Educators said they do not believe the incident was done with hatred or prejudice

I would have thought a requirement to be certified as an “educator” included actually knowing what the word “prejudice” means.

August beat me to it.  That line is the killer.  Seriously, the kids who came up with “hit a Jew” did it out of their love for christ, there was no hate or prejudice involved.

Once again, the heartland proves when it comes to stupid, they can compete with anyone.

“Educators said they do not believe the incident was done with hatred or prejudice.”

Uhhh… ok. What a stupid comment. It’s called “Hit A Jew” day you moron!!!!

And, wow, these are 6th graders? Sad…. the next generation of ignorant voters.

Ah, “Hit a Jew Day.”  That’s Middle School for you.  I remember in middle school where I was (which was in the Maryland suburbs of DC, an area with a whole lot of Jews), some kids decided it would be funny to start drawing swastikas on things.  It was obviously prejudiced, but it was done without any real understanding of how offensive such things are.  Obviously done with the intent of upsetting Jews (and I was certainly offended), but really mostly a case of kids testing limits, trying to figure out what kind of behavior is acceptable and what’s not.

Seems like the same kind of thing here - Chesterfield is a suburb of St. Louis, and note that 30 Jews out of 850 is a pretty substantial percentage, 3.5%, which is higher than the percentage of Jews in the overall population, I think.

At any rate, doesn’t seem like a terribly big deal.

And people wonder why kids are coming out of the public schools unprepared for college.

Anyway, a couple of days ago I had a lengthy layover at the Las Vegas airport (bleah) and was sitting near an accountant who was on the phone with a client.  He was trying to convince the client that his taxes would go down under Obama’s proposal and then he started talking about having Obama yard signs stolen from in front of his house.  He said he finally smeared his sign with white lithium grease so that whoever stole it would mess up his or her car interior.

John, how is Hit a Jew Day not a big deal?  Even allowing that it’s okay to test boundaries by saying bigoted things (and I don’t agree with that), we’re talking about the word “hit.”  You know, “hit” as in “HIT.”

Of course those kids weren’t motivated by hatred or prejudice!They were only following orders! *puke*

Ummm…

“Hit a Jew Day”

“Educators said they do not believe the incident was done with hatred or prejudice.”

“Hit a Jew Day”

“Educators said they do not believe the incident was done with hatred or prejudice.”

“HIT A JEW DAY”

“EDUCATORS SAID THEY DO NOT BELIEVE THE INCIDENT WAS DONE WITH HATRED OR PREJUDICE.”

These are 6th graders. They don’t know anything about jewish people or history. I wouldn’t read too much into it.  Kids do dumb things, it’s almost a requirement of being a kid. That said, the kids should be punished for it and have it made known to them why they are being punished. That’s how you get kids to not do dumb things when they grow up.

If the 30 percenters had their way, every day would be Hit a Jew Day.

“History repeats itself: first as tragedy, then as farce”

It’s hard to continue believing in social progress when it seems we’re destined to relive the 1940s over again.

Around where I live the lace-panty crowd is clutching its pearls and gasping in shock and horror because a few McCain-Palin signs got stolen… turns out they got blown away in recent storm… but, hey, never let the truth get in the way of a good Rethug narrative, eh?

Ain’t it Awful.

There’s always some bad stuff going on.  More than one person gets murdered every day.  Then there’s auto accidents.  We’re all gonna die.  Someday.  Billions of nasty bacteria are multiplying, somewhere.

There is no worst of the web.  There is no worst news.  The bottom just keeps on going down.

Still, taking down yard signs is clearly wrong.  Somebody ought to keep a website tracking all of this for both sides.  And keeping score.  Maybe the humiliation will stop it.

I do like how on the video linked to the story it was said that the principal held an assembly about how inappropriate this behavior was and how she felt that all the students had let each other down because no one reported the incidents to the principal themselves. That’s gotta shame the kids whose friends know they saw any of the incidents and did nothing, hopefully it’ll encourage the kids to speak up next time (and sadly there’s always a next time…)

I have to side with John and Pablo. Hit a Jew day is bad and clearly done with prejudice, but sixth graders really don’t know any better. Use it as a teachable moment and move on.

Are you nuts, Dan?

Kids have to be taught hatred.  Those pretty blonde girls calling Barack Obama “monkey president” are to be pitied on one hand, but that doesn’t make their hate any less hateful simply b/c they don’t fully understand it.

Sixth graders should know better.  Public schools have all sorts of programs on bullying now.  They might not understand the full implications, but they certainly know hitting is wrong.  They learned that in kindergarten.

