RC school headmaster resigns after requiring black student to kneel during apology

Probably one of the more vivid displays lately of casual or systemic racism. The incident happened last month at a Catholic school in Long Island.

Quote:

In an interview with CNN on Tuesday, Paul said she noticed her son seemed sad after school one day late last month. When she asked him what happened, he told her he'd been sent to the headmaster's office for working on an assignment in his Literature class during designated reading time. Paul said her son's teacher took the assignment, tore it up, and brought her son to the headmaster's office. Once there, Paul said, the headmaster told her son to kneel before the teacher in apology. "I was filled with all different types of emotion," Paul said. When the headmaster called a few days later to discuss dates for her son's first communion, Paul said she brought it up. "I asked him what happened," she said. "He began to tell me a story about an African family that attended the school many years ago." The headmaster, according to Paul, told her about a former student whose father had once told him to bow when apologizing, calling it "the Nigerian way." "I was just at a loss for words," Paul, who along with her son is Black and of Haitian descent, told CNN. "I didn't understand the relevance." "I was really sad and disappointed," she said, adding that she went to the school to speak with the headmaster a few days later. "I was hoping to get through to him," she said. In his office, the headmaster told the story again, Paul said. "This time, it was 'the African way.'" She said she tried to convey to the headmaster that he'd "humiliated and degraded my son," but said she didn't feel heard. "He has become extremely quiet," she said Tuesday. "His interactions with everyone -- family, friends -- has changed. He's sad. He has questions. He's just trying to cope with this."

While old white people very often have no compunction about dividing themselves and each other up by nationality-treated-as-ethnicity, to many of them, black people are just black people. That certainly seems to have been the case with this person; because once "many years ago" he saw a single African man tell his son that bowing while apologizing was "the Nigerian way", and in his mind this eventually was conflated with kneeling and became the just generally "African" way, which made it a completely appropriate thing to demand of any black child.

via International Skeptics Forum https://ift.tt/3tSJFPU