A 15-year-old in South Carolina is suing her school district for violating her civil rights after a teacher assaulted her in the hallway for refusing to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
Marissa Barnwell, a Black honor roll student at River Bluff High School, was walking to her classroom on November 29, 2022 — her birthday — when a teacher, Nicole Livingston, grabbed her and held her against a wall while the pledge was being recited.
Livingston, whom Barnwell does not have a class with, demanded that Barnwell stop walking and acknowledge the pledge, according to the lawsuit, which lists the teacher and the state Department of Education as co-defendants. Livingston then sent Barnwell to the principal’s office to face further discipline.
Although other students were walking in the hallway and not reciting the pledge, Barnwell was the only student targeted, the lawsuit notes. Barnwell was the only Black student in the hallway, and the school is predominately white.
After discussing the situation with Barnwell, the principal decided against punishing her and agreed to watch security camera footage of the attack. Barnwell’s mother later called the school, in tears, after learning that her daughter had been targeted.
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In high school I got yelled at by a teaching assistant for not saying the pledge. He was a bald man, older than the teacher, and shorter than me. The teacher had to tell him to calm down and that it isn’t required. Because it isn’t, by law, which I knew already lmao.
As a non-American, the pledge seems bizarre. How can anyone not see this as creepy brainwashing?
It IS incredibly bizarre. It’s so fucking creepy. And outside the most insane chuds you can even get most conservatives to agree by saying something like “Can you imagine what we would think if Iranian children had to do that?”
Yeah it really seems completely wild. Like you have a forced prayer every day to a bourgeois state and every time I bring it up with a yank they say some dumb shit like well you don’t technically have to say the pledge if you don’t want to so it’s ok - like mfs really think just because there’s a loophole you can escape through if you’re brave enough that this type of shit doesn’t have a completely toxic effect on the formulation of brains
And like, you can get out of saying it but even if you can’t get in actual trouble for it there’s a good chance an adult will fucking shout at you for it.
By the way, outside of “look out for that bus” and similar messages, yelling at a child is never acceptable, and doing it should disqualify you from ever working with children ever again. Imagine being an adult with such poor control over your emotions that you would angrily yell at a child. It’s fucking embarrassing.
Canada here, we had to stand for the national antemat the start of each day until high school. I mean, you didn’t have to but there was immense pressure to. From what I’ve heard that was phased out pretty close to when I graduated. I think the main purpose was to blast some music that kids had to stand silently for at the start of an elementary school day to signal them to stfu its learning time. Which makes some sense, but I’m sure could be refined quite a bit.
I got yelled at by a couple different teachers in high school. We also had this monthly class called advisory and they’d sometimes use it to feed us nationalist propaganda where they called America the greatest country on earth. I remember one time we had to watch a video made by JROTC teachers or something about how to honor dead troops, and one of the ways they listed was to say the pledge every day. So we did the pledge for the second time that day, this time literally everyone feeling pressured to get up for it
Blue town btw, and it’s not like I went to hs after 9/11 or something like some people here, I graduated in 2021!
Imagine having such poor control over your emotions as an adult that you’d yell at a child in anger. Fucking embarrassing.
It’s never acceptable and should get you banned from ever working with children in the future, or maybe you need to take anger management classes and have a psychiatrist okay you.
Tbf they were just like “stand up!” in a commanding voice, idk if the way I worded it made it sound like they were screaming insults at me but it definitely made me feel uncomfortable with sitting from then on
Also, my friend in another one my classes, who was black, wouldn’t stand and the teacher was like “you wanna be Colin Kaepernick, go ahead, doesn’t change the fact America is the most racially inclusive country”
I know I replied to you already but I think your position that “if you yell once, you should be banned forever” is a bit extreme. There’s a lot of circumstances that go into things and tbh teachers are still humans with human limits. Like I described my situation in the other post but idk have you ever worked with kids? Particularly large groups of them? I only remember losing my temper on one induvial child once, and I handled that by apologizing after like I described in my other post (the kid did not give a single fuck btw, its actually a cute story but I wont get into it), but I had to raise my voice at the group at a whole to like coral them pretty frequently, especially once the stress of the new boss came in.
I agree that it should be avoided but there’s issues of like, management and shit that can cause shit to get out of control in ways I dont think you’d understand unless you’ve worked with kids.
Land of the free where you will be beaten until you recite the brainwashing chant
Honestly the nerve center of my politics is still the fact that i loathe the performative patriotism of American society instead of an actual ideology
I was a lib in high school, I usually did the pledge but I decided to sit it out one day freshman year. Teachers didn’t do anything but fellow students accused me of being a communist all day, I was really just curious what would happen if I exercised my freedom of speech lol.
I was in high school from 01 to 05 and I remember sitting down for the pledge a bunch of times and no one batting an eye which is odd because it was the heyday of 9/11 and the spring of american neo-fascism blooming. Maybe the school didn’t want the :freeze-peach: headache.
I wore a CCCP shirt in high-school, then 9/11 happened and I got harassed for it. Luckily I was friends with skaters and punks who were willing to throw down. I stopped doing the pledge in junior year. I got some mean looks and some verbal harassment but nobody fucked with me directly. It helps to have friends that are down to scrap.
