The Authentic Eclectic

Kids Should Absolutely Disrespect the President

If we want to fight oppression and prevent an authoritarian dictatorship.

I like Walter Rhein. He seems like a good-hearted person and I like most of the articles I’ve read from him. A recent one, though, struck me as painfully misjudged, enough that I want to talk through the implications in a full article rather than just in the comments section.

Here is his piece:

And here is the part where my heart truly sank:

Now kids are trotting around in the hallways chanting, “Let’s go Brandon!”

Is that okay?

When schools allow kids to get away with that behavior, they’re teaching that it’s okay to disrespect the president. They’re teaching that it’s okay to disrespect the nation.

I sympathize with why Rhein wrote this piece and why he’s so passionate about his stance. He’s talking about an incident that upset his young daughter, and sees a world where she will grow up being afraid of the people around her. Nothing makes us so fierce as the desire to protect the ones we love.

Now, I’m not a parent — but I have been a young daughter scared of the people around her.

My mother is ethnically Han Chinese, an immigrant from a working-class family in Hong Kong. She came to America as a high school student by herself and never left.

Like most people who differ from this country’s majority phenotypes, I came into racial awareness fairly young, and by junior high, I was hearing panicked rhetoric about the “Rising Dragon” of China. The American government has stoked fear and hatred of China and her people since long before Trump. Never mind the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, China has been perceived as economically threatening to the United States since at least 2005.

I’ve been afraid of a war with China and what it would mean for my family, both here and overseas, since my early teens. When I was younger, I was afraid that, like people from Japan during World War II, every family with Chinese ancestry in America would be put into camps under the guise of preventing espionage. Of course, whenever I tell this story, the response I get is, “That would never happen today!”

A few years ago, a friend who is a Marine veteran kindly let me know that if it did happen, it would be for the greater good and the safety of the nation. I think most conservatives, and probably even a fair number of unaffected liberals, would agree with him and not do a damn thing to stop it.

And with today’s conservatives going full tilt into authoritarianism, ripping immigrant kids from their families and putting them in cages, denying police brutality or systemic racism as problems entirely — under a more polished leader than Trump, it’s no longer out of the question that America would attempt to strip an ethnic group of their rights, should our government go to war with their nation of origin.

In fact, it already happened recently, if more covertly, to people in America who immigrated from or who are the descendants of immigrants from “the Middle East.” Internment camps might be off the table these days, but intense surveillance and restrictions on movement, including house arrest, would be easy enough to pass.

I have never felt safe in America. I have never felt this nation to be Home.

So I, when I was young and already wary of the government and its blindly obedient citizenry, should have had the right to say, “Fuck the president” without fear of punishment. Fuck George W. Bush. Emphatically, fuck Franklin D. Roosevelt. (Fuck China’s government while we’re at it, but that’s beyond the scope of this essay.)

Every single hurt child in this nation should have had the right during the last four years to say, “Fuck Donald Trump” without fear of being punished.

The kid whose parent was shot and killed by the police. The kid whose undocumented parent was deported. The kid whose parent died from COVID. The kid who showed up to a school with swastikas spray painted on the walls. The kid who went hungry while billionaires’ profits surge. The kid who gasped from asthma while unregulated industries pumped smog into the air. The kid sent to a “conversion” camp for being queer.

And because I firmly believe in the right of these children and adolescents to express their pain and anger in extreme language without punishment, I cannot in good conscience endorse the punishment of children saying, “Fuck Joe Biden,” whether the language is coded or explicit, even if profanity against the president is sometimes a guise for something else, even if it’s only being said because they heard it from their parents.

An adult at school can and should have a conversation with any of these kids about what is being said, and why. They deserve to be understood and guided, though, rather than punished. The former offers opportunity for growth; the latter is more likely to produce resentment and reluctant obedience at best.

