Posted on 11/24/2008 10:33:48 PM PST by mondoreb
Political Correctness Claims Another Victim:
40-Year-Old Kindergarten Thanksgiving Celebration Killed by Political Correctness Gone Wild
"Racist" children celebrate Thanksgiving by "dehumanizing" American Indians
In yet another case of political correctness run amok, a forty year history of kindergarteners dressed as pilgrims and native Americans celebrating Thanksgiving at school has been quashed in Claremont, California, due to four people who complained the celebration used "racist stereotypes" which were "dehumanizing".
According to the Los Angeles Times, parents of kindergarteners are "furious" over the Claremont School Board's decision to ban the kiddies wearing costumes after one mom, Michelle Raheja, an English professor at UC Riverside who specializes in Native American literature, and a member of the Seneca tribe, complained, along with three other professors and former instructors from Pitzer College, the University of the Redlands, and Riverside Community College.
Raheja claimed that the children dressing up as Indians was "demeaning" and likened it to having them costumed as "Nazis".
(Excerpt) Read more at deathby1000papercuts.com ...
My son was required to take a “diversity” class at college (Temple University in Philly). He perused his choices for fullfilling the “diversity” class requirement and opted for a “diversity” class on Native Americans, figuring it would probably be the easiest one to stomach among the choices offered.
His “professor” was black (naturally - - these mandatory “diversity” classes are designed to provide employment opportunities for people who majored in “African American Studies”) and one of the books REQUIRED for the class was a book written by that famous “Native American”, Ward Churchill.
I kid you not.
“Raheja claimed that the children dressing up as Indians was “demeaning” and likened it to having them costumed as “Nazis”.
So, is Raheja mortified or does she think the children should be. I am displeased that she would interfere with a traditional celebration. I wonder how she would look after an application of pine pitch and feathers, now that would be up close and personal “demeanment”. We seem to have lost the ability to deal with such people.
“Well I see that to be PC complaint we shall have no history, no heros, and therefore no future.
A nation trying to implode - just like Britain. Unbelievable.”
This and more are not by accident. Calling it “political correctness” minimizes just how planned and insidious has been this gradual destruction of the West.
I went to an all Indian school for 2 years and we dressed up as Pilgrims, buckle hats and all. Thanksgiving is a good holiday. I think we all thought that giving thanks to the Creator, whether we had a bounty or very little was important. The details of the past events weren’t so important as the idea of people coming together to give thanks. As children, regardless of what we thought of the past; we liked the story and wanted it to be our future.
It’s time for the families to stick together and dress all the kids in traditional Thanksgiving garb. Let the school expel all the kids for breaking the “dress code.”
It’s time for the families to stick together and dress all the kids in traditional Thanksgiving garb. Let the school expel all the kids for breaking the “dress code.”
Yeah, I know a few of those, too. The fact that we have so many Native folks here, though, kind of dilutes the effect.
I always thought Thanksgiving was about “hope”, too, and I always loved the idea. Isn’t it strange that they (liberals) would elect a President on that premise, but they can’t stand the notion (hope) when it comes to actually putting it into practice?
Thanksgiving is the one holiday that every American family, regardless of religion or lack thereof, celebrates, and it is a uniquely American celebration. I have many acquaintances who are immigrants, and they LOVE the idea of Thanksgiving!
Brought to you by another hate filled sick and twisted unthinking group.
“who specializes in Native American literature”
Sort of like specializing in leprechauns, or perhaps minotaurs.
Fom the website www.senecaindian.com/seneca_tribal.htm:
War and Politics-PJThe Seneca were also great conquerors, highly skilled at warfare, and having been given guns by the Dutch colonists, were fierce adversaries to any other tribe who tried to resist their takeover. One of the distinctive features of the Iroquois warriors' appearance was their hair, which they kept shaved in "Mohawk" fashion, and their heavily tattooed bodies. Iroquois warriors were also believed to have participated in ritual cannibalism, and were also know to torture their prisoners.
