North Dakota Hockey Fans Dress Like Klan Members For High School Game
Andres, as promised, I have been thinking about your comment on the above photo, a photo I altered by taking away the color & minimizing the students surrounding the three who chose to wear garments reminiscent of the KKK. Because it all comes down to black & white & these three hoods in a mass of white garb.
You wrote:
When I was in high school, I remember we celebrated International Day and one of my classmates dressed up as Hitler. We were ignorant and naive in 1976 his image was even published in the Yearbook, as if it was something to celebrate. Fast Forward to 2013...no explanation for this one...pathetic.
Looking back, I am not sure that we can claim ignorance or naiveté as an explanation for behavior or traditions with insidious & insensitive under & overtones.
We debated the right of eighteen year olds drafted into the military to participate in the process that called them into service, called upon them to give up their lives in that service. We understood the need for civil rights to be disseminated throughout the population; that the war in Vietnam was not really about defending democracy but annihilating the Other (real & imagined); that our survival as a species is intertwined & linked with the survival of the Environment & its ecosystems.
We recognized the promise of change & growth beyond culturally imposed gender & racial stereotypes.
Perhaps culture itself engrains ignorance & perpetuates naiveté in our collective consciousness to ensure that we forget the power & passion of our youthful rhetoric. We lose our idealism. We lose our fire.
It is beyond understanding that in 2013, the KKK still exists, that the insidious symbol & the ideology behind that all white, hooded cloak, is imitated. Venerated. Beyond understanding that the three students in the photo were not aware of the image.
It is beyond understanding that in 2013, a woman’s right to control her body & its reproductive capacity is in jeopardy. Beyond understanding that women are not guaranteed fair & equitable treatment in the work place, the military, in representation, in the private & the public sectors.
It is beyond understanding that in 2013, fifty years after Martin Luther King, Jr., stood in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial, that a biracial President elected by a majority of American voters fosters insidious enmity & anger among his detractors. Because he is not a White Anglo-Saxon male of European descent.
It is beyond understanding that in 2013, over forty years after Coronado High School in El Paso elected Charlotte Basset as the first female President of Student Council, we have yet to see a woman elected as President of the United States. Beyond understanding that the nation leading the free world has is the only major democracy never led by a female.
It is beyond understanding that in 2013, the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act is before the Supreme Court.
It is beyond understanding that in 2013, a nation built on immigration & the diversity brought by immigration, has forgotten that we are all descended from immigrants.
It is beyond understanding that in 2013, we are more divided than we were when all the answers were blowin' in the wind & Puff was a magic dragon & we dreamed that one day all men & all women would be free & equal & worthy.
My youth was marked by many things – the text of my life was imprinted & influenced by my family, my mother’s faith, my father’s mind, the neighborhoods in which I lived, public education, teachers, writers, musicians & artists, popular culture, history, time, discourse.
It was not marked by either ignorance or naiveté. Growing up as Jack & Jean’s daughter demanded discourse, knowledge, understanding, awareness.
As you see, Andres, I have thought about this for many days, & will continue to ponder.
To ponder why we continue to witness & experience behaviors & beliefs rooted less in ignorance or naiveté than in a willing suspension of understanding & awareness.
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