Why would a high school teacher try to crush the dreams of a child? He doesn’t like Barack Obama.
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PoliticalBlindspot.com has reported that the suspension of a teacher who was dismissed for saying, “America does not need another black president” – to a student who voiced his ambition to one day become President – has been upheld unanimously by a five-member school board.
Gil Voigt, a science teacher from Fairfield, Ohio, was suspended in December for making the comment, his second reprimand since a 2008 reprimand for “inappropriate racial remarks”. Both the superintendent of Fairfield City Schools and the board president have said that the suspension is the first step in the process to fire Voigt, and the school board’s decision now all but ensures his termination.
While I’m all for introducing different viewpoints on history within schools, what Voigt said crosses a line of meanness towards a kid – a freshman in high school – who aspires to the highest office in this country. We can talk about racism, both from Voigt and the way it’s institutionalized within our society, and how young black men are expected to enter prison rather than college, law school, or the government. But at its’ core, this was an especially rotten comment from someone who’s supposed to be a positive influence on kids. Not only that, but it’s an alienating kind of argument: one that narrows the definition of what a “good president” looks like, thus making it harder for people like Voigt to find someone they actually like holding positions of power within government.
Politics is a dirty business, and in recent years, the fine line between ‘passion’ and ‘vitirol’ has been blurred to a permanent gray area. But there’s a huge difference between being heated in your political beliefs and being downright cruel to an ambitious fourteen-year old. If there is ever a case to be made to keep politics out of the classroom, then this is the shining example: the inability of a man who holds considerable influence over children to distinguish hated political figures from other people who happen to be of the same ethnicity.
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Barack Obama’s presidency has been an up-and-down process: ‘par for the course’ isn’t a great rallying cry, but the truth is, this is what most presidents aspire to. Nevertheless, it’s easy to understand disappointment and anger at Obama’s decisions on a daily basis – you voted for him and you still don’t have a job, you didn’t vote for him and your taxes went up, you never voted for him because you think he’s a socialist – all of these are pretty valid reasons not to support the President.
The problem arises when one simply can’t distinguish other African American politicians from Barack Obama. It happens all of the time in both liberal and conservative media when speaking about Democratic politicians, such as Cory Booker – but right now, the Republican Party has influential African Americans who could one day aspire to the highest office in the land: Senator Tim Scott, a South Carolina Republican, is currently the only African American serving in the United States Senate. Condoleeza Rice was perhaps the most influential member of the Bush administration and has been repeatedly mentioned as a possible Republican candidate for president. Herman Cain, two years ago, mounted the first competitive campaign for the Republican presidential nomination by an African American in history. Dr. Ben Carson is quickly becoming one of the most popular figures in the conservative movement today.
Rarely do I agree with any of them. But in the same way it would be foolish to compare Andrew Jackson to Bill Clinton, or Strom Thurmond to Ted Kennedy, based solely on the fact that they are white men, it’s asinine to compare prominent neoconservatives and Tea Party Republicans to Barack Obama because they all happen to be African Americans. It also runs the risk of passing up a truly electrifying candidate based purely on prejudice. It’s a sincere worry that if Obama had been abject failure of a president (not just to conservatives, but to everyone – a one-term president bound to go down in the annals of history as a 21st century Herbert Hoover), we could have seen the last African American or “minority” president for a long, long time. Which, at the very core, is why Voigt’s comments were so cruel.
No one, especially a child, deserves to be crushed the way Gil Voigt tried to destroy his student. And for the sake of children everywhere, who learn from the example set by their parents and teachers, it would be a travesty if he ever works with children again.
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Credit—Photo/Trevor Manteranch