Rod and Karen discuss Facebook group decorum, Shaun King, Dr. Dre apologizes to women, Ashly Madison, Duggars, Raders, Jared Fogle, confederate mascot drama, Straight Outta Compton and sword ratchetness.
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Hearing you read about the school with “Rebels” as their mascot reminded me of my own high school experience. The high school I went to had “Rebels” for our mascot too. Though we didn’t have confederate references in our official mascot (at one point our mascot was a white and blue dog), and despite being a public school in rural New England, there were a handful of people who drew the connection to the Confederacy anyway, and you’d sometimes see one or two pickup trucks with Confederate flags at school sporting events.
While I was in high school there was a petition to change the name that had strong support among the African American community, and this was over a decade before the Charleston shootings. As I was a racially-clueless white nerdy kid at the time, I was vehemently against changing the mascot. To me “Rebels” evoked Luke Skywalker, not Robert E. Lee.
Given that my town is approximately 90% white, the petition predictably proved unsuccessful. Now that I have grown from that racially-clueless white nerdy kid into a slightly-less-racially-clueless white nerdy adult, I now look back on the whole situation with a bit of shame. If the question had come up today, I wouldn’t hesitate to support changing the name, because in hindsight it seems obvious that though the school had distanced itself from confederate imagery, that was probably the original intent of the mascot, regardless.
Thanks for being cool & moderating your group so well. I must’ve missed the scuffle but I’m glad for that.