16-year-old student at Central Davidson High School in Lexington, North Carolina was suspended for three days last week after using the term ‘illegal alien’ during a vocabulary assignment in his English class.
Leah McGhee’s son has a teacher who assigned vocabulary words during class last Tuesday, including the word ‘alien.’ McGhee says her son made an effort to understand the assignment and responded to his teacher, asking, “Like space aliens or illegal aliens without green cards?
This kid is smart. Whenever hearing "illegal aliens," I think of those skinny, gray guys with big eyes, small noses, and birth certificates from another solar system. It was, thus, a question even wiser than the student probably believed it was. The Carolina Journal continued
According to an email describing the incident, sent to local officials and shared with Carolina Journal, a young man in class took offense to his question and reportedly threatened to fight him, prompting the teacher to call in the assistant principal. Ultimately, his words were deemed by administrative staff to be offensive and disrespectful to classmates who are Hispanic.
So according to those local officials himself, a student (now identified as Christian McGhee) said something another student believed (erroneously) was offensive, was threatened with being beaten up, and, oh yea, it was the student who could have been pulverized who is at fault. The "administrative staff," born yesterday, must be too young to remember when bullying was considered a bad thing. Continuing:
“I didn’t make a statement directed towards anyone; I asked a question,” said the student in response to his suspension. “I wasn’t speaking of Hispanics because everyone from other countries needs green cards, and the term “illegal alien” is an actual term that I hear on the news and can find in the dictionary.”
However, though he finds the phrase in the news and the dictionary, at least it doesn't in on official documents. Oops:
8 U.S. Code § 1325 - Improper entry by alien
(a) ".... Any alien who (1) enters or attempts to enter the United States (improperly)..."
(b) Any alien who is apprehended while entering (or attempting to enter) the United States at (an undesignated place)"....
Just a guess: lawmakers were not referring to little green men, sometimes referred to as "greys," when they composed the U.S. Code.
Filling out the story
In addition to the three-day suspension, his record could be damaged as he aims to secure an athletic scholarship for college. He is actively involved in school clubs, track, and cross country.
“Because of his question, our son was disciplined and given THREE days OUT of school suspension for ‘racism,’” wrote his mother in the email. “He is devastated and concerned that the racism label on his school record will harm his future goal of receiving a track scholarship. We are concerned that he will fall behind in his classes due to being absent for three consecutive days.”
Leah said the assistant principal has so far refused to remove the infraction from her son’s record. The family is working with an attorney to remedy the situation so it doesn’t harm his future, and they expect more developments in the days ahead.
Meanwhile, State Senator Steve Jarvis, R-Davidson, said he contacted the school district’s superintendent to make him aware of the situation. Jarvis told the Carolina Journal that while he informed top officials of the issue and urged officials to look for the best outcome, he did not take a stance on what they should do because he wasn’t there to understand all sides of the story.
“I do not see that that would be an offensive statement, just in getting clarification,” said Jarvis. “But there again, I don’t know. I don’t know the situation of this particular incident.”
An official at Davidson County Schools said the district could not provide details on a student matter. The student handbook says that “schools may place restrictions on a student’s right to free speech when the speech is obscene, abusive, promoting illegal drug use, or is reasonably expected to cause a substantial disruption to the school day.”
This case involves speech codes, but also immigration. In April of 2019, before conditions at the border and at the workplace had deteriorated to such a disturbing degree, David Frum recognized
Without immigration restrictions, there are no national borders. Without national borders, there are no nation-states. Without nation-states, there are no electorates. Without electorates, there is no democracy. If liberals insist that only fascists will enforce borders, then voters will hire fascists to do the job liberals refuse to do.
The parallel would be that if liberals insist on policing speech in schools, then conservatives who want the public sector to wither to "the size where we can drown it in the bathtub" (except, of course, when it comes to policing the uterus). will be invigorated. And so
State legislators have propelled school choice forward in North Carolina to give parents and students alternative education options. More than 72,000 applications flooded the Opportunity Scholarship program this February in record-breaking demand, and additional funds will likely expand the program’s budget due to the surging demand.
School choice, fundamentally a handout to the wealthy at the expense of the working class and the poor, is a terrible idea. Yet it gains steam, especially where an unforced error of enforcing extreme wokeism blinds administrators and some officials to common sense.
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