A Florida School Board member is facing charges of racism after calling a group of rowdy students hoodlums.
Yeah, that’s about it:
Pinellas School Board chairwoman Janet Clark is coming under fire for using the term “hoodlums” to describe a small group of chronically disruptive students in county schools.
Board members Mary Brown and Linda Lerner criticized Clark at Tuesday night’s board meeting. And now Ray Tampa, president of the St. Petersburg branch of the NAACP, said Clark’s refusal to apologize has made things worse.
“I was disgusted with her response,” Tampa said Wednesday.
Disgusted? Maybe it’s worse than I thought. What exactly did this racist say:
“So much time is taken up with addressing hoodlums, with kids who don’t want to be in school,” she said. She also said, “We are talking about a small number of children.”
GREAT SCOTT!
Wait, what?
How, exactly is that racist?
It does not appear the origins of the word “hoodlum” have any ties to race or ethnicity. It is an adaptation of a German word that meant “ragamuffin” or “good for nothing,” said Michael Adams, an associate professor of English at Indiana University and author of the 2009 book, Slang: The People’s Poetry.
But the meanings of words can change, Adams said. Over time, “hoodlum” may have become a more racially identifiable word, in part because of the slang term “hood,” short for neighborhood, and also because hood and hoodlum began to be applied to African-American youths by white people, he said.
“Hoodlum, when you look it up in the dictionary, doesn’t look so bad,” Adams said. But when people in the black community hear it, “they associate it with words and meanings other than (those from) 1871 or whenever it was the word first appeared in print.”
The professor said the case reminds him of the uproar from a 1999 incident when a Washington D.C., city official used the term “niggardly” to describe how he was managing budget cuts. It means “miserly,” but another employee took it as a racial slur.
So, it’s racist because some ignorant people think it’s racist. And now this woman has to take heat because other people are too uneducated to understand what a word means.
Is that about it?
No. Here’s who started the racism charge:
The International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement — better known as the Uhurus — called for Clark to resign for the statement, which it viewed as racist. Clark is white.
Case dismissed.
I guarantee the people involved in this group are far more racist than Janet Clark, and I don’t even know Janet Clark. I mean, this is the same group that held a vigil for Lovelle Mixon, a man who shot and killed four Oakland police officers.
That alone destroys their credibility.
I’m no friend of the public school system, or school boards for that matter, but I’ll back this chairman against these fools any day.
