sadatx

Am I the only one responding who thinks BuDDaH makes a very good POINT?

Look, the PC wave across America (and the world really) has been spawned by misguided liberal guilt in my opinion, so I'm not one to support it. However, there it is and it has shaped certain things in our daily lives. One of them being: The accepted term that institutions use (in general) is African-American and not Black (just like you'll find caucasain over the term white on most forms).

Why? Well it's complicated. But part of the reason boils down to semantics. And this is precisely what most people replying to this thread are arguing over:

SEMANTICS.

However, by arguing over the schools choice of words most of you, as BuDDah said, have "MISSED the point".

We can all argue that we're all American and that most black Americans weren't born in Africa so why use the term African-American blah blah blah.....'til we're all blue in the face (and by the lenght of this thread that's just what we're doing).

But this has little to do with the point. Which is:

THE AWARD AT THE SCHOOL WAS CLEARY INTENDED TO BE GIVEN TO A BLACK STUDENT WHATEVER TERM THEY USED TO DESCRIBE THE STUDENTS RACE.

Why was it meant for black students only? Well BuDDaH probably said it best, but it has a little something to do with the UNIQUELY AMERICAN struggle that black americans have had to endure in this country. Slavery and segregation, while thankfully in the past, did not happen that long ago. And racism, I hope everyone realizes, is still very much present to this day.

Awards, like the one at the school, remind us of the past and help us to see how far we have come. But I'm sorry to say that we are not at the point yet where such awards aren't needed. Although I do believe we are moving forward slowly but surely.

This is why the students were misguided in their protest. However I can't really blame highschool students for thinking that such semantics are so important. They do make a valid point that many people have made before. The term African-American does have many "loopholes" as many of you have pointed out. Yet the term isn't so far off that I think we need to just drop it entirely right now. And, more importantly,

THE STUDENTS CLEARLY DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE DEEPER MEANING OF THE AWARD.

And in the face of that deeper meaning their argument seems childish at best.

I disagree with the schools decision to suspend them. The students should have, instead, been assigned a research paper on the Civil Rights Movement, maybe then they'd begin to understand what this whole mess is really about.