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I’m Heading Straight for the Castle
Black Expulsion is Normative Decorum in Tennessee
Think about the word expulsion. Doesn’t it remind you of expelling, to be expelled or to be kicked out of, common phrase to bad students at school, or ones who act improperly. Doesn’t it give the sense of going to suspension, time out, a type of exile. Somebody was bad, the principal decided, and now these ‘kids’ must suffer removal, either temporary or permanent. They must be separated, or segregated out, from the status quo until they learn to conform.
That is the determinative factor action that occurred in the Tennessee legislature. The supermajority’s goal in the expulsion of Mr. Jones and Mr. Pearson from their classroom by the principal. The white supermajority who expelled them were functioning on a normal system in the expulsion decision, not an abnormal system. The idea of expulsion, institutional expulsion especially, from public life and places of power by interpretations of white people has lasted 200 years plus in Tennessee. That tradition referenced by one of the white leader Cameron Sexton, Republican John Ray Clemmons, Chief Indignant Officer.
Clemmons spoke out with great outrage at the “circus” against these young black men. He was referring to the lack of dignity these black men in using a bullhorn, who had been silenced for two weeks through procedural rules…