And also, you have to go back.
Hats,
as Racked explored earlier this year, have historically signaled that the
wearer is part of a team — and when is the desire to belong more acute than in
middle school? Of course, teams don't exist without opponents, and for some to
feel like they're on the inside, others need to be left out.
It was clear to one mother, who asked to remain anonymous, who fell into the latter category and who didn't when she picked her son up from his middle-school trip to DC: "Our school district has a good amount of minorities in it, but we were all stunned. Every single white kid besides maybe one or two walked off the bus with a red hat on," she said.
While she, her husband, and their children were all born in the United States, they are Muslim-American and not white, and the hats were just the most recent and most visible symbol of a racial divide that, she says, her son has seen escalate since November.
"I think 12-year-old boys use it as a form of bullying — identifying themselves as part of this group to the exclusion of others just for the fun of it. That's what it seemed like to me," she says. "Us over here with the red hats, and you over there… you're not even an individual anymore. Now you're just one of the brown kids and you're not one of us."
It was clear to one mother, who asked to remain anonymous, who fell into the latter category and who didn't when she picked her son up from his middle-school trip to DC: "Our school district has a good amount of minorities in it, but we were all stunned. Every single white kid besides maybe one or two walked off the bus with a red hat on," she said.
While she, her husband, and their children were all born in the United States, they are Muslim-American and not white, and the hats were just the most recent and most visible symbol of a racial divide that, she says, her son has seen escalate since November.
"I think 12-year-old boys use it as a form of bullying — identifying themselves as part of this group to the exclusion of others just for the fun of it. That's what it seemed like to me," she says. "Us over here with the red hats, and you over there… you're not even an individual anymore. Now you're just one of the brown kids and you're not one of us."
The God-Emperor's winning never ends. The Red Hats are the sans
cullottes of the 21st century. Never forget that homogeneous nations are
usually derived from heterogeneous empires.
You may not like these developments. You may think that they are cruel, racist, and wrong. And your opinion of that matters about as much as your opinion of a melon striking the pavement after being dropped from 100 meters high. Civic nationalism has observably failed. The melting pot was always a propagandistic lie. Human nature did not change when the Declaration of Independence was written, and in any event, it was not written for the 80 million post-1965 invaders of America.
You may not like these developments. You may think that they are cruel, racist, and wrong. And your opinion of that matters about as much as your opinion of a melon striking the pavement after being dropped from 100 meters high. Civic nationalism has observably failed. The melting pot was always a propagandistic lie. Human nature did not change when the Declaration of Independence was written, and in any event, it was not written for the 80 million post-1965 invaders of America.
