House of Eratosthenes

“So much time is taken up with addressing hoodlums, with kids who don’t want to be in school. We are talking about a small number of children.” — Janet Clark, Pinellas School Board chairwoman

Ever since school started this year, John Hancock Middle School in St. Petersburg, Florida has become more noteworthy for school brawls than academic excellence. Indeed, with over 60 arrests this year, the school gained a reputation as a hotbed of juvenile violence. One teacher openly wondered if it will take a death to get those in charge to do something to establish a safe and secure learning environment. What to do has been foremost on Ms. Clark’s mind.

As one former Washington DC bureaucrat can attest, it’s not what you say, but rather what other people think you’ve said that matters.

Stop!

That, to me, right there, is what is ridiculous about this. And you know who is reviewing this? Nobody. You know who owns that standard, who is ready to take the credit for putting it up…to say “yes, I am me, and I think that’s a swell idea”? Nobody.

It is the way it is. Don’t question it. You know why? Because it makes untalented people very powerful.

Just imagine historians studying this seventy-five years from now. They’ll have YouTube…they’ll have all kinds of electronic archives full of digitized news clippings, visual aids for sexual harassment courses.

What do those courses say?

“These standards and guidelines are put in place to ensure a more comfortable working environment for everyone.”

And…

“The important thing to keep in mind, is that it is not the intention of the person who spoke that matters — what matters, according to our rules, is how it was perceived by the person who complained.”

Get the impression this is one of those situations in which the word “everyone” doesn’t quite have the same meaning as you’d expect it to? Someone’s a ninny — just go with it, because you know if you round up a thousand people, one or two are going to be a ninny who complains about just freakin’ everything —

And the ninny sets his or her sites on you because of something you said. Aw you didn’t mean it, but it doesn’t matter. It’s up to the emotional vibrato emanating from the person who received (or overheard). That person is God, according to these rules that are owned by nobody. The ninny. Ninnies have godlike powers now.

That’s what happened here:

The outrage was initially voiced by some fellow members of the school board. Mary Brown, one of those members, had this to say about Clark’s use of the word hoodlum:

“They might be disruptive. They might be in gangs. They might be many things, but they are not hoodlums. I feel that that statement showed insensitivity to our children, and it certainly did not offer good guidance to our staff.”

Now Ms. Clark is getting blasted fellow board members, community activists and from the local NAACP chapter. Kobina Bantushango of a group calling itself the Uhurus says the word is racist and Clark, who is white, must step down.

Is the word racist? Well…

According to Michael Adams an academic who has studied slang, the word has no racial connotations, at least in its original and formal dictionary definition.

Stop it again. Right there. Yes, I know the next statement qualifies this…and I don’t care. Etymology says no, history says no, dictionary says no.

On my planet, Earth, that settles it. Not because my skin is white, but because I have red blood. Because I’m a non-weird non-alien human creature who cares about facts. That’s why you don’t want reckless folks like me making the rules I guess.

Anyway. It seems this story has a happy ending. Ms. Clark responds:

“I am not going to resign or step down and I don’t even think I’m going to apologize for using the word. We can’t continue making excuses when children don’t behave and disrupt the educational environment for teachers and students. That’s all I can say on that matter.”

Pretty awesome. It would have been better if Ms. Clark lashed out directly at the “Could Be Construed As” standard…just so future historians will see someone had something to say about it and we weren’t all so willingly living under a cadre of lawyers. In my mind that’s what this story is all about. Not black-and-white, not hoodlums, not dictionaries. That absurd standard we got going because we somehow thought our lawyers weren’t quite rich enough and our society wasn’t quite unstable enough. The idea that has no owner. The standard that has no signatory, because no one will fasten a name worth defending to something so patently absurd.

But if nobody else is doing that, I guess I can’t expect her to. That’ll have to be left up to relatively anonymous bloggers rattling away on their minibooks, in their underwear, on the living room couch, early in the morning.

That revolution is going to be an ugly one. Hope I live long enough to see it. The “Could Be Construed As” standard. It will be rated alongside the Spanish Inquisition, drawing-and-quartering, ducking stools and Roman crucifixions.

No offense intended to Spanish Inquisition people or Roman crucifixion people out there. Go construe somewhere else.

A shame our schools are now regulated to the point where teachers and administrators are no longer able to administer effective discipline on problem students, and that parents no longer support them doing so.

I’m not even talking about corporal punishment like in the old, old days. I’m just referring to being able to kick bad kids out of class and have them reassigned to something truly awful or humiliating. Manual labor, that sort of thing.
- cylarz | 03/18/2010 @ 23:46

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“Hoodlums”Thursday, March 18th, 2010

“Hoodlums”
Thursday, March 18th, 2010