Your excellent post should be required reading. Great work!
I am also a genealogist. Part of a common thread that runs down through the generations, alongside inherited hair color, eye color, body structure and such, is temperament and talents.
Back to the Plymouth Pilgrims, for example: to this day, ancestors of Bradford and Brewster (Brewster was Cambridge educated - the meeting/dining hall he would have attended is the very same used in the Harry Potter series. I get a kick out of that.)
Anyway, Brewster was also a writer and a publisher. He operated a clandestine printing house during the 12 years the Pilgrims spent in Holland previous to embarking upon their historic venture. He published tracts against the Crown, including the (in)famous “Perth Assembly”. The Crown wanted his head, preferably on a stake. They set Pinkerton detectives on his trail. (Brewster made his living teaching English at Leyden University.)
They would go to Holland and be skulking around to find him and his presses while Brewster would actually be secretly back in England. Then the Pinkerton's and Brewster would switch locations again. They were getting too close and had captured one of his associates. That was one of the catalysts, along with realizing that their children were growing up to more Hollanders than English, that kicked the Pilgrim's resolve to find a land where they could be out from under the watchful eyes of the crown - and not be arrested for owning/reading a Bible and taking their religious practices from it instead of the Church of England.
The Brewsters had taken in the young William Bradford while still in England after he was ostracized by his family for consorting with the Separatists at Scrooby Manor - home of the Brewsters. It was under Brewster's tutelage that Bradford became educated.
Back to inherited genes that go beyond the physical. Down through the Bradford/Brewster generations, one finds writers, publishers and artists at a prominent rate. (Even in the present generation, my cousin spent his life as a writer, editor (taking the gov’t to task) and has several books published. One of my sons has published work and I have made my living as an investigative reporter (taking on the powers that be,) once had my own little publication and retired, keeping my hand in only with an occasional free lance feature and my column, which I just ‘retired’ from after a 20+ year run - with a cherry on top, winning first place again for my column in the state's Press Association.
Conversely, in seeing the generations of another family from the Mayflower - the Billington’s, one of the ‘strangers’ families, not one of the ‘saints’ - the ‘bad seed’ genes are still manifesting themselves in today.
The Billington’s were trouble from the get go. They signed on as indentured servants in England. Their kid almost blew the Mayflower up in the middle of the ocean - playing with fire next to powder kegs. Once on land, he created a mess when he wandered off into the woods, necessitating a search party to be sent out for days - at a time when every hand was needed to ensure survival against the winter in a land with no Holiday Inn down the road.
In later years - not to many - the father earned the dubious distinction of becoming the first criminal hung in the Colony - for murder.
Their descendants today often come up on the wrong side of the law.
And so it goes. Today, think about the families such people as jimmah C., Bubba and the little messiah come from?
I don’t understand how the school let a couple people ruin the event for everyone else. From my understanding, no one is required to go to the celebration dinner. This woman could easily keep her child home if she objects. Growing up, I remember some parents keeping children home from Halloween parties if they didn’t want their children celebrating. It’s pretty simple.
I saw something rather encouraging not long ago at a school. I was working in a kindergarten class, and the kids watched a cartoon movie about Thanksgiving. The pilgrims talked about God quite a bit, and even gave thanks to Him in prayer.
“I saw something rather encouraging not long ago at a school. I was working in a kindergarten class, and the kids watched a cartoon movie about Thanksgiving.”
Good Lord, kids sitting around in school watching cartoons (before they go home and spend the rest of the day watching more cartoons and assorted crap on TV) is *encouraging* to teachers these days? No wonder things are going downhill at an ever faster pace. Hey, how about having them learn to read and write and all that “old” stuff?
I agree kids shouldn’t generally watch movies at school. The teacher showed this movie during an indoor recess when it was too cold to go outside.
