Made this point before but I think millennials and older really underrate the extent to which younger conservatives experienced the (quite successful!) 2010s school anti-bullying campaigns as a radicalizing and defining event for their politics.
(and zoomers conversely underestimate the extent to which bullying kids over sexual orientation or race was just widely accepted in society and tolerated by authority figures in the 80's, 90's and 00's)
Sure. A bunch of bigoted assholes who had been taught that being a bigoted asshole was Correct and Good suddenly found themselves facing harsh punishments for acting this way in school, and their anger over this simmered into an identity defining political stance.
bsky.app/profile/meze...
It's overall been an incredibly good change imo but my point is that it's important to understand the central role that the backlash plays for reactionaries if you are interested in defeating conservative politics bsky.app/profile/melb...
I think about this a lot and I also don’t think there was a way to avoid this clash- other than never trying to change anything and letting the bigotry continue to flow freely. It feels like every problem in society is up against the violent anger of these people.
not just 'tolerated' - frequently encouraged by teachers or administrators, as ways of applying negative social pressure to queer, atheist, and abused children
I still have vivid memories of a fifth grade teacher (1989-1990) who not only encouraged bullying, but often was the one to think up a demeaning nickname.
Literally my middle school earth science teacher spending no less than 10 minutes a week of class time coming up with new ways to mock my last name because it sounds like an appliance
I still remember my seventh grade PE teacher pointing at one of the special ed buses as it pulled up alongside the soccer field, then pointing to a student and calling, “Hey, [name], your bus is here!” Or the number of teachers who would casually drop the r-word in class.
When I was in grade school there was an older kid who would literally stalk me across the playground, throw me to the ground, punch me repeatedly in the stomach, then walk away. This would happen daily. When I tried to report it the teacher said she was sick of my whining.
Sudden memory of a 7th grade football coach telling us practice was nearly over, no more drills, now we could blow off some steam playing "smear the queer"
The fun part of practice was named after beating up gay people!
I remember my 3rd grade teacher pointing out my speech impediment in front of the class, I couldn't make the TH sound. I guess it wasn't severe enough to recommend me to speech classes or try to help me, just enough to publicly shame me.
8th grade teacher and principal, at a parochial school; also very sexist. My parents pulled me out and sent me to public school. Then we moved and practically the whole school was like him, with a few notably excellent exceptions.
Second grade for me! Teacher singled me out as a scapegoat to be bullied, and it didn't stop until I moved in seventh grade.
The reason for being singled out is that I was often zoned out (traumatized, for other reasons).
Oddly enough, it was a fifth grade teacher who suggested a demeaning nickname I could use on a bully who had been pestering me on the bus, and it worked. Might have been the best single piece of advice I got from a teacher in grade school. She was the bully's teacher, too.
This is the point my kids just didn't believe. I saw a PE teacher check to see which kid was having his head smacked into a corner by a football player. And then walked away.
Teachers use bullies to punish students the teachers can't punish any other way.
I remember once in ‘99 my locker was searched for drugs. The admin doing the searching wanted me to explain why I had a copy of Nietzsche’s The Gay Science and was visibly relieved when I explained that’s not what gay meant back then.
Like bro our fire alarms don’t work why do you care about this?
The way conservatives retaliate for received cultural slights is really incredible. They'll devote so much time and energy, nearly their entire lives to destroying the thing that told them "no" at some point in childhood
My high school was successfully sued by the ACLU in the late 90s for teachers openly engaging in anti-gay harassment of students, and those teachers were still there and in charge of their departments a couple years later when I showed up, and one of them was still gleefully on his bullshit
In the early 80s, an English teacher (not even *my* English teacher) stopped me in the hall and suggested that I ask the drama teacher to teach me “how to walk like a man.”
My first grade teacher hated me and frequently put her hands on me and gave me punishments because I “didn’t listen”.
I’ve been 75% deaf since infancy, a concept this grown woman in probably her 60s simply couldn’t grok in 1985.
Not much changed by the 2000s. I moved schools because the teachers refused to accept that I wasn’t just ignoring them because I was “naughty”, but that I had an auditory processing disorder and their words literally weren’t hitting my conscious brain. Even had a professional come in and explain!
In "technology" class (what older people called shop class and what younger people probably call "big old factory machine class") the teacher routinely insinuated that I was a girl (derogatory) because my hair was kinda long.
Needless to say there were no girls in the class.
Remembering when “zero-tolerance” policies showed up in the mid-nineties, because administrators were too lazy to do even a modicum of work to determine who the aggressor was and so if you were the victim of bullying you were probably going to be punished because you were “involved in a fight”
All this did was encourage fights. If you get hit by a bully, you're going to get suspended anyway, so why not get some blows in?
Zero tolerance made everything worse.
I was once thrown into a trash can by my teacher, he took my art book and shared it with the class and mocked me for an "obvious" crush on someone.
Also another teacher openly mocked me and took personal offense when I pointed out my homework was partly destroyed by my cat.
My Kindergarten teacher beat and abused me, and that was a cue to the other kids to go ahead and mess with me as well. Still honestly dealing with that decades later and don't think I'll get treatment in time before I start hitting "Lost Cause" territory.
It's "too late: and you're a "lost cause" when you're literally dead. There is literally hope where there is life. Don't believe anyone trying to tell you otherwise.
