*sighs*
Where I live in my small town of about 6,000 people, my daughter's elementary school is about 53% Hispanic/Latino. There are a small hand full of students from various countries in Africa as well. In order to avoid chaos, it appears, without having been spoken, that in order to avoid such chaos, the school district does not have school in lieu of certain holidays, but does not actually name the holiday being commemorated on paper. I don't necessarily agree with the practice, but it does help to eliminate some of the potential backlash. I noticed that they had this last week.
What I have noticed is a good amount of this crap going on amongst the educators themselves. Although large diameter hoop earrings are banned, some staff are only asking white appearing females to remove them, while leaving those who appear to be of other races, wearing these types of earrings, alone entirely, citing to the white students that they are afraid of offending someone's ethnicity. I drew the line when my daughter came home from first grade, frustrated because she couldn't understand anything that they were learning in reading. I decided to get to the bottom of the matter and went to the school. Although I was assured that English was being taught in reading before other languages, when I finally got my hands on the paperwork that they'd been doing, I realized that in two months, she'd only been learning math and Spanish. I was angry. What the school didn't realize, is although my daughter may appear to be white, she in fact, is biracial. Her caregivers and family members that took care of her while I was at work, primarily speak Spanish. My daughter does know a great deal of the language, but simply is not comfortable in speaking it, even though we do encourage her to do so. She says that she is American, but her family comes from Mexico.
Although these high school students MAY have been trying to antoganize, I have to say that it is my opinion that they were no more trying to identify themselves than the population celebrating Cinco de Mayo were trying to identify themselves. When reading more and watching more about this, it was mentioned that many students went to city hall saying that they were disrespected. First, what does city hall have to do with the matter for heaven's sake? Secondly, I have to ask did this happen during school hours? If so, were the students suspended for skipping school? After all, three students were being threatened with suspension for wearing patriotic clothing on a certain day.. violating a rule that the principal had set, if the students were skipping class, are they going to be punished too? As for one video I saw, a student mentioned that Hispanic students don't go to the Fourth of July waving Mexican flags and the like. I truly hope that the school board didn't eat that up. Of course students don't do that... during the summer they are temporarily NOT students. And I've seen Hispanic families and communities celebrate both of these holidays. A small group of boys wears t-shirts because they feel patriotic to their country and left school or were suspended (Im still not clear on which occurred). And we have a large group of students that were being allowed to celebrate their culture, but felt threatened and/or disrespected by a tiny group trying to acknowledge theirs... Throw a tantrum and storm city hall because they feel disrespected. They should have let it be... MANY schools no longer publicly acknowledge any holiday.... they've either stopped having school those days or won't celebrate things such as Halloween, Easter, Valentine's Day, Veteran's Day, Martin Luther King Day, Columbas Day, etc because it offends some people's delicate ethnic or religious sensibilities.
It offends me and mine that my children can't just attend school, learn, and have even a tiny bit of good old fashioned fun along the way because some other parent doesn't want to have to explain to their children that it's against their beliefs not to celebrate this or that and that they don't want their kids to participate in that or feel left out or to be offended.
I could go on for hours...
*sigh*