Have a “fun” day where you go around hitting people isn’t just something that could happen to any kid.

Caren:

Those pretty blonde girls calling Barack Obama “monkey president” are to be pitied on one hand, but that doesn’t make their hate any less hateful simply b/c they don’t fully understand it.

I don’t understand how you can hold someone fully responsible for doing something that they don’t understand is wrong, because they’re too young to think like adults.

Sixth graders should know better.

Yes, of course they should. But they don’t. Blame the parents, not the kids.

They might not understand the full implications, but they certainly know hitting is wrong.

Many adults still don’t know that hitting is wrong. I’m not going to get worked up over a bunch of pre-teens who don’t have a fully nuanced, historically-contextualized understanding of violence vis-a-vis race-baiting.

I mean, fuck, I’m Jewish, and even I didn’t really know what the Holocaust was until I was at least in high school.

These are 6th graders. They don’t know anything about jewish people or history. I wouldn’t read too much into it.

I think you’re underestimating 6th graders. They’re old enough to know it’s never ok to hit, they’re old enough to know it’s not ok to single out one group for mistreatment. Are they still going to do stupid things? Yes, but so do adults. It’s not ok to act like they aren’t hurting real live people, just because they’re kids.

My first personal experience with anti-Semitism was when I was in the first grade. Another first grader told me that Jews like me had no right to go to school if we weren’t willing to sing Christmas carols with everyone, and that people like me were ruining the country.

Did he know what that meant? No. Was he just parroting what he’d heard some adult say? Yes. Did that make it less wrong? No.

Ah, “Hit a Jew Day.” That’s Middle School for you.  I remember in middle school where I was (which was in the Maryland suburbs of DC, an area with a whole lot of Jews), some kids decided it would be funny to start drawing swastikas on things.  It was obviously prejudiced, but it was done without any real understanding of how offensive such things are.  Obviously done with the intent of upsetting Jews (and I was certainly offended), but really mostly a case of kids testing limits, trying to figure out what kind of behavior is acceptable and what’s not.

Yeah, I think both POVs in this thread are true. It is mostly 11 year olds being 11 year olds, being hellions, doing things just to be contrary. On the other hand, I can see how stuff like this really could fester, and become actual racism, if left un-attended. (Probably some of it already is real racism, and these kids are picking up on statements from their parents.) So its probably for the best to address it openly, and boldly.

Somebody ought to keep a website tracking all of this for both sides.

You ever notice, when a douchebag can’t deny his side is doing something wrong, he start claiming both (or all) sides do it equally?

Yay my home state. I’m kind of glad I got a cold and couldn’t protest the Palin rally. I probably would’ve just gotten my car window smashed in. (EDITOR’S NOTE: This comment is TOTALLY a case of sour grapes.)

Hit a Jew day is bad and clearly done with prejudice, but sixth graders really don’t know any better

What in the hell kind of sixth grader were you, that you didn’t know better than that?

It was obviously prejudiced, but it was done without any real understanding of how offensive such things are… mostly a case of kids testing limits, trying to figure out what kind of behavior is acceptable and what’s not.

When I was in middle school, one of our teachers did a really interesting thought-experiment-cum-teachable-moment exercise with us.  First thing in the morning on MLK day she handed out a list of rules which specified that no sixth graders were allowed to have recess.  Sixth graders were also to sit at one of two designated lunch tables (one on each end of the cafeteria, small, cramped, and I think even wobbly), with herself and another teacher personally supervising.  Sixth graders were not to speak at all unless called on in class, purely at the teacher’s discretion.  Including at lunch and recess, in the halls, between classes, and the like.  There were also various other penalties for the status of being a sixth grader which I don’t remember now, which probably related to onerous chores or idiosyncracies of middle school status hierarchies which I’ve forgotten in the intervening 15 years. 

All of us sixth graders immediately protested about how incredibly unfair this was.  WHAT?  We’re being penalized for no reason at all, just because we’re in the sixth grade?  Why don’t the seventh or eighth graders have to follow any of these rules? 

Her response, “today you will each get a taste of what racism is like.”

I don’t remember how much the rest of the school was in on it, or how many of the rules she really held us to (some of them could have potentially gotten her in trouble with parents, I seem to remember).  But that was probably the last time I ever saw my classmates do stupid openly racist shit (swastika graffiti, blatant use of the N word, etc) that could easily be described as “testing the limits of acceptable behavior”.  Of course most of the people in that room probably did go on to be typically bigoted southerners—I don’t think it really turned anyone into a civil rights crusader or anything like that.  But it nipped the egregious stuff that isn’t even socially acceptable in the south right in the bud.

