Wednesday, November 26, 2008

What If I Dressed Up as a Turkey?

In honor of Thanksgiving, I give you this story from California, where kindergarten students will no longer dress up as Pilgrims and Native Americans when they have their Thanksgiving feast.

"It's demeaning," Michelle Raheja, the mother of a kindergartner at Condit Elementary School, wrote to her daughter's teacher. "I'm sure you can appreciate the inappropriateness of asking children to dress up like slaves (and kind slave masters), or Jews (and friendly Nazis), or members of any other racial minority group who has struggled in our nation's history."

I remember creating a construction paper headband with feathers around Thanksgiving in grade school. Probably more than once. Somehow, I grew up to be a (somewhat) mature, contributing member of a decent society able to celebrate the diversity of our great land.

Yet another example of adults sucking the fun out of life, this time using 5-year olds in order to do it.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

9 comments:

Clown said...

If dressing up as indians is offensive isn't the whole idea of Thanksgiving?

Thanks for the maize... Now fuck you. Here's some burned out land, go build a casino.

Anonymous said...

These adults don't suck as much as the parents of two UW band members who wrote the chancellor about the offensive harassment their kids went through. The acts included forcing freshmen to fetch drinks for upperclassmen and drink mixtures of condiments and alcohol (the article is on madison.com). Parents ruin all the fun.

Anonymous said...

Have I ever mentioned how much i dislike the UW band?

Anonymous said...

This story just confuses me. Comparing Thanksgiving to slavery and Nazi Germany is absurd. Now Valentine's Day, that's offensive.

Charlie Marlow said...

Boy, I can't wait until my 6 year old gets to decorate the "Holiday Tree" at school.

Anonymous said...

Remember that referring to it as a tree is in and of itself also offensive. Enjoy decorating your "Winter Shrub" kids.

Charlie Marlow said...

Everytime someone says "Happy Holidays" to me in lieu of "Merry Christmas", I just want to slit my wrists.

I'm sorry. When I was a kid, I could say Merry Christmas and not have to pretend to worry about it 'offending' someone. The irony here, is it is likely some lame "progressively minded" 40-something upper-middle class white woman who's on the PTA who, in the (self)interest of being politically correct(read: gain social status by being 'sensitive) thought she would say that, even though she herself is Christian, it offends her to hear everyone say Merry Christmas.

Anonymous said...

What is offensive is that this womens kid attends "Condit Elementry School" in California. I wonder if the school is named after Gary Condit the congressman from CA who's young mistress Chandra Levy turned up missing a few years back.

It is in the same area...

Anyways...

Anonymous said...

Charlie-

I'm sure she enjoys the smell of her own farts too.