Two HS students suspended for Confederate Flags

http://www.kirotv.com/videos/news/video-students-suspended-for-carrying-confederate/vCFYyz/

Interesting story from the high school I graduated from a couple years ago. Two students were suspended for wearing Confederate flags to school, in response to a student wearing a gay pride flag a few days prior. Fair or foul on the suspension?

T'was allowed at my school.................But I live in Alabamer.....................

Good. The Confederate flag is a symbol of treason, slavery and ignorance and has no more place in a school than a Swastika.

Stupid. Let kids wear what they want, within reason. Nothing wrong with wearing a confederate flag.

I can't stand people who wear anything with the Confederate flag on it, it's even more ignorant and annoying when you see this kind of crap in northern states.

England said the same about this one.

Yeah, I never understood why those kids wore Confederate stuff up here in Washington. Used to happen when I went to that school too.

I'm assuming you live in the south or the Midwest? or possibly upstate Pennsylvania?

As much I don't like it, I wouldn't suspend someone for practicing their freedom of expression. It's also a form of freedom of speech by the way they handled things.

Saying it causes a disruption is bull. Gay pride could cause a disruption for those are against it too. I'm not against gay pride btw, but I think everyone should be allowed to have some say in anything, whether it sounds ignorant or not.

I guess you forgot that America committed treason against the crown. Guess you also don't recall Martin Luther King's struggle to encourage white people to make what they said on paper true (the US constitution)?

Also, did you forget slavery, segregation, and the apartheid type government all of which were perfectly fine under the current 50 star flag?

Hell, with that logic Hitler wasn't half bad at least Hitler allowed the Jews to leave Germany. Last time I checked blacks got hanged/beat/murdered trying to rebel against anti-white supremacy prior to the late 1970s in the United States.

The rebel flag is a symbol of southern culture, and American history - not hate.

@DJ419 said:

@Makhaidos said:

Good. The Confederate flag is a symbol of treason, slavery and ignorance and has no more place in a school than a Swastika.

England said the same about this one.

Primary difference being: that flag represents freedom from religious idiocy. People who wear the Confederate flag would have us all praying for Jaysus to protect our guns from evil brown people.

Hell, the students wore the Confederate flag in the first place because they were pissed about gays getting uppity.

@Makhaidos said:

@DJ419 said:

@Makhaidos said:

Good. The Confederate flag is a symbol of treason, slavery and ignorance and has no more place in a school than a Swastika.

England said the same about this one.

Primary difference being: that flag represents freedom from religious idiocy. People who wear the Confederate flag would have us all praying for Jaysus to protect our guns from evil brown people.

Hell, the students wore the Confederate flag in the first place because they were pissed about gays getting uppity.

Brush up on your history, the southern states broke away because they believed that each state should be its own entity.

Unless you're white man that flag didn't represent freedom from religious idiocy.

@Makhaidos said:

@DJ419 said:

@Makhaidos said:

Good. The Confederate flag is a symbol of treason, slavery and ignorance and has no more place in a school than a Swastika.

England said the same about this one.

Primary difference being: that flag represents freedom from religious idiocy. People who wear the Confederate flag would have us all praying for Jaysus to protect our guns from evil brown people.

Hell, the students wore the Confederate flag in the first place because they were pissed about gays getting uppity.

Sucks for them but I understand. The Confederate flag and people who don it openly are fvcking creepy.

@monkeytoes61 said:

@Makhaidos said:

@DJ419 said:

@Makhaidos said:

Good. The Confederate flag is a symbol of treason, slavery and ignorance and has no more place in a school than a Swastika.

England said the same about this one.

Primary difference being: that flag represents freedom from religious idiocy. People who wear the Confederate flag would have us all praying for Jaysus to protect our guns from evil brown people.

Hell, the students wore the Confederate flag in the first place because they were pissed about gays getting uppity.

Brush up on your history, the southern states broke away because they believed that each state should be its own entity.

Brush up on your critical thinking: the reason they argued each state should be its own entity was because the federal government was proposing emancipation. They wanted to keep slavery legal, and the only way to do that was to make each state able to make its own laws regarding slavery.

You can't possibly argue that the Confederacy wasn't about slavery when that was their biggest talking point. Their biggest leaders appealed to the Bible and declared owning slaves a right because that's how society had always been (and because it was blessed by God).