Since you guys like to tweak MSM writers, editors, and headline writers, I’m gonna ding you on this one: “Another McCain mob incident on tape….”

Mob?  Really?

1: a large or disorderly crowd ; especially : one bent on riotous or destructive action
2: the lower classes of a community : masses , rabble
3: chiefly Australian : a flock, drove, or herd of animals
4: a criminal set : gang ; especially often capitalized : mafia
5: chiefly British : a group of people : crowd

Ha, I’ll give you #2, and maybe #4, although I’da wrote “..McCain <u>M</u>ob…” in that case. However, in everyday American English, i think mob usually means a crowd.  “Pro-McCain Hooligans Caught on Tape” would’ve been much more apropos.

If you guys are gonna be Teh Nu Meedya, you gotta be better than the old.

I think that the real issue here is that the kids learned those attitudes from somewhere, even if they don’t know much about Jews or history, and the likely models for these attitudes are parents, pastors, and friends (who got it from their parents or pastors).

Kids of that age naturally try to punish “outsiders”, who can be of any group - gay, poor, ugly, race or religion different from the majority, immigrant from another local school, region, country, Goths, nerds / geeks, fat girls or skinny unathletic boys, etc. Adults should be clamping down on bullying, not reinforcing the kids’ reasoning behind their bullying behavior.

When I was nine and in 4th grade my teacher caught me drawing swastikas during study period. I had NO idea what they were or what they symbolized or anything else, even though I knew what the holocaust was by then. I just thought they were cool looking geometrically. Anyway, my teacher totally singled me out in front of the class me and asked me if I was prejudiced against Jews and the handicapped and if I agreed with the holocaust. He then went on to explain what the swastika meant. I was so ashamed and just mortified that any of my classmates might think I thought that way about anyone. I started blubbering in front of the class and apologized to everyone because I felt so horrible. For anyone to claim that these kids didn’t do it out of hatred and prejudice is flat out wrong. I knew what prejudice was at nine and so did everyone in my classroom.

I just thought they were cool looking geometrically. Anyway, my teacher totally singled me out in front of the class me and asked me if I was prejudiced against Jews and the handicapped and if I agreed with the holocaust.

This is actually kind of crappy, especially since the swastika is, at the end of the day, a really, really common design motif (especially in its correct orientation - the Nazis skewed it a half-turn).  If you’re an artistically or geometrically minded person who likes to doodle, eventually you will discover the swastika, just like you also probably discovered the circle, the triangle, the Greek key, the Star of David, etc.  It’s usually pretty easy to tell the difference between a 9 year old who is absentmindedly doodling interesting shapes, and a 9 year old who is drawing the Nazi swastika fully aware of what the symbol is and what it means.

Though I do think it’s important to make sure that kids know what that symbol means in modern Western culture.  I just don’t think it’s fair to single them out in front of the whole class and make them cry.

Use it as a teachable moment and move on.

Sounds like a few people on this thread could use a “teachable moment”, since they apparently think if nobody’s threatening *their* kids, it’s all good.

I actually agree that it’s possible that no prejudice was involved; 6th graders are murderous about testing boundaries and doing forbidden things for the sake of doing forbidden things.  It’s why teaching middle school is the challenge that it is.

That said, of course the event needs to be acknowledged seriously and disciplinary action taken.  Which is, it appears, what happened.

dan:

What in the hell kind of sixth grader were you, that you didn’t know better than that?

mythago:

Sounds like a few people on this thread could use a “teachable moment”, since they apparently think if nobody’s threatening *their* kids, it’s all good.

Until either one of you can quote where I said anything even remotely resembling what you’ve claimed I said, please kindly go fuck yourself.

Sounds like a few people on this thread could use a “teachable moment”, since they apparently think if nobody’s threatening *their* kids, it’s all good.

Did you miss, or purposely ignore, the part where Dan said:

I mean, fuck, I’m Jewish, and even I didn’t really know what the Holocaust was until I was at least in high school.

Has anybody advocated sweeping this under the rug? The only thing I’ve seen are a lot of people saying, “hey, let’s not declare these kids Hopeless Losses—they’re kids, they can be educated. Blame the asshole racist parents who raised them with these ideas.” Inherent in that is the need to educate the kids. There should be consequences. Writing them off as racist dickheads and then IGNORING them just lets the problem fester! Do you want the 11 year olds in jail for hate crimes? WTF purpose does THAT serve, other than to permanently fuck up a bunch of kids?

