In northwest Mississippi relatives of high school students who cheered very briefly at graduation were served arrest warrants and are scheduled to appear in court next Monday (June 8).
Threat of $500 fine plus of course court costs. This is like in Ferguson: arrests and fines for normal human behavior.
The arrests are of course ridiculous and just happen to be of Black people.
Call School Superintendent Jay Foster to protest: 662-562-4897 Email: jfoster@senatobiaschools.com
The local news story is at http://wreg.com/...
8:30 AM PT: A friend of mine close to this story told me that there is a back-story that is important, but I don't have the details yet.
I will update this post when I do.
3:42 PM PT: Think progress is now featuring this story, with an emphasis on the school to prison pipeline in Mississippi and how students can be arrested for dress code violations (!). See: http://thinkprogress.org/...
The promised backstory is not very revealing: just that the district has been trying for years to hold "orderly" graduation ceremonies. I can think of many, many different ways of planning a ceremony that does not involve arresting people who cheer.
Indeed, what we have here is the confusion of a social gaffe for a crime. And that is a very serious and pathological confusion. What is the pathology? Racism enforced via a police-state.