We should not be surprised
The teacher in Bexley who recently resigned after a racist incident occurred during a task he was assigned to supervise isn’t why the incident happened and getting rid of him won’t stop incidents like it from happening again.
So, what’s the point?
I’m so tired of the schools having to bear responsibility for students behaving in deplorable ways that they most certainly didn’t learn at school.
Too many people are too cowardly to acknowledge the real problem which is the conservatives in their neighborhoods and families who think diversity is genocide and equality is oppression.
We have them to thank for the persistence of malignant racism into the 21st century, which we had a chance to eradicate from acceptable society before soulless wealthy Republicans invented “the southern strategy” in order to bring racist southern white democrats into an unholy alliance of racial and economic oppression.
Bexley’s Republican parents pat themselves on the back because they don’t burn crosses in yards and really for them it’s just about tax cuts and the national debt.
But you can bet they never explain to their kids who actually gets harmed when they vote for people who stand in the way of universal pre-k, smear immigrants, and promote the laughable if not so dangerous notion of “replacement theory.”
This is the toxic undercurrent of the entire modern Republican party’s agenda of white grievance and hate married to evangelical Christian moral superiority.
Can we be surprised when the kids of these parents express the basic underlying ideas that inform their parents politics and worldview, that they’re just “better” than all those people who are poor not because the system is rigged against them but because they’re lazy and shiftless?
Kids are very adept at observing their parents and what their parents say, do and listen to. They aren’t sophisticated enough to hide their learned racism in the way their parents have.
But we as adults need to handle situations like this not by reacting to each and every “incident” as if it is an isolated matter of a few bad apples.
We need to be far more willing to acknowledge the reality of what conservatives do, attack the problem of systemic racism at its political power center, and treat the voters who enable them with the disdain they deserve.
Robinson Dunham, Bexley
Young athletes shouldn’t emulate Jim Brown
The NFL recently announced that the player who leads the league in rushing will receive a trophy named in Jim Brown’s honor.
No one doubts Jim Brown’s athletic abilities and he deserves to be in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
However, success on a football field (no matter how great) should not automatically equate to praise off of it. No one exemplifies this more than Jim Brown, a man who has been accused of and investigated for beating or raping women at least six times over a period of time spanning from 1965 through 1999.
Given this background, the NFL should not be associating with Jim Brown in any capacity, let alone anointing him as a hero deserving of a yearly trophy named in his honor.
For an image conscious league that regularly suspends players for nonviolent drug use, naming an award after Jim Brown is hypocritical at best.
Continue to praise Jim Brown for his athletic talents and keep him in the Hall of Fame, but he is not someone young athletes in this country should grow up emulating.
The NFL should rename the award and apologize for such a tone-deaf decision.
Justin Thompson, Columbus