In other words, go fuck yourself.

These are 6th graders. They don’t know anything about jewish people or history….
pablo on 10/25 at 12:43 PM

I dunno, Pablo. By the time I entered 4th grade I had already read a version of Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (Expurgated and drastically shortened, for children, retitled ...of Adolph Hitler. I’d seen a few WWII movies, which sometimes shocked me because what I expected to be funny situations (doubtless because they looked like
bits from Hogan’s Heroes turned out to be grim. By the time I finished 4th grade I’d seen at least one PBS documentary on the Holocaust, as well as a school production, at my Catholic school, of a stage play based on the Diaries of Anne Frank. By the time I’d finished 6th grade I for one knew a lot about the Third Reich, some of which was taught to us in Religion class at Catholic schools. For that matter, there was even an episode of The Waltons which I’d have seen back in 2nd or 3rd grade about how decent people resisted anti-Semitism, featuring the line “Jesus was a Jew.”

Now I was quite the nerd and a prig as well, and all this was during the mid-1970s, when there was a big flurry of interest in WWII and the evils of Naziism, perhaps because a lot of stuff was coming out that had been downplayed, ignored, or even supressed hitherto. (Certainly WWII buffs were then benefiting from publication of information that had been kept secret by British law, such as the story of how the German Enigma codes had been cracked—there was a standard 30 year term for state secrets that was expiring in the 1970s and so a bunch of memoirs were coming out).

Perhaps both I and my times were a bit weird, then, but I find it hard to believe any American kid grows up to the age 12 without having some clue that Nazi bigotry was deadly stuff. If they think swastikas and the like are “cool” they probably approve of meanness. Not saying a lot of them would not recoil and rethink if they only knew more. But face it, some of these brats would like it all the more.

And perhaps that sort of intentional thuggery has on the whole gotten worse rather than better in the past 30 years, despite some obvious and good countervailing trends.

At any rate, I certainly never heard of “hit the Jews” as an institution when I was a kid.

Hitting other children “in fun” is not acceptable even if they’re not (or not obviously) doing it for racist reasons.

My daughter is one of 6 white children in an otherwise all-black public school. The school houses a gifted students magnet that pulls children in from all over the city in a majority black city, and she’s in the gifted magnet. On her birthday, I was contacted by the nurse and told that she had come to the nurse with an injured arm because other students had been giving her “birthday licks”—punching her in the arm 11 times for being 11, plus 3 extra “to grow on.”

I don’t know whether this is common behavior in that school, or in the subculture many of the children come from (birthday spankings I’ve heard of, but not birthday punches from fellow children), or if she was singled out for being white, but I contacted the school, and they took the children aside and told them that this was not acceptable, and got the children who did it to write my daughter apology letters. The children who didn’t do it wrote my daughter sympathy letters.

Whether it was racially motivated or just plain bullying or ignorant behavior the kids would perpetrate on nearly anyone, I don’t know, and I don’t care—I wanted it to stop and I wanted the kids to be told that this was unacceptable, and that’s what happened. I respect her school a lot for how they handled it.

It sounds like the Missouri school handled their situation correctly as well. Suspending kids for hitting each other is the right idea even if you don’t think they were specifically being racist about it.

Has anybody advocated sweeping this under the rug?

Yes. Turning into angry “go fuck yourself"s when it was not, in fact, so swept: “Use it as a teachable moment and move on.” “That’s Middle School for you. ” “At any rate, doesn’t seem like a terribly big deal.” “Do you want the 11 year olds in jail for hate crimes?” That’s exactly what blowing something off as trivial *is* - muttering that it isn’t important, let’s move on, hey, why are you so upset about this, and why are you making a federal case out of it fercrissakes?! Why don’t you go fuck yourself?!

Gosh, we never hear this kind of boredom-to-anger continuum for other ‘harmless’ games like boys grabbing girls’ asses. The difference here, I guess, being that we can’t pretend the Jews invited it or secretly enjoy it.

I happen to be the parent of a 6th grader. They’re not innocent little lambs who don’t know what “Jew” means and who don’t understand that hitting people for being ‘other’ is wrong. Of course they pick up this shit from their parents. They are also learning to take their lead from grownups, and when grownups treat this kind of thing as childish hijinks, they learn they can get away with it.

And as far as I’m concerned, those grownups can go fuck themselves. Preferably with heavy farm implements.