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Claremont, a community southeast of Los Angeles, is now the scene of a fight over a Thanksgiving celebration that was scheduled to be held by two local elementary schools. The planned event would have involved some 150 elementary schoolchildren from Condit Elementary School and nearby Mountain View Elementary School. The program, which was in the preparation stages, would have involved the kids dressing up as Indians and Pilgrims as they shared a Thanksgiving dinner. In preparing for the event, the children were busy at work cutting out their costumes from paper. Then it all came crashing down.
What happened was that one woman, the mother of one of the children, wrote a 2 1/2 page letter to the Claremont School Board, protesting the event as being denigrating and demeaning to Native Americans. As a result, the costumes have been scrapped by the school board.
In the letter, the woman, who is an Asst Professor of English at the University of California at Riverside and apparently of Indian heritage, described the Thanksgiving dinner as a "celebration of genocide". She compared the depiction of the first Thanksgiving dinner to showing slaves having dinner with their masters and Jews having dinner with Nazis.
On Thursday evening, the Claremont School Board held a public meeting, in which several parents showed up to defend having the event. They were told by the Board that the decision had already been made to have the students dressed in their normal clothes-and that no costumes would be permitted.
Whatever happened to Native Americans in our history, what in the world is wrong with showing a historical event that was conducted in friendship-before the wars began? Is this the first step in an all out assault on Thanksgiving-much as we have seen with Christmas? That this cowardly and/or politically correct school board would capitulate to one activist professor is absurd. Did she threaten them with a lawsuit? So now, in the interest of "sensitivity", to use the Board's own words, the event has been reduced to something as meaningless as an outing to Chucky Cheese.
Is this the first step in an all out assault on Thanksgiving-much as we have seen with Christmas?
ReplyDeleteIf anything, it'll be the start of a new conservative hysteria where they make a mountain out of a frikken' molehill.
Gary, the "War on Christmas" was a sham, and most of the "evidence" for it turned out to be exagerated at best and completely made up at worst. Come on, "War on Christmas" is a punchline to a joke that mocks conservative paranoia.
Geez, when are you conservatives going to realize that consumerism destroyed the meaning of Christmas long ago? "Oh no! They're saying happy holidays! My rights are being trampled!"
Give me a break.
This lady is definitely being overdramatic (which isn't to say that there isn't at least some truth to her point) but let's not start calling this a national epidemic just yet, okay? Don't worry, nobody's going to touch your turkey dinner.
Lance,
ReplyDeleteI don't even like turkey.
Hey! How about I start a national campaign to abolish Kwanzaa?
Don't like turkey?! Now that's downright un-American. You know who also didn't like turkey, right? Hitler, that's who. You don't want to be like THAT guy, do you?
ReplyDeleteAs for Kwanzaa, I'm more for a War on Boxing Day.