The saying goes, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” But what happens if those who remember the past don’t learn from it? Or just don’t care?
Last week, McAdory High School of McCalla, Ala., displayed an enormous banner to a rival football team, the Indians from Pinson Valley High.
The banner read: “Hey Indians, get ready to leave in a Trail of Tears Round 2.”
It took a few days for the principal — not even the students who were responsible — to publicly apologize for the blatant undermining of what he referred to as “horrific atrocities.”
So not only do we have one high school using an entire race of people as its mascot, we also have another school comparing what is essentially genocide to the loss of a football game.
As Adrienne Keene, author of Native Appropriations, points out, this sort of behavior raises many concerns as to how “Native Americans are perceived in American culture.”
More commonly than any other race, it seems, Native Americans are misrepresented or ignored completely in media. Their history is evidently nothing more than a joke.
But the Trail of Tears isn’t the only part of our history we take lightly.
Earlier in that same week, former Gov. Sarah Palin challenged the African-American ideology of slavery, comparing it to the impending consequences of the national debt.
In an interview with Jake Tapper, who asked if she could understand why African-Americans were offended, Palin replied, “I can, if they choose to misinterpret what I’m saying.”
She then said she was using another dictionary definition of slavery, one that, upon further inspection, does not exist.
What she seems to imply is that black people are not smart enough or willing to understand her alternate definition of the historic accounts of inhumanity, which hold little to no bearing on her life.
Slavery didn’t happen so idiot politicians could drive home their points about the national debt, which many of these politicians helped create in the first place. Slavery didn’t happen because politicians, somewhere down the line, would need to make a point.
The Comedy Central show South Park once devoted an episode, “Jared Has Aides,” to the idea that it takes 22.3 years before a tragedy is funny — or, at least, not to be taken seriously.
Unfortunately, these days it seems as though people agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment. High schools students joke about the Trail of Tears, politicians use slavery for discussions about anything but race, and the Holocaust is essentially its own brand of joke.
Inhumanities of this sort are never funny. They’re never to be taken lightly. That’s it.
Even at N.C. State, we see this sort of institutionalized bigotry and disregard for history.
The religious organization, CRU, which is part of a worldwide organization known as Campus Crusade for Christ, finally caught some flak a few years ago for its name.
During the transition from Campus Crusade to CRU, leaders said the name change was meant to signal a broadening of the organization’s mission and to overcome stereotypes — not even because it was offensive.
Members pointed out how frequently people associated Campus Crusade with the Crusades of the Middle Ages.
Then-director of the program, Mike Mehaffie, said, “Our name never had any ties with the crusades of old.”
Well, the modern tea party has nothing to do with the Boston tea party, but the rhetoric forces us to draw comparisons.
Shortening the group name to CRU doesn’t do much either. We know what it’s short for.
This sort of blatant appropriation of historic tragedies occurs far too frequently in our so-called “developed” nation. Sure, we learn about these crimes against humanity, but rather than learn from them, we make them into jokes. We use them as points in irrelevant debates. We name our religious groups after them. It needs to stop.