Word: decatur
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Such excesses have popped up with some regularity for a few years, but the consequences for rule breaking are getting harsher. Jesse Jackson has made an issue of severe punishment in Decatur, Ill., where six students were thrown out of school for one year for fighting at a football game. But that sort of violence (a videotape of the incident shows a wild brawl) has long been cause for expulsion. What's new is that even pranks can land kids not just before the school board but before a judge. Two weeks ago in Virginia, a pair of 10-year...
Then there's the mixed message that Jackson is sending. He contends that although the officials who kicked those black kids out of school are overwhelmingly white, the issue is "not race but fairness." In almost the very next breath, he likens Decatur to Selma, Ala. If race is not the issue in Decatur, why dredge up memories of a historic civil rights struggle where the only issue was race...
Those are just two examples of why it's so difficult for all of us, black and white, to discuss racial issues productively: our words keep throwing us back to the past. That's what's happening in Decatur, where school officials' stubbornness and loaded language from both sides have escalated a local dispute over school safety into a racial cause celebre...
...Jackson has repeatedly pointed out, no one was injured in the brawl that broke out at a high school football game in September. None of the teenagers used a weapon. If the six who still live in Decatur (the seventh has left the area) don't get back into class fairly soon, they will in all likelihood become permanent dropouts--which, for young black men, often translates into a one-way ticket to jail. They obviously ought to be disciplined for taking part in the fight, but not more severely than the student who threatened to blow up a Decatur...
...knows the kids believes they are angels. Two of them have been in trouble with the law, several are chronic truants, and two are so-called third-year freshmen. A lot of people in Decatur are putting themselves on the line because they think these young men deserve a second chance. If it comes, they had better make the most of it by studying hard and straightening out their lives. That's the only way to give real meaning to Decatur's war of words...