble with the ADL or something. Given that swastikas are now universally recognized as a mark of pure evil, I doubt very much a rational explanation of its original significance would have swayed those offended by its display. Some worms are best left in the can for all involved.
As for the General Lee’s big honkin’ decal, I dunno. Again, it would appear a significant number of people do not regard it as a symbol of hatred. It’s on hats, belt buckles, tee shirts, flags, posters, cars, bars, and a whole lotta trucks. I’ve seen the likes of Rob Zombie sporting a Confederate flag on a big black ten gallon hat as part of his Hellbilly personna. I’ve no interest in wearing or displaying it, but I also can’t get too worked up about it, as you can find it damn-near everywhere if you try hard enough, and in some parts, you can hardly avoid it. Again, this chick’s school may have walked into a lawsuit it could well lose, and that strikes me as unwise.
I DO know a thing or two about the thing I’m defending and I don’t give a good goddamn if you understand it or not. You’re entitled to your opinion and I’m entitled to mine—I won’t try to impose mine on you if you promise not to try to impose your’s on me. I don’t find Africa offensive, I find the attitude that it is perfectly acceptable to pretend one person is entitled to flaunt some dubious link to a heritage while others are not. I personally think it is about time we all got over the bullshit re slavery and the reminders of it. And deleting those reminders is NOT the way to get over it.
This matters naught to me, unless these “significant number of people” are the same ones that the KKK and racist skinheads want to exterminate and are the same people that Confederate flag-wavers marched against in the 50s and 60s.
It’s an ugly dress with ugly connotations.
If she spent four years making the dress, as the CNN story said, then I would think she would have taken that time to really mull over what she was doing. She must have been truly convinced that this dress was something she wanted to wear, something she wanted to be seen wearing. That’s a real shame, in my opinion. (Who has a dream of wearing a Confederate-themed dress to prom? UGH.)
I have to agree that if she had just been allowed inside, there would likely be no huge uprising and no lawsuit. I feel bad for the principal-- I wonder what the backlash will be like.
I kind of wish that they had let her in, and that her peers could have let her in on the fact that she made a poor choice.