High School Politics: A Change in the Weather
After the presidential election, the tension in the nation has showed up everywhere — even in the local high school
By Molly Duffy
After the presidential election, some students at Kennedy High School in Cedar Rapids began parking their pickup trucks, Chevys and Fords, in a row outside the building, along a sidewalk where other students walked past. They hoisted American flags from the truck beds. As a result, some were called racist, sexist, and white supremacists.
For Will Brouwers, a tall and lanky 17-year-old student at Kennedy, the labels were hurtful. And, he says, wrong.
He parked his truck next to the others on Fridays because he thought “it looked cool.” Mostly, he wanted to find a small group of friends in a school he said seems full of “big cliques.”
When other students started to interpret the line of flag-flying trucks as confrontational, Will wanted to say that wasn’t his intent.
In fact, he painted the term “pro-diversity” on a large piece of particle board and started placing it on the hood of the truck in the mornings. Most days, he would find it blown off his truck — from the weather, maybe — or shoved underneath the body of the car. Once, someone else in the truck line heard a student bragging about knocking it off the car.
“We could have been something they vented their anger, and especially their fear, on,” Will said. The flag, he added, is a representation of America, and, “We don’t know where America is going.”
Donald Trump’s election in November prompted strong emotional responses across the nation, as well as some tense exchanges between friends, families and classmates. As Kennedy High Principal Jason Kline pointed out, high schools are in many ways a microcosm of the current climate. It didn’t surprise him to see that angst in his school of about 1,800 students.
“It wasn’t mass chaos. It was individuals who are really, really into politics — and they just went a little too far,” Kline said. “Which, you know, it’s not unusual for teenagers to do. But things were really supercharged after the election. That month after the election, it was really just pins and needles.”
Changed Atmosphere
After Nov. 8, the atmosphere changed, Kline said.
It had been quiet during the campaigns, as students seemed unimpressed with both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. But after the vote, teenagers started “becoming enraged” at derogatory comments aimed at Clinton, Kline said, while others felt beaten down by students’ negative views of Trump.
“It was not like things I had noticed previously in my career,” said Kline, who has been a high school administrator for nine years, four of which have been at Kennedy.
Standing together in similar cowboy boots one Wednesday after school, the students who drive the trucks said they didn’t set out to send a message. When the backlash started, they told people they were supporting the troops. Once, someone flew a Confederate flag. But that wasn’t them, they said.
Other rumors circulated that a student had raised his hand in a Nazi salute one morning before school, said Nathan Sheeley, 18, who edited the school’s news magazine and graduated in May. On Snapchat, a social media platform, someone wrote derogatory, racist comments about another student.
“It’s been really disappointing,” Nathan said about a week before graduation. “In my years at Kennedy, I’d never seen anything like that.”
As is the case in many high schools, the majority of Kennedy High students don’t identify themselves as conservative or Republican. Those who openly do, such as Nathan, said they feel they became something of a target, as fears about Trump’s presidency mounted.
Letter from the Editor
In December, Nathan published a letter from the editor headlined “Check your Racism” — a response to classmates’ calls for white students to “check their privilege.” In the piece, he argued that telling white people as a group to check their privilege — inherent advantages associated with being of the majority race or gender — is racist.
It was published online on an evening just before classes let out for winter break. Almost immediately, Nathan said, other students were posting about the column on Twitter, saying it had white supremacist undertones.
The first tweet Nathan saw was posted by a student who had organized a walkout in the wake of the election, Afnan Elsheikh. The outspoken Muslim teenager also was a member the magazine’s editorial staff. She later resigned.
“It was one of those moments where I got hot all over, almost,” said Nathan, who saw the tweet after soccer practice. “I was shocked. I knew there were at least 400 people who just saw this, and I thought, ‘This isn’t good for me.’ ”
Letters to the editor poured in.
“You haven’t had to face any adversity due to the fact you are a white man in an upper-middle-class family,” one black student wrote. “ … Pretending that white privilege doesn’t exist won’t help get rid of it, but you probably wouldn’t want it to stop because it directly benefits you.”
Another student wrote: “People like to pretend that women are treated the same as men, but the fact of the matter is, we’ve only recently began to possess basic human rights.”
Nathan wrote a response, too.
While his liberal classmates argued that teen pregnancy and crime rates among African-Americans are evidence of white privilege, he countered that such thinking only preaches “excuses and falsehoods.” The issue, he wrote, is “culture.”
“This is not an opinion, this cannot be debated, it’s a fact proven with statistical evidence,” he wrote. “White privilege is an illusion, and a racist explanation to suffocate white conservatives and systematically destroy the meritocracy that America was founded upon.”
Looking back, he said he wished he would have shifted his tone.
“I would make it less edgy, less controversial,” he said, noting he still believes in the overall message of the piece.
He said he’s become resolved to the fact that many of his classmates might only remember him for those columns and there’s not much he can do to change that.
Dealing With Friction
The debate that took place in the pages of the news magazine was encouraging to Kline. And the students in the truck line — who had to arrive at least 30 minutes early to school to claim their parking spots — showed dedication. To the principal, it was evidence students cared about politics and recognized their civic responsibility.
“That is vitally important, so if it means we have to have a little bit of friction — OK, we can deal with the friction,” Kline said. “I would rather not have an apathetic group of students. I would much rather have a group that’s engaged — we just have to engage them in the right way.”
In many ways, today’s political discourse is an opportunity for school administrators and teachers, he said.
“It’s hard because within our regular political discourse, there is an acceptable response — or at least it seems acceptable — to label a policy position or even a political position as ‘racist.’ When kids hear that, they apply it,” Kline said. “ … I think that’s where we struggle a little bit because the examples out there aren’t always great.”
While political conversations didn’t get out of hand for the vast majority of students, Kline met with a handful of students — trying to explain how their words and actions could be interpreted as discriminatory or as quashing authentic debate.
“In a school that is 80 percent white, we have a lot of work to do to continue to help students understand other people’s cultures,” he said. “Although we have diversity at Kennedy … I would say a lot of the kids — I won’t even say at Kennedy, a lot of the kids in Iowa — are sheltered. They may know people of other races and cultures and other backgrounds, but I don’t know that we have done what we need to do to help them understand each other. … I think we’re making some progress, but I think this year has been challenging.”
Everything became a symbol for a political stance this year, he said, including the American flags put up in the trucks.
“Some students took it as an affront,” Kline said. “Some students asked me to take the flags down. And I said, ‘They’re American flags, we fly one in front of the building. I’m not going to take down American flags.’”
‘Shape Up or Ship Out’
While Kline said he thinks next school year will be quieter, Will, who is entering his senior year, said he and the other truck drivers plan to continue mounting American flags in the parking lot.
On the last Friday of this past school year, Will noticed that a number of sophomore students had joined the line. One started jumping up and down in the bed of his truck — something Will knew might be interpreted as a racist impression of an ape.
“You’re in the truck line, you’ve got to be behaved better,” Will said he told him.
“We’re in the spotlight. You’ve got to shape up or ship out.”
