We Apologize for Providing Your Refuge

A small town in Iowa has forced its high school students to apologize for wearing red, white, and blue attire to a sporting event. "The Valley High School students' USA-themed attire was seen as offensive because some of the rival school's players were from refugee families."

Oh, well, instead let's wear colors to celebrate whatever place was so hellish that you fled halfway around the world to get here.

8 comments:

raven said...

There is nothing someone can do, that cannot be construed as offensive by someone.

Wasn't it Cardinal Richelieu that said "give me one sentence written by a man, and I will find something in it to hang him?"? Same principle in play here.

This victim culture the left is fertilizing is absolutely sickening. Makes me want to give them something to feel victimized about

Assistant Village Idiot said...

My two sons from Romania get incensed when they hear about these stories.

E Hines said...

A minor note: Valley High is in West Des Moines, a suburb of Des Moines. It's not a small town, and the Des Moines Metropolitan Area is not small, either. Although, this attitude from the home of the Des Moines Register isn't surprising. Nor is the attitude of the Precious Ones of Des Moines North High, in Des Moines proper, surprising.

To the point of the post: it's the administration members of West Des Moines' Valley High who are behaving in a despicably offensive manner. Calling our national colors racist is itself stinkingly racist; Valley High's management (not leadership) should have pushed back against the slurs from North.

Valley's management should apologize to its students and parents and to our great nation at large, and then they should be terminated for cause.

Full stop.

Eric Hines

Grim said...

OK, corrected.

jaed said...

Were any actual refugees complaining?

I recall one of those incidents in Britain where someone was doing something completely inoffensive and suddenly panicked and announced that they would stop doing whatever it was immediately, because it was offensive to Muslims. The newspaper I was reading this in had found a local spokes-Muslim who said whatever the thing was, wasn't offensive at all to Muslims, and expressed puzzlement about the whole thing.

Thus do horrible and stupid officials act to inflame racial tensions and stoke resentment. "Let's you and him fight!"

Assistant Village Idiot said...

Piggybacking on jaed's comment. We have had several "brown bag" lunch lectures or discussions at the Department of Health and Human Services over the years, as I think has happened in many places. Some person took it upon themselves to group email everyone in the department that the name should be changed because it was offensive to black people. His reasoning was that there were exclusive African-American clubs that admitted people only if they were lighter than a paper back, so the topic was sensitive among AA's.

Did I mention this is New Hampshire? We have very few black people here and maybe a third are from Africa. The rest are a pretty thick-skinned lot who don't get easily offended. Lots of ex-military.

It's pretty clear what happened. Some white person learned about the old clubs and wanted to show off his or her knowledge. Reasoning that because it was theoretically possible that the mere mention of brown bags could have become insulting in African-American culture, they concluded that this must be the case.

Which is kind of insulting, when you think of it.

jaed said...

If you think about it, AVI, this is a disadvantage of the Internet, and of greater dissemination of knowledge generally. Back in the day, it was much less likely that your colleague would have ever heard of the brown bag rule, and thus be able to make mischief with it.

(I do give whoever it was a few points for realizing that the rule was one imposed by black people against other black people. I've heard many indignant references to it that assume it was created by white people. This is what "only white people can be racist" gets you.)

Texan99 said...

I'm just shaking my head. "We apologize for being the country you sought refuge in. Who do we think we are?"