Commencement, Education / Schools

Is It Racist To Charge Black People For Cheering?

You shouldn't have to go to court for cheering at commencement.

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A high school diploma should be a certificate conferred on parents that reads: “Congratulations, you didn’t completely screw this up.” It should happen in private to little fanfare. Celebrating graduating high school is the definition of getting a cookie for doing something that you are just supposed to do. To put it in Chris Rock terms (NSFW):

Whatever. For some people, getting a high school diploma is still a huge thing, worthy of celebration. But many communities place rules on those celebrations because there are people in this country who walk around with surgically implanted ass sticks who get believe there is a “right way” to celebrate. In Mississippi, a place where graduating from high school without diabetes truly is an accomplishment, the graduation ceremony at Senatobia High School resulted in at least three people being charged with “disturbing the peace” for cheering on their loved ones as they received their diplomas.

Those are stupid charges. Let’s not set legal precedent that an exception to free speech includes shouting “woohoo” in a crowded amphitheater. If you want to holler like an idiot because your child read Lord of the Flies instead of becoming Lord of the Flies, that’s just not something that should be subjected to legal regulation.

But, I see the other side. “Act like you’ve been there before.” Even if you haven’t. ESPECIALLY if you haven’t. Everybody has the right to hear their named called, and it’s sometimes hard to hear the next person up if you are carrying on like a lunatic.

Too bad the other side is kind of racist.

It’s not racist because black people are less able to contain themselves at a genetic level. That’s a dumb cultural stereotype. There are loud, inappropriate white people and loud, inappropriate black people. The difference is that when Jimbo shouts “F**king-A” when his sister-wife graduates from high school, white communities aren’t calling the cops on him. They aren’t running to CNN saying, “In ‘Murica, we need a goddamn sense of decorum.” If they are, those cases aren’t making national news, at least.

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But when it happens in black communities, it’s “news,” and just feeds into this whole negative stereotype of “the showy negro.” It’s an internal fight within the black community too, and the media is all too happy to play along. The school superintendent who pressed charges against the family members, Jay Foster, had this to say on CNN:

Foster, who is in his fifth year as superintendent, said when he arrived at the district, the graduation ceremony was not “conducted in a manner we were happy with.”

After seeing graduates missing their names being called and audience members leaving during the ceremony and disrupting others, Foster said he began implementing changes to make things better.

Some of those initiatives including requiring anyone attending the ceremony to have a ticket.

Foster also involved police, asking officers to escort out any audience member who made an outburst.

Yeah, I saw Lean on Me too, and “Crazy” Joe Clark was a hell of compelling character once Morgan Freeman got his hands on him. But military-style dictatorships are not the only way to forge strong educational environments. At the point where you are prosecuting family members for supporting their students at graduation, you are less “school principal,” and more “a**hole with a little bit of power.”

To me, this is the same issue as with the black woman in Baltimore who walloped her kid and got called “Mom of the Year” on national television. There is a weird, and I think racially motivated, desire to see black people who are doing something “wrong” to receive extreme punishments (relative to their offenses), from members in both the white and black communities. It’s almost like we think that if we are super harsh against the people who are “acting out,” then it somehow adds legitimacy to the calls to be respectful to the people behaving appropriately.

Over-punishing blacks doesn’t help all the other black people. If high school graduation is such a big deal for your family that you have to go off like a damn fool, you don’t need to be fined, you need to be helped.

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Authorities File Charges Over Loud Cheering at Mississippi High School Graduation [New York Times]
Family served arrest warrants for ‘disturbing the peace’ at graduation [CNN]

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