Wow looks like people don't really know their history. The Civil war was over much more than slavery, in fact it was an extremely small part. The confederate flag does not represent crap like that, it represents southern culture. You do realize that there was plenty of slavery under the american flag also, in fact if it wasn't for the civil war, I don't think slavery would have been banished any where near the time it was. Most of the north wasn't against slavery either.

I swear people must not care about actual true history anymore.

@Makhaidos:

Your generalizations are far more offensive than why these kids may be wearing a confederate flag. Yet, I would never attempt to censor them in the way you seem to be advocating censoring people's choices in the way they voice their opinions. Especially in a public school of all places.

To be honest the Civil War probably had little to do with slavery. Most southerners were uneducated white men, which couldn't afford slaves. My theory is "white trash" didn't want to be on the same social and economical level as blacks.

A poor white man was still white, thus superior to a black. A black man who's educated would than be superior to the uneducated white man, thus superior to a white man.

No white man wants a black superior to him given that time period.

I dislike people who wear that kind of stuff, and the school has the right to enforce whatever dress code they see fit; but suspension is a bit harsh, they could have just told them to take it off.

but it's a bit odd that they suspended the confederate flag wearers for disrupting school and violating the dress code, while they allowed gay pride flags, which are just as disrupting and also violate the dress code.

"Southern culture" at the time of the Confederacy can be summed up in a single word: plantations. Extremely rich families owned successful plantations in Southern territories, and they were successful because they had cheap (or free) slave labor for picking cotton. The abolishment of slavery threatened this success, so the rich families lobbied (hint: bought) the local governments into starting a rebellion.

A good chunk of the North did own slaves too, and some of the Northern states joined the Confederacy (just as a couple of Southern states joined the Union). However, the Northern territories were the first to begin freeing slaves, and it was freed (or escaped) slaves that joined the Union, not the Confederacy.

Used to wear a confederate flag shirt in High School up in New York. No one cared

A gay pride flag is just as disrupting as a racist, treasonous symbol worn primarily by violent skinheads as a symbol of past (and sometimes future) rebellion on the basis of religious tyranny?

Don't use the word "free" as it's somewhat misleading. Blacks didn't get their rights until about the late 1960s to late 1970s (varies based on state).

Some did have some level of freedom; none were treated on the same level as whites, of course, but they were not slaves and were able to own property (hell, some of them had slaves of their own; "Uncle Toms," they were called).

As for the ones whining that I don't know about the Confederacy, and Southern culture, and history, and wah wah wah. . .I was born and raised and still currently live in the Bible Belt, in a Confederate state, and I have "Confederate Veteran" members within my own family (all of whom are some of the most racist human beings I've ever known); every other truck in my area has a Confederate flag (usually accompanied with an anti-Obama sticker), and there are Confederate sympathizers in the school I attend. Museums in my city have a Confederate bent (I've seen one refer to the Civil War as "the War of Northern Oppression") and I've seen actual Confederate rallies (unlike most people here).

So yeah, I know a thing or two about the Confederate flag and what it represents. It's a disgusting symbol and a stain on our history.

Good, it's a symbol of hate and prejudice and has no place in schools. You can practice your FA rights all you want after school, when you're in school you have to deal with other people and learn to be respectful of them. Without even getting into the whole "but it was teh states rights" revisionist argument, these students specifically wore the shirts in order to disrespect homosexuals, there's no place for that in schools.

When there's a 99.9% chance if you walk across the street into a "white only zone" you'll get a Rodney King beat down - I wouldn't call that freedom.

An Uncle Tom is usually a black man who has a pro-white supremacy agenda to better himself.

A white man who owns a slave who encourages his slave master's white supremacy ideology becomes an Uncle Tom, and in the eyes of the slave owner the Uncle Tom is an "exception to the rule", and not a black-black (on a different social playing-field than a non-uncle tom).

It's like "pet owner syndrome" ( Just made that up) - people love their pets more than they love a wild animal. Hell, some consider pets part of the family, but it's still an animal, which is an example of "uncle tom".

At my school you couldn't wear anything with an American flag,so this isnt a big deal

Okay then. Whenever I say "freedom," replace that with "emancipation." My point still stands.