As for antecedents, Jimmy Carter's family (if you can believe PBS) were foursquare and conservative by today's standards, whereas Bill Clinton came from -- sorry, but I think the word fits -- a low woman, and it shows. I think he grew up in the back rooms of a Hot Springs cat house, rushing beers for the madame and getting paid in sex. I don't think he's ever been "the man from Hope", I think he's always been "the man from the Warm Springs Motel". His own criminality in office in Arkansas and D.C. will have been enough -- if he does nothing else -- to poison the next seven generations of his issue.
The Bushes aren't the Yankees they hold themselves out to be. Well, maybe Barbara is (I think she's a snob, which is why Nancy wouldn't invite the Bushes up to the family quarters while the Reagans lived there: because Nancy knew Babs would never, ever have returned the favor), but Prescott Bush was a shoe salesman from Ohio who went East to find his fortune by chatting up the fellows at Yale. Worked out well for him: he found himself a U.S. Senator, eventually. As for Poppy, he was Pressy's boy all right: Mr. Serviceability fit almost exactly the damning line Shakespeare wrote about Lepidus (actually Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, scion of a house nearly as proud as the Julians') in his play Julius Caesar: "He is a slight man, meet to be sent on errands."
Journalist Murray Kempton, I think it was, developed a relationship with Richard Nixon after Nixon's fall and retirement rather like Camille Paglia's with Rush Limbaugh: mismatched and occasional, but cordial and frank. Gore Vidal, in his most recent book, says that Kempton once told him about a luncheon at which Kempton had asked Nixon his opinion of Poppy Bush. Nixon replied that Bush was one of "those people" who have no particular virtue or competence and are generally useless, but they're so well-connected as to be almost inevitable, so that the best way to deal with them is to appoint them to something just to get them out from underfoot. And that is what Nixon did with Bush Pere -- Bush was Chairman of the RNC during the Watergate scandal and was summoned as such to testify to the Watergate Committee by Sam Ervin. Like his younger clone, Robert Odle (the first witness), Bush was an early witness called to help lay out the wiring diagram of the RNC and who knew or reported to whom, and where were you and what did you know on the night in question? That sort of thing.
So even though George H.W. Bush attended Andover and Yale and did all the Yankee-legacy things, he was nevertheless the son of an affinity-group-mining Buckeye shoe salesman who learned how to qualify his customers and serve them well.
Minor point here: Ohio was the hotbed of the old Whig Party, whose national totem was always "development" and big infrastructural projects and -- as it handed its leadership off to the Republican Party -- the railroad land grants and the homesteading scheme. So the "big government conservatives" of the 1840's eventually became the Rockefeller-Bush-Dole wing of the GOP, which explains David Stockman's "pigs at the trough" comment to William Greider of The Atlantic Monthly in 1982 or 1982 and the drunken-sailor spending of 43's administration. These people are absolutely not Reaganauts or Goldwaterites or anything remotely approaching conservative.
Dubya is another story entirely, and it would be interesting to see a book by someone who neither owes him nor hates him. I saw Stone's film, and it was like gazing at reality through a baguette-cut ruby: distorted, and deeply pink. Dubya has a lot of Texas in him, but he was Yale-educated for the worse and I think it shows, not least in the foisting off on him of so many of his daddy's chamberlains like Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, and Condi Rice. Heck, it's almost impossible to name a 43 functionary who didn't have a job in 41's administration someplace, even Robert Gates, an old family servant from way back who brought Yankeefied cultural imperialism to the unfortunate students of Texas A&M, the "improvement" (i.e. denaturing) of whose campus Poppy settled on as a retirement project. A&M now has its second Bushy president in a row; the new one, replacing Gates, is a Cubana whose brief (from Poppy himself, I'm sure) is the "cultural broadening" and "diversification" of the A&M campus. Which I think may be code for sending those poor, white Scots-Irish kids back up into their piney woods to learn air-conditioning repair and the arts of deference to their social betters instead of going to college, and reserving their slots for minorities instead, esp. Hispanics (i.e. Mexican irredentists).
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