Racism in High School.

Live Oaks High School - where students were told not to wear the American flag on Cinco de Mayo - has a bona fide racist group - MECHA.:

Mr. Boden and Mr. Rodriguez preside over a high school with various clubs and organizations. As administrators, they must sanction these activities. There is the Anime Club, the Asian Student Union, the Black Student Union, the Drama Guild, the Chess Club, MEChA, the Patriot Club, and a raft of other extracurricular activities from which student can chose to participate. Shockingly, one of these groups is a borderline hate group that proclaims racial supremacy. While it may come as a shock to some of our more “progressive” readers, the oppressors are not the Patriot Club, but the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán, or MEChA. Live Oak High’s Web site claims that the group has certain goals:

MECHA stands for Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (Chicano Student Movement of Aztlán). Aztlán was the homeland of the Mexicas (Mexicas is the root word of Chicano), also known as the people of the earth, who wandered from Aztlán to Tenochtitlan. Aztlán is believed to be located in the southern US and northern Mexico.

The group was [originally] formed to address issues in the Chicano movement of 1969 such as the need for better school conditions (resources, facilities), to learn Mexican studies, have more Mexican teachers, and higher expectations for Mexican students versus encouraging them to go to trade schools or for young Chicanas to stay at home.

And all of this is true — but it is not all of the truth, and there are clear warning signs for anyone paying the least bit of attention. MEChA’s militaristic logo is an eagle with a brutal obsidian-bladed Aztec war club called a Huitzauhqui in one claw and a lit stick of dynamite in the other. Is such violent symbolism an indicator that the group might need to be vetted a bit further? Reasonable people would think so.

Critics of MEChA claim that the organization is little more than a racial supremacist group seeking to carve out a country of their own, to be inhabited by their own race.

Wait a minute — that wasn’t from critics; it was a direct quote from the official MEChA website:

As Chicanas and Chicanos of Aztlán, we are a nationalist movement of Indigenous Gente that lay claim to the land that is ours by birthright. As a nationalist movement we seek to free our people from the exploitation of an oppressive society that occupies our land. Thus, the principle of nationalism serves to preserve the cultural traditions of La Familia de La Raza and promotes our identity as a Chicana/Chicano Gente.

MEChA is a paranoid, racist, nationalist group that seeks to claim northern Mexico and the southwestern United States as a nation called Aztlán. Principal Borden and Assistant Principal Rodriguez have allowed their school to be infiltrated by a seditious supremacist group.

Why are they still employed?

Good question.

My sense is that young people - those who came of age in the multi-culti era - are far more racist than they were in my day, when tolerance and equality under the law was the ideological norm.  Given the fact that the law has tolerated these kind of racist groups, it is hardly surprising that "white" kids are kicking back by paying kind with kind. That, unfortunately, undermines the dream of a race-blind society that was supposed to be the goal of the Civil Rights movement.