It’s an Idiocracy world, and we’re just living in it.
Students at Jones College Prep in downtown Chicago conducted a sit-in on Monday after their Principal Joseph Powers was fired by the Chicago Public Schools. They were protesting Mr. Powers’ response to a student wearing a Halloween costume to school that the ignorant children mistook for a Nazi uniform but was, as Mr. Powers vainly tried to explain to the kids, a uniform worn by an East German border guard, probably from the 1980s.
“I tried to explain the context and time period of the uniform to the students who spoke with me, but apparently the student who wore the uniform may have told people it was from the 1940s,” Powers said in an email to parents and students. “I spoke with him this afternoon and explained the same thing to him and the inferences others may have drawn.”
Jones College Prep student dresses as Nazi, goose steps across stage during assembly, gets booed by fellow students https://t.co/QlhPIJg20d
— Boing Boing (@BoingBoing) November 6, 2022
Hey, the kids were close. At least they got the country right. But as detestable as the Communists in East Germany were, they never quite rose to the level of the overt racism and antisemitism shown by the Nazis.
But the question isn’t whether the kid shouldn’t have worn the uniform of an oppressive government that shot people in the back trying to escape. The question is whether the principal should have been fired for telling the truth. And at Jones College Prep, apparently yes.
“We’re over it, we’re so done with the admin being complacent,” student Florence Tang, 17, said. “It wasn’t just about the Halloween incident, it was about the years of complacency and inaction at Jones that really triggered this protest and this movement.”
How was telling the truth evidence of “complacency”? How about evidence of ignorance because students mistook an East German uniform for a Nazi uniform?
What this incident is really all about is power. And Ms. Tang and her fellow “empowered” students are stomping all over the school administration.
She said many students were happy to see Powers suspended and hope he will be replaced with a principal “who is actually willing to listen to students and take the right step toward change.”
Gabriel Willis, 18, said he was “really disappointed” the school’s administration failed to immediately address the costume last week and looked for ways to explain and contextualize the outfit rather than listen to concerns.
“He shouldn’t have been able to walk the stage,” Willis said of the student who wore the soldier costume.
Incredible. The infants don’t care about what was actually happening, nor did they want anyone to explain any context to them. They wanted to order the principal to do what they were telling him to do.
Seig heil, baby.
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