@Makhaidos: Aside from the fact that I find their entire argument to be a really poor justification of Confederate actions and a rather disgusting attempt to downplay the suffering of American blacks before emancipation, I think this entire argument is distracting us from the main point that everyone should take away from this article, specifically that they were wearing these shirts in order to harass homosexuals. Yeah, let's not focus on the fact that these kids are harassing an already embattled minority that suffers from a high rate of suicide due in part to bullying, no let's focus on some ridiculous argument about whether or not states' rights or slavery was the main issue in the Civil War, because that's what's REALLY important.

It's a complicated issue. On one hand, it is definitely an offensive symbol to many people. On the other hand, the meaning to those who wear can vary from harmless to straight up racist. Truth be told, I don't really give a shit either way.

Everything that was said in this post is true.

Definitely expected to see this from a school in eastern or central Washington, not on the west side.

Otherwise I would say using anything as a prop to discriminate or hate against a group of people is dumb and those kids got what was coming. If they were so worried about a student's gay pride flag, they should have spoken to the student in a civilized manner about it.

It's freedom of speech. It disturbs me that people don't like the display of a Confederate flag, but have no problem with illegal immigrants' display of their home nation's flag.

Yeah, it's strange. There was a weird culture of "hicks" when I went to the school in question. There are some rural surrounding areas that send students to the school, but it's not that rural. We're still only twenty minutes from Seattle.

Same here, though for me it was Florida.

Honestly, no one really seemed to have a problem with it.

I'm not saying that there weren't some people who used it as a racist symbol, but for the most part it was treated as a "southern pride" thing.

Surprised they have the "courage" to do that even if it's still a small subgroup of people. I would think that takes either a large schism in home education compared to others at the school, or people just acting like dumb high schoolers (so who knows what's wrong). Honestly I only knew of Mount Tahoma high school, I actually had to look up Tahoma high school to find out where it was, and was really surprised it wasn't farther east. Probably should know my Washington Geography better.

Well, actually, that's entirely possible. One could easily argue that gay pride flags are more controversial and more socially relevant in today's social climate. Gays don't have their rights, intolerance against gays is largely tolerated. Whether or not it's totally ass-backwards that gays are still so stigmatized, the fact that this is such a hot issue means that it technically does have a very high likelihood of being disruptive.

By contrast, the confederate flag is irrelevant. Regardless of what it represents (racial bigotry or southern pride), they lost. There's no battle of ideologies or values here, just the losers trying to cling to the past. No battle equals no threat, which means there's little reason to get invested.

They only wore them as a spiteful anti-gay message, of course they should be suspended.

Pennsylvania wasn't confederate dude....

@Makhaidos said:

@monkeytoes61 said:

@Makhaidos said:

@DJ419 said:

@Makhaidos said:

Good. The Confederate flag is a symbol of treason, slavery and ignorance and has no more place in a school than a Swastika.

England said the same about this one.

Primary difference being: that flag represents freedom from religious idiocy. People who wear the Confederate flag would have us all praying for Jaysus to protect our guns from evil brown people.

Hell, the students wore the Confederate flag in the first place because they were pissed about gays getting uppity.

Brush up on your history, the southern states broke away because they believed that each state should be its own entity.

Brush up on your critical thinking: the reason they argued each state should be its own entity was because the federal government was proposing emancipation. They wanted to keep slavery legal, and the only way to do that was to make each state able to make its own laws regarding slavery.

You can't possibly argue that the Confederacy wasn't about slavery when that was their biggest talking point. Their biggest leaders appealed to the Bible and declared owning slaves a right because that's how society had always been (and because it was blessed by God).

There were a lot of things that the South didn't like....not just the one issue. Since we're talking history and all....let's be accurate.

Don't know why the south has a hard-on for celebrating all the times they had their asses handed to them. The confederacy, alamo, republic of texas, etc.

How exactly does the confederate flag have anything to do with messages about homosexuality?

Seriously. >.>

Another student had a rainbow flag and these students wore the confederate flag as a direct statement against it. Personally, I don't really see a problem with the flag itself, but they wore it for a specific reason.

It's a symbol of discrimination and they were clearly using it as a form of homophobic abuse.

Of course they should be punished

Cofederate flags are idiotic. But I don't think they should've been suspended.