Democracy for Vancouver

We may be better than West Virginia or Pennsylvania, but we’ve got racist assholes out here in the Pac NW, too:

A substitute teacher accused of calling two students of South Asian descent “terrorists” last week in a Camas High School classroom will not work in the Camas district again, officials said on Thursday.

The school district wrapped up an investigation of veteran substitute Norman Krasne and will forward its report to the Office of Professional Practices in the state superintendent’s office, officials said.

District leaders also issued a public apology to the pair of sophomores, who were back in school on Thursday.
…
The two boys, Amit Teja and Simran Dhillon, both of Indian descent, had quickly reported to the school principal’s office that Krasne told them during a class project that they were “terrorists,” more prone to blow up hotels than to research them.

Teachers like this lead to presidents like this:

And atrocities like these:

Forty years after MLK’s assassination and we are still a nation of bitter, tiny-minded white people.

When Obama captured the nomination last week, I choked up, much to the amusement of L. He’s been an Obama supporter since Day One (though only 9, he feels it’s time for someone other than a white guy to be president, and Hillary didn’t fit the bill since she voted for the war). But though he’s read about civil rights and Jim Crow and Little Rock and Selma in his Time for Kids at school, he lives in a time and a community where no one thinks twice about his inviting his friend D. to a Seahawks game or his birthday party.

I, on the other hand, grew up in a South where I had to rescind my invitation to my friend Devonne to swim at our Country Club after introducing her to my mother, who hadn’t realized she was, well, black. My high school of 2,200 was half African American, and the casual racism in everything from class assignments to club participation was appalling to me even then.

But I was a hopeful adolescent, and if you’d have asked me back then, I would have said, sure, there’s a chance I’ll see an African American president in my lifetime. But I would have believed a woman would make it first, solely based on my own sheltered experience as an upper-middle class white girl in a highly stratified small Florida town.

So Obama’s nomination means a lot, not just in the macro but right down to my happiness for Devonne and all of my black friends over the years who I knew had maybe five or ten percent of the opportunities I was given in life, simply by virtue of my lily-whiteness.

So, while that asshole substitute teacher Krasne in Camas may have been able to inoculate his students with his poisonous racism over the course of his career, his power to do evil will be dwarfed by the good that will come of an Obama presidency. Not only will African Americans finally have the chance to feel at home in their own country, but ignorant whites - and even a few old Jews* - will have their eyes opened to the common humanity and decency of all races, and douchebags like Krasne will finally receive the scorn they are long past due.

*I’m a good portion Jewish, so please don’t call me anti-semitic.