I have previously written about the increasing monitoring and discipline of teachers for conduct in their private lives. In San Diego, three high school coaches and a volunteer teacher were suspended for wearing costumes with black face at a Halloween party. They were not doing a minstrel show but were going as the Jamaican bobsled team featured in “Cool Runnings.” The party was at the San Diego State University.
The punished individuals include the varsity head football coach, an assistant coach and a teacher at Serra High School will be suspended. Notably, a volunteer will also be suspended.
People can debate whether wearing makeup to look like a Jamaican bobsled time is racist. My concern is purely one of free of expression and association for teachers. This was not a criminal act. They were not participating in a KKK cross burning. They clearly do not believe that wearing black makeup is racist or wrong. They have a right to make such decisions in their private lives. Nevertheless, both the NAACP and the Anti-Defamation League supported action to be taken against the teachers and coach.
I certainly understand why many find black face to be offensive and I am surprised that people continue to use it in costumes. However, free speech and association protects different values and expressions. Citizens are not required to satisfy majoritarian views on proper humor or, as the English call it, “fancy dress.”
Superintendent Cindy Marten took the group out for a public lashing, stating that “[t]hey send their apologies to any person or group of people they have offended and want to make it clear it was not their intention to offend anyone.” She called it a “critical teachable moment” but what does it teach about free speech and privacy for public teachers?
Lei-Chala Wilson, President of the NAACP’s San Diego Branch, praised the discipline and added “We found nothing funny when we saw that picture was posted.” The concern is that public teachers should not have to satisfy others in their private lives as to whether the public finds their jokes funny or their associations acceptable. I was struck how it was simply assumed that such private conduct off-hours are naturally the subject of public discipline and accountability.
What do you think?
Those costumes are in such bad taste all of ’em should be denied any candy, but busting them on the job is plain dumb.
Mike,
If I wore a Ronald Reagan mask for Halloween, do you suppose people would interpret that as me offering a tribute to him? If that is the case, maybe I better change my plans for next year.
Laws are not “a fallback,” they are the cornerstone of any civilized society.
Po, Good manners boundary awareness and empathy make for a pretty good society, laws are pretty much a group fallback for people the that don’t get that. If it is a choice between the First Amendment and good manners, I have to go with the First Amendment but I’m all for manners and empathy. I’ve enjoyed your contribution to this thread and look forward to reading your postings in the future.
What makes the country great is our Constitution, not people feeling they are entitled to not be offended. No one has ANY right not to be offended. On the cultural side, what has made this country great are people overcoming stereotypes. Paternalism is not what made this country great. I was called names as a kid. My adopted son was called “spic.” We both are stronger for dealing w/ it. What about the non protected groups? Fat people come to mind. It’s always open season on them . No PC police protecting them. PC is simply wrong on many levels. It doesn’t unite us, it divides us. Oh, and don’t ever go to any comedy clubs. I’ve see PCer’s walk out in righteous indignation. That’s always good for a laugh.
Randy, I am disappointed that that you did not finess your “Sure glad you were NOT my union rep”. It was uncalled for. Shooting from the hip is uncool.
I think we could both agree, having our work history intersect at a narrowly defined activity, that specific requirements, liabilities and protections for both employees and union reps are dictated by a number of things as you explained regarding the various Energy companies, their safety requirements and union protections. We had a good union and a contract that was used as a model by many other locals. We had protections built in for employees and union reps that other locals were amazed at. It was a thing of pride for us.
We were not the best though and other locals had favorable concessions that we could but envy. The governing rules and regs were different too in many circumstances. The same behavior could/would be treated quite differently based on the agency and the contract. Safety was always an asterisk or a separate paragraph: ‘Such and such will be treated this way * if the matter is based on an allegation regarding a safety violation then something else happens’. It sounds like you were a**-deep in a serious safety issue.
Obviously, there are peculiarities to your situation, my situations and the coaches situation. We would have to see all the paperwork and perform our due diligence before we could make an informed statement on the employer’s legal ability to do what they did. [No, the law and ‘legal’ is not justice, sometimes it’s not even close. I’m not even arguing that point, others have covered it well.] Even then we would be coming from knowledge from different sectors. We might not agree even then due to our own knowledge gaps. That’s why they’re call specialties.
