The local Philadelphia high school incident, wherein a black teacher intimidated a white, 16-year-old student because she had the audacity to express her First Amendment right and wear a Mitt Romney T-shirt on dress-down day, has garnered some national interest, but not the kind it would have produced had the roles been reversed.
It’s my opinion, of course, but I truly believe that if a white teacher had harassed a black teenage girl for wearing an Obama shirt, that teacher would have been summarily dismissed, and likely even charged with a “hate crime.”
The incident took place at Charles Carroll High in the Port Richmond section of Philadelphia. I lived in Port Richmond, and I can tell you that there are few neighborhoods more patriotic, more hard-working, and more passionate about individual rights than this bastion of blue-collar pride.
So where is the outrage? Where is the good, old, Philadelphia neighborhood support for this child who was in effect bullied by one of the adults that’s supposed to be a safeguard during school hours for students’ rights?
I, my wife, and children have always been proud of our attachment to Port Richmond. One of our daughters and many of our friends still reside in this row-house region of typical, middle-class Philadelphia.
I can’t imagine that the folks I know who call Port Richmond home are not embarrassed, humiliated, and angered by the thought of a student who cannot express her Constitutional right without being accosted angrily by a member of the faculty.
Many Port Richmond veterans served abroad in the military to defend against precisely this kind of tyranny. And here it is raising its ugly head right in their own back yard. Or rather right in their local schoolyard.
I majored in history in undergrad school, so I’m particularly upset whenever I hear anybody deny that the Holocaust of World War Two ever took place.