On September 14, 2010, President Barack Obama delivered his second education speech to students across the United States of America. Schools all over the nation took time out of the school day to allow students to view this speech welcoming students to the new school year and encouraged them to have a productive year, encouraged them to overcome diversity, and recounted challenges he had as a student.
A couple of days before the speech, notes were sent home to parents throughout the nation giving them the decision to opt out of their child watching the speech. Instead, students whose parents ‘opted’ out of their child viewing the speech, were sent to the library or computer lab. My children’s school participated in the ‘opt-out’ decision.
A couple of questions ran through my mind as I tore up the permission slips. . . 1. What do you tell your children when you make the decision that they should not listen to the President welcome you to a new school year? 2. If McCain was elected President and cared enough to give a speech welcoming students across the nation to a new school year . . . would there still be an ‘opt-out’ option.
One of my daughter’s came home with the first answer to my question, the day of the speech. ‘Guess what?’ She ran in the door saying after school. ‘This girl said that she couldn’t be my friend or play with me anymore because I’m black and her family didn’t vote for President Obama.’ After her father told her a few choice words she should have had for the girl, my daughter said that she told the teacher and he took both the girls in the hallway to explain that skin color shouldn’t have anything to do with how we treat one another. Unfortunately, this didn’t work because today my daughter came home and said that the young lady formed a group of girls against her and even tried to put ‘the black girl’s card’ at the bottom. This is a young lady who interacted with my daughter before ‘the speech.’
It is sad that the election of a black man as President of the United States has caused racial hatred and threats of segregation to rise so dramatically. It is even more upsetting that these feelings are trickling down into the classrooms and playgrounds of our youth . . .shattering their innocence and causing them to deal with these social issues as if they don’t have enough to deal with on a daily basis. There is no way to ‘opt out’ out of the president’s education address without explaining your beliefs and dislikes for the president . . whatever the reasons may be.
The sign of old times . . .stomping a hole in the fight of the civil right movement!!!! Finally, I received the answer to my second question when I posed it on Facebook to my group of friends . . . one response said it best . . . ‘Uh . . . NO!’