***
The pigs in the pipeline:
Yes, I recall reading and also hearing in a news report that the spill that just recently occurred this year in an Arkansas subdivision(!) had a smart pig test not too long before the leak but the results were not made public, that was a pipeline that had known problems. I’d like to see those results.
rj: “they stopped running pigs through the pipe, and have experienced a lot of leaks and dangerous situations.”
Considering the laughable penalties for oil companies when things go wrong, even when workers die, it’s easier to fix a problem than monitor and keep one from happening. Bah humbug.
“The Pig in the XL Pipeline
Insider reveals concealed “error” in pipeline safety equipment that could blow away the GOP’s XL pipe dream”
http://www.gregpalast.com/the-pig-in-the-xl-pipelineinsider-reveals-concealed-%E2%80%9Cerror%E2%80%9Din-pipeline-safety-equipment-that-could-blow-away-the-gop%E2%80%99s-xl-pipe-dream/
Lost another posting, could it be dug out of the filter?
randyjet: “Lotta, I said a lot of nasty things about the oil companies in public and in some cases on TV. So according to your ideas I should have been fired many times over. I made sure that I did not ID myself with ARCO, but I did have my union jacket on.”
*
Randy, If you were wearing your union jacket and speaking as a union official then you had a whole body of law that protected you WHILE YOU WERE WEARING YOUR UNION HAT, or it could be inferred that you were speaking as a union official. Was that the case?
Were you speaking as a union official? I was trained to never speak to management in a conversational manner because it would always be assumed that I was speaking as a union representative and could be held to whatever was said as a matter of policy. That was black letter law and I read decisions on exactly that issue. It could work for you or against your organization, and guess what? The law gave the employer a pass, it always worked against the union. Whoda’ thunk?.
BTW, I would never be so presumptuous as to indicate you could not do a job in your specialty based on an Interweb posting that is by the nature of the medium, abbreviated. If I’m talking about A and you have a different situation with different rules, B, you can’t conflate the two entirely different situations and say ‘Ah-Ha, you must be incompetent because you don’t see A is the same as B. That’s not honorable. It’s not the same and I well know the difference, it saved my butt repeatedly.
I said some serious stuff about my employer publicly, said it in person, said it on TV, said it in print. And I’d have been fired or seriously disciplined if I had not been wearing my union hat.
or it could be inferred that you were speaking as a union official. Was that the case?
Lotta at the time I was not an official, but I was elected later. I guess being sued by the company along with some others gave me some credibility. I was just a rank and filer at the time. In fairness to ARCO, I do have to admit while I had some problems with them, they were the best of a bad bunch. We got a contract which allowed a chief operator of a unit to shut it down for safety reasons. It took a five month strike at Shell to get the same thing. At AMACO, later BP, the union was weak there, and they did not have that provision. It cost the lives of 15 people when a blowdown drum for hydrocarbons was allowed to be vented to the atmosphere instead of a firing line. At ARCO, I would have not let that unit come back up unless that had been corrected. BP when it was privatized changed its operations completely with the results we all got to see in the Gulf. When ARCO ran the Alaskan pipeline, it had very few problems. When the privatized BP took over, they stopped running pigs through the pipe, and have experienced a lot of leaks and dangerous situations.
“Getting personal! Breathe.” ??
MS I hope that you rent a copy of the movie Cool Runnings. I think that you will really enjoy it since it is inspirational and funny too.
Randyjet,
I saw “Cool Runnings” when it came out and rooted for the team through the olympics.
nick spinelli:
“Getting personal! Breathe.”
What? High dudgeon is a state to be savored, not suppressed!
Comedians are actually our strongest defense against PC. They DESPISE IT.
randyjet,
This goes back to the proposition that only comedians who are members of a group get to make jokes using stereotypes about that group. One may agree or not.
“randyjet,
This goes back to the proposition that only comedians who are members of a group get to make jokes using stereotypes about that group. One may agree or not.”
No actually Robin Williams make a plethora of jokes about Jews that are appropriate. Some Jewish comedians promote bias with their comedy and are expressing self abnegation. Context is all..
Brooks is a Jew, he has a right to mock Jews. Didn’t you get the PC memo. It’s about 87 pages, and growing.
