Minnesota Teens Banned From Graduation After Flying Confederate Flag

Posted by Trish , Pensito Review at 4:26 AM on June 6, 2008.

Three Minnesota teens learned a big life lesson on graduation day. They weren’t allowed to march with their classmates after sticking a huge Confederate flag in everyone’s face in the school parking lot.

Seniors Dan Fredlin and Justin Thompson, both 18, and Joey Snyder, 17, were suspended and restricted from the diploma ceremony after arriving at John F. Kennedy High School in Bloomington, Minn., Tuesday with the flags affixed to their cars. One of the teens had a flag hoisted on a 20-foot flagpole attached to his truck…

The school’s principal, Ron Simmons, who is black, made the decision to suspend the trio and ban them from the commencement, a decision school district officials affirmed.

“What is not acceptable is driving through the parking lot and waving the Confederate flag for the purpose of inciting a response,” Rick Kaufman, a spokesman for the Bloomington Public School district, told ABC News.

Kaufman cited a pair of state laws to justify the discipline decision, including the students’ willful disruption of the rights of others to an education and their endangerment of students and school property.

At the same time, as Jon reported, plans were unveiled for a huge Confederate flag to be flown by the Sons of Confederate Veterans along the I-4 corridor near Tampa.

The modern-day symbolism of the Confederate flag is a hard concept to express. Jon ended his post, “Time to find a new logo for pride in the South” but the Minnesota teens were hardly demonstrating that. They say that see something non-regional — and much sexier.

Kellie Rezac, a friend of the three suspended seniors, helped organize the unsuccessful protest….

Both Thompson and Rezac acknowledged the opinion of some that the flag is a symbol of hate, but said that there is a group of students in the class who celebrate the Confederate flag as a symbol of some stereotypically Southern lifestyles. “It’s country music, we have a lot of fun, we go mudding,” she said, describing “mudding” as pushing 4×4s off-road.

In popular culture, the Confederate flag has been celebrated — as a hood ornamentation on the General Lee in the television show “The Dukes of Hazzard” for example — but also used to depict racism and racist characters.

“The whole racism thing is a bandwagon idea that everyone jumped on that has very loose wheels,” she said.

Actually honey, to say that flag represents anything but racism — and white privilege borne on the back of the most exploitive, illegitimate, and dishonorable system conceived since the dark ages — is to just skim the surface. The Dukes of Hazzard was a Hollywood image of a South that exists in the minds of people who don’t live here. It’s unfortunate this “makes a better story” version struck a cord with young people like these three in Minnesota.

A festering racism is oozing out of the cracks in our country, just as Barack Obama is emerging as a symbol of a new way, an America 2.0. It’s not surprising that these concealed and unaddressed resentments would work their way to the surface now. The big question is, do we do what we have always done, and bemoan (us) ignorant racist Southerners, or do we face our national shame, our nationwide failing? Only one of these paths leads to the way we all wish these Midwestern three teens had chosen.