From the Omaha World-Herald:
Two Westside High School students say they were using satire to make a point: The school shouldn’t have a special award to recognize the achievement of black students.
Trevor Richards, the Rambo twins’ choice for Westside High’s “Distinguished African American Student” award, moved from South Africa to Omaha six years ago.
That’s why Paul and Scott Rambo, 16-year-old juniors, blanketed Westside on Monday with posters touting a white youth from South Africa for the “Distinguished African American Student” award.
“The posters were intended to be satire on the term African-American,” Scott Rambo said.
The resulting flap left all three boys suspended from Wednesday’s classes and drew national attention to the mostly white school. The Rambo twins stand by their actions, keeping them at odds with Westside officials.
“It’s disruptive,” Westside Principal John Crook said. “It was offensive to the individual being honored, to people who work here and to some students.”
Crook defends the idea of giving a special honor to a top black student. Those who feel otherwise should have talked to him, he said, rather than upsetting the tone of Martin Luther King Jr. Day with posters that some viewed as mocking. . . .
Paul and Scott Rambo . . . spent weeks discussing the unfairness of an award solely for blacks. Blacks are eligible for every other award at Westside, they figured, so what was the point of a special honor? . . .
“They were pointing out an absurdity with an absurdity,” said Michael Duffy, a junior who said he was reprimanded for collecting more than 160 signatures in support of the three boys. “That is the basic rule of satire.”
But Principal Crook said the timing and the nature of the posters was insensitive, preventing a healthy dialogue.
“My role is to make sure we have a safe environment, physically and psychologically,” he said. “We can’t allow that kind of thing to be hung up on our walls.” . . .
Duffy said the incident is forcing Westside to face racial issues that sometimes are ignored.
Crook agreed. “Obviously, it’s a teachable moment. We all need to be more sensitive.”
(Thanks to reader Patrick Charles for the pointer.)
Well, it is a teachable moment: A good moment for teaching that school officials are bound by Tinker v. Des Moines (1969), the Court’s leading First Amendment case on speech in public schools.
Tinker, which upheld students’ rights to wear black armbands as an anti-Vietnam-War protest — a highly contentious position, which many other students doubtless disagreed with — wasn’t limited to “sensitive” speech, or to speech that maintains a “psychologically” “safe environment,” or to speech that fosters what principals view as “healthy dialogue,” or even speech that avoids “mocking” or “upsetting the tone” of a holiday. (See here for a few more legal details.) Tinker did allow for the restriction of genuinely disruptive political speech, but only if there was evidence of real disruption to school activity, and not just some people being offended by the viewpoint that the speech expresses.
There are actually reasonable arguments for why K-12 schools should have complete authority over in-school speech. Justice Black’s dissent made those arguments. But it was a dissent; the majority squarely disagreed with Justice Black — and, I think, with the position that Principal Crook espouses.
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