7 Comments

Excellent job lining up the facts and the unknowns and showing how this case, in miniature, represents a society-wide rupture in our basic notions of truth and fairness. I appreciate what a good and level-headed writer you are.

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A wonderfully balanced and ethically nuanced job of examining this situation. You will no doubt Helen be punished and vilified accordingly by the ideologues in all camps who find that such a rational balanced analysis of material reality makes them - "feel unsafe" or "triggered" or "discriminated against" or "whatever?" : /

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Thank you Helen, for your objectivity. The Oklahoma trans student/bathroom incident occurred a few miles away from me. This incident you discuss in this post certainly aligns with that incident.

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Love this even though you’re not reassuring. You write “An objective reality exists about this incident and the two girls can only be helped by responsible adults caring about what is true, investigating that reality seriously . . . “ Besides the general public having no patience to wait for an investigation (or even seeing one in its original form),

few people believe in objective reality anymore.

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I would say without I hope confirming my own biases you (Helen) "hit it on the head" it takes patience to hold and not jump. That can be hard work say, if you are agitated, primed by a completely unrelated event, attention deprived. Let the facts speak first or, have your opinion if you must but reserve the judgement.

This takes practice and to my mind, should be taught sometime in early learning. When you see how many different ways a mind can be fooled, take optical illusions, how we misinterpret an action by another for examples... "oh sorry I thought..." Mundane, trivial mistakes become bloody assaults in road rage incidents... it's everywhere and not trivial but our little lives which are ours.

"On guard!" I say.

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You still figure that you have anything relevant to say anywhere?

How much are you being paid by monied interests Helen? And Liberal you? LOL

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A well balanced article, nicely done. I fully agree that we shouldn't spin the story in order to fit it into a particular political narrative. It seems highly likely that racial tensions didn't cause this particular incident.

However, I don't want to fully dismiss the possibility that this incident could fit into a general trend. Teachers are less willing to discipline a Black student when they act aggressively(1). One may find that this has adverse effects on the student's behaviour. This incident might still have happened if the teachers were working within a colourblind framework, but I suspect incidents like this would be less frequent.

(1) I could be totally misremembering something here, don't quote me on this factoid.

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