Brooks has a brilliant comedic and incitement mind that satirizes the world around him. People like Myron Cohen for instance were the equivalent of blacks dressing up for minstrel shows.
Getting personal! Breathe.
“Getting personal! Breathe”
Just being hones in a civil manner. Getting personal is bringing your wife and child into this to campaign for a sympathy vote, rather then actually attempting to discus the subject in a civilized fashion.
I entirely agree, Gene H.
Admiration and bad social judgement are not mutually exclusive.
Just sayin’.
Most of us here would have used the N word as stand in for the N word, but you, Randy, as sensitive as you are, choose to go with the full word, caring little about how uncomfortable you may make others.
Po glad to see that you are joining those who would destroy our literature. I guess you think that Huck Finn should be printed with N Jim instead of the real name. Then we can rewrite Conrads book as N—— of the Narcisus. At least Mark Twain would have gotten an ironic laugh out of your idiocy.
Randy
Please stop claiming Mark Twain, he is not on your side, has never been. No one ever read his work and took from it any ounce of the vitriol that you and your ilk offer to our society.
And why would I ever want to ban his book because of the N word? Where have i said such? I said that everyone has the right to be as idiotic as they choose to be , and that the offended do also have the right to be offended.
As others have brought up, Mike S specifically, and The Janitor too, I think, you cannot offend then take away the right to react.
As Lotta said, books are to some as churches are to the religious, and I agree wholeheartedly with the points in that post. No one is burning any books, not over the N world and not over any other words, and no one is suggesting anything of the sort. So please, get off that upside rocket to truthiness.
My point, which you keep missing, is that most of us would go out of our way to not offend people. That is why most of us would not use the N word because it offends some people, rightfully. Nor would we use the B word, the F word, the K word, the W word, not because we enjoy playing the PC game, but because all of those words were once, and ongoing, used to characterize a group of people in a very negative manner, and those people, because they were mistreated by various means, including the use of those epithets, are sensitive to its use by people who reveal by using them, that they lack sensitivity and civility, and perhaps harbor ill feelings toward them.
Interestingly, when you argue so vehemently against civility and cultural sensitivity, you are arguing against everything that makes this nation great.
There, one remedial politeness for Randy, one.
I don’t have any problem with using the word nigger in a proper context, which would be expanatory one. The Mark Twain banning due to Huck Finn is a nonsensical joke. I am against and always have been of banning or expurgating any book on first amendment grounds, even “Mein Kampf”
I can’t read minds, but I would conditionally agree with randyjet that it is entirely possible that the costume was at least in part the product of admiration. Perhaps it was also the product of bad social judgment, but I think it is a little hasty to assume nothing but evil intentions.
“Perhaps it was also the product of bad social judgment, but I think it is a little hasty to assume nothing but evil intentions.”
Porchop to believe that I would have to distrust the history of this country which has been a rigged game of prejudice towards people of color since its founding.
Feeling a little touchy, Mike?
Considering that you have referred to them _TWICE_ in this thread as the Jamaican _SKI_ team, I think it was legitimate to ask whether you actually knew anything about them.
Maybe _YOU_ should go back and read what you said.
“Feeling a little touchy, Mike?
Considering that you have referred to them _TWICE_ in this thread as the Jamaican _SKI_ team, I think it was legitimate to ask whether you actually knew anything about them.”
Porkchop,
You’re correct I misnamed them but the us old farts often have trick of that memory type played on us by our wayward synapses. Now as to touch I plead guilty. Bigotry, even uninformed bigotry makes me angry, especially because I;m familiar with the terrible effects it has on people lives. To use stupid talking points like “race card” used by some is not a defense of the first amendment, it is an attempt to justify what is not morally justifiable.
Mike S By dressing as the bob sled team, they were paying tribute to their accomplishment and in NO way sought to be disrespectful in any way. In fact, most people who saw the movie loved it and their accomplishment. Now if they had done blackface as Jolson did,THEN I would agree with you.
“Mike S By dressing as the bob sled team, they were paying tribute to their accomplishment and in NO way sought to be disrespectful in any way. In fact,”
Randyjet,
What I saw on that video was not a respectful tribute by any means. You can’t have it both ways by saying it was merely a Halloween costume, to it was a tribute. People don’t wear Halloween costumes as respectful tributes.