They certainly won’t get all the attention Jussie Smollett did, even though their story is actually plausible. They’re the wrong color for that type of coverage — just as they were the wrong color in their assailants’ eyes.
And the latter was the case according to four white middle-school students who say they were the victims of a slavery “revenge attack” last Wednesday morning. The Daily Mail summarizes the story:
- One of the alleged victims, who has not been identified because he is a minor, said he no longer feels safe attending Lyons Creek Middle School, in Broward County, Florida
- He told NBC Miami that the five boys assaulting him and his friends told them it was ‘revenge for what they did in the 1700s, slavery’
- The group, made up of three black and two white students, reportedly yelled ‘It’s opposite day, Brown Power!’ as they whipped, kicked and hit the four white kids
- Furious parents said that their children are terrified to return to school after the racial attack at the Coconut Creek Recreation Center in Florida on Wednesday
- The five attackers, aged between 12 and 15, were arrested and charged with battery and a hate crime
Whether the “opposite day” activities included subsequent affirmative action and quotas for the white students was not reported.
Providing more detail, NBC writes that the “arrest reports from Coconut Creek Police stated the victims were “racially profiled…. The group looked at (the student) and stated ‘he is white’ before another student ‘tackled him to the ground which subsequently allowed the group of middle school kids to start hitting him with their hands, feet and phone chargers,’ the reports said.”
One student said that “attackers hit and kicked him, and yelled things that made him believe that he was being targeted because he is white,” NBC also informs.
“I put my hands up so they don’t whack my face,” the news outlet relates the student as saying. “After they jumped me, they said, this is, like, revenge for what they did in the 1700s for slavery.”
Frank Foster, a parent of one of the victims, “said his son is still being abused at school over text messages for reporting the assault,” National File adds. “‘People at school are calling him a snitch for reporting it and doing the right thing,’ the victim’s father continued.”
“The five students were arrested and charged with battery and evidence of prejudice while committing a battery, which is a third-degree felony,” National File further states. “However, the mother of one of the alleged attackers said she is angry at the victims and claimed they are trying to ‘ruin’ her son’s life by having him prosecuted.”
In fairness, the reported attack was brief and accorded with the norms of “typical” boyish mischief, in that the violence was mild and no serious injuries were sustained. Kids will sometimes do stupid things, too. A good relevant example were the “Kick a Ginger [red-haired kid] Day” attacks that would sometimes occur in school a while back. Yet there is a deeper issue here.
While visiting with friends last year, I learned that their granddaughter, who was present, had been asked by other students in school if she was a Republican or Democrat.
She was 11.
It never would’ve occurred to us to ask such a question of classmates when I was that age. Not only don’t kids have any official party affiliation, but it never would’ve entered our minds to “play adult” in that fashion. But this reflects how children today have been politicized — and more to the point here, ideologized — as never before in America.
Obviously, the Florida middle-school attackers did not, as when bullying kids because they’re overweight or wear glasses, unilaterally conjure up the slavery angle. Adults indoctrinated them — in school and via entertainment and (to a lesser extent) the media — with anti-white, Critical Race Theory-oriented propaganda.
Though there are ulterior motives, such curricula in schools are justified with the argument that “we have to teach children about slavery,” ostensibly under the theory that forgetting past mistakes condemns us to repeat them. But educators today don’t teach about slavery.
Rather, they teach only about the small snapshot of it that occurred in America for a few hundred years.
The result is a skewed conception of history — and of the past mistakes’ causes.
Slavery, of course, had been practiced anywhere and everywhere since time immemorial. Early Americans didn’t originate it; they inherited it.
It also was for most of history an unquestioned institution that transcended race. Not only did Africans enslave other Africans and also sometimes sell them to others, including Europeans, but “an estimated one-third of the free persons of color in New Orleans were slave owners and thousands of these slave owners volunteered to fight for the confederacy during the Civil War,” wrote Professor Thomas Sowell in Black Rednecks and White Liberals. “Black slave owners were even more common in the Caribbean.”
In fact, one of Kamala Harris’s ancestors was one of these black slavers, her father, Professor Donald Harris, has told us.
Moreover, thousands of American Indians joined the above, and a small percentage of antebellum whites, in owning African slaves. (So who, by the way, should pay reparations to whom?) A video presentation of Sowell’s aforementioned book passage is below.
What’s more, it was only European civilization that finally put an end to this age-old institution where it could. Put differently, whites may or mayn’t have been the first to practice slavery.
But they surely were the first to eliminate it.
The original purpose of teaching young children history has been lost and perverted. The goal should be simple: to give kids a basic understanding of the world and how their country was created and to instill a common historical understanding that will unite them with their countrymen and engender national pride. The notion that you could possibly inculcate the tender-aged with some deep knowledge of history’s nuances is folly — especially since educators generally lack this insight themselves.
As an example, Sowell mentioned a school exercise in which students were asked to explain how they’d “feel” if they were an American Indian whose land had been seized by Europeans. As the professor explained, however, while the Indians certainly didn’t like losing the battles, neither they nor anyone else at the time questioned the process of winning territory via military conquest. This was status quo, how things had always been done.
The point is that a young child today hasn’t nearly enough information, or the perspective, to even begin understanding the “feelings” of a conquered 19th-century Indian, who operated within an entirely different cultural and moral framework. So the result (and sometimes the very purpose) of such “teaching” is not to enlighten, but to dishearten and inflame.
And as the Coconut Creek attack evidences, this grievance curricula is bearing fruit. So perhaps it’s not correct at all to say kids aren’t learning anything in school.
