Respecting Nevada students’ cultural heritage an easy call for Legislature

Adiverse coalition of Nevada students is leading the charge to pass legislation to ensure that graduation ceremonies celebrate the importance of family, culture and community, along with individual accomplishment.

Assembly Bill 73 would give students a legal right to wear “traditional tribal regalia or recognized objects of religious or cultural significance” at any public school graduation.

Examples of adornments range from leis and stoles to tribal or religious headwear to necklaces or pins depicting a cross, Star of David or rainbow. Students can decide what symbols, if any, are important and meaningful to them, their families and their culture as long as they aren’t likely to cause a “substantial disruption of, or material interference” with the graduation ceremony.

That reasonable limitation likely prevents trolls from demeaning the graduation by wearing symbols of hate groups. The goal here is to share “this is who I am in this culture on this great day,” not to growl “this is who I hate.” Beyond that constraint, the symbolic items can represent the traditions of any group of people, not just racial or ethnic groups.

It’s a simple and straightforward proposal that respects the cultural backgrounds, identities and values of the students and their families celebrating graduation. In other words, it respects the fact that different students and families may have different beliefs about why graduation is important and what they are celebrating with this transition for young people.

We applaud the Nevada Joint Standing Committee on Education for proposing the bill and call upon the state Legislature to pass the bill quickly and unanimously.

But the existence of the legislation begs the question: Why is this even an issue of debate?

As Hillary Davis reported Friday in the Sun, currently, decisions about dress codes for graduations are made locally. For example, in the Clark County School District, acceptable graduation attire is up to each high school principal.

The result is that even something as simple as a staffing change can lead students to have vastly different graduation experiences.

Colton Desimone, a member of the Walker River Paiute tribe, said he was told he could not wear a beaded cap to his Minden Douglas High School graduation last year even though his older brother wore one a few years ago. His brother has graduation photos that Colton could not replicate.

“I look at these pictures and see how I was told my culture was a distraction,” he testified last week at the State Capitol in Carson City.

Context matters when it comes to the importance of this bill.

For many middle-class families, the rite of passage embodied in a high school graduation is joyful, but also utterly expected and conventional. For children and families of marginalized or impoverished groups, high school graduation can be a triumphal culmination of multigenerational struggle. In this sense, high school graduation can be a time for an entire community of people to celebrate.

While we make ourselves anew with each generation, we are also the products of the events and people preceding us. As William Faulkner said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

To understand people, indeed to understand today, recognizing the road by which we arrived at this moment is crucial. For some of today’s kids, that road started generations ago.

For example, if a family was denied a home loan due to redlining and racial discrimination in 1970, they never got to take advantage of the financial savings or equity that comes from long-term homeownership or profit from the sale of that home down the road. Although the discriminatory practice occurred 50 years ago, the financial and educational impacts of that discrimination are still felt today.

We have taken steps to remedy many such things moving forward, but effects of the past are still felt today. If you come from a family that had to work so hard, so early that few graduated from high school, there is no tradition or expectations of successful education to draw upon today. Underdevelopment echoes through generations.

Many generationally limiting forces were in full force until recent times. It’s not ancient history.

The Chinese Exclusion Act banned Chinese immigration and legalized certain forms of discrimination against Chinese people living in the U.S., and was still in effect until 1943. Black and brown people still faced government-sanctioned discrimination in the form of Jim Crow laws until 1964. And the United States was still forcibly removing Indigenous children from their families until 1978.

These are living memories whose reverberations are still felt today, not distant memories dating back centuries. The parents and grandparents of some students graduating today were subject to government-sanctioned kidnapping, violence, arrest, discrimination, theft and fraud because of their cultural identity. Their kids still live with the repercussions of those policies.

For many of these students, high school graduation is not simply a celebration of academic achievement, it is a celebration of their family and their community’s survival. It’s a celebration of hope that the future might finally hold greater opportunity than the pain and trauma of the past.

When students ask to include their cultural identity and family history in the graduation celebration, they are asking for recognition of the fact that their individual accomplishments have meaning and importance to a broader community. It’s a simple request that shouldn’t require legislation, but it does require respect.

And frankly there is this: The celebration the kids hope for is one we can all participate in because no matter who you are, the road America has been on, while hilly and full of ruts at times, has always steered in the direction of a better and more just society. Everyone who doesn’t have hate in their hearts can take pride in that.

While we are confident that the Legislature will pass AB73, we hope that school administrators will take the lessons of this bill and apply them in myriad circumstances in which students are asking to express the histories, cultures and values that are important to them.

To understand people, indeed to understand today, recognizing the road by which we arrived at this moment is crucial. For some of today’s kids, that road started generations ago.