It is crucial that kids grow up knowing that they do not owe deference or respect to anyone on the basis of office or some claim to authority, rather than for leadership that helps all people lead better lives. Nor should children be compelled to be patriots. Believing that respect and obedience must be paid to an authority such as the president or that loyalty is owed to a nation is at the heart of authoritarianism and dictatorships.

To punish children who disrespect the president and the nation is to teach them that respect and loyalty come before preservation of human rights against the imposition of the state. Make no mistake, authoritarians will take advantage of any opening we give them to restrict our ability to fight back.

We cannot tell children they have to respect the president when it’s liberals or progressives in power, but not if it’s conservatives. This is not even solely a matter of principle and avoiding hypocrisy; it simply will not work because conservatives and authoritarians won’t let it. They still have enough power to impose any well-intentioned efforts to promote safety at the cost of freedom right back upon us when it works in their favor.

Besides… if this sort of thing matters to your decision-making, not every child who chants “Let’s go Brandon” is going to be “white.” Or the “white-adjacent” diaspora from countries in Asia. Or “mixed kids” with ancestors from Europe.

Trump has supporters “of color” under the strictest racialized conditions for who counts, as well.

Rhein further claims:

[Section header] It’s not a matter of free speech

School children are already subject to punishment for using profanities. It is not that much of a stretch to suggest that children that use the language of seditionists should also be punished.

This cannot be stated strongly enough: it is a matter of free speech. The American Constitution explicitly recognizes the right to free speech in part because the authors of the amendment knew that people need to be protected from punishment by the government for language critical of it, else we’d have a nation no better than one ruled by a tyrannical monarchy.

Our political speech, our ability to dissent, no matter how loudly or offensively, is quite possibly the most important kind of speech to be protected.

Without it, we cannot criticize abusive government practices. We cannot criticize the leaders who create such practices, nor the police who enforce them. We cannot even begin to tackle systemic oppression without our political speech being protected from state punishment.

White supremacists have always sought to take away the right to dissent from those they believe to be racially inferior. They have punished it harshly, even violently. We should not hand them another avenue of doing so to our youth.

One can make a case about private schools adopting punishment practices against political speech (although I wouldn’t), but public schools, being a function of the state, should absolutely not.

I understand wanting to protect the feelings and well-being of children. I understand the impulse to believe that punishing all speech that feels threatening to them is an important step to creating a materially safer world to grow up in. I understand not wanting your little girl to grow up as I did, feeling that this nation isn’t home. I don’t want that for her, either.

The trade-off is children’s and adolescents’ ability to dissent to government cruelty. It compromises their ability to even believe that criticism is an option, or to believe that sometimes dissent and disrespect are the right things to do in the face of cruelty and oppression. It opens the door for even harsher punishments once they are adults.

And that is far more dangerous to them than hearing “Let’s go Brandon” or “Fuck Joe Biden” in school halls.

A final note on the educational aspect of this: school punishments are not effective means of behavioral reform — and the point of school punishments should be reform, not just punishment for its own sake. Traditional punishment ends in expulsion, which in this case would mean the state denying a child a public education over politically motivated speech if they refused to stop using it.

We should be trying to teach all children, even and especially the children of white supremacists, to embrace love of humanity and freedom from oppression for all. Punishment will not achieve that. It will not help them develop the intrinsic motivation to respect and care for others. Instead, it will likely entrench them further in following their parents’ path. It’s even more likely that it will incite their parents towards more resistance and violence than we have already seen over efforts towards inclusivity.

I’m not one to advocate bending a knee just to avoid conflict at all costs. Right now, though, we have options other than direct antagonism through school punishment. There are better ways to help kids think critically and manage their emotions. I’d invite you to look up the work being done on alternative methods to punishment at school.

Given the looming threat of widespread, violent civil conflict in our country, we should take those options while we still have the chance.

Edited 1/29/22. Thank you to Lisa Gerard Braun for respectfully challenging me both in the comments and her work here. Though my argument is the same, the dialogue helped me see where I left gaps in explaining my motives, intentions, and beliefs.