The Confederate monument saga continues!
From Civil War plaques that enable false narratives to a plan to construct a monument for black Confederate soldiers, CSA monuments and relics are hot topics throughout the nation.
This time, a Confederate monument debate has erupted in Orange County, California at Savanna High School where over half of its students want to "rebrand" their school mascot, Confederate soldier Johnny Rebel.
Johnny Rebel is not only a term for a Confederate soldier; it is also the stage name of a prominent white-supremacist musician.
A worn-out statue of Rebel was removed from the school in 2009, and a teacher's pitch to restore the statue was rejected by district officials in 2015, according to the OC Register.
56 percent of students want to rebrand their mascot, 26 percent want the mascot to remain and 18 percent want to eliminate the mascot entirely.
Some students are offended by the mascot, but its supporters say to change it would be to erase history, and not just Confederate history.
Senior Alma Valenzuela stressed during an October student-led meeting that removing the statue “means that you’re erasing, you know, all those families and all those graduates” from previous years.
However, others don't believe it's a history worth preserving.
“I get the fact that you don’t want to erase history,” school board Trustee Al Jabbar said, “But it’s a bad part of history."
At a more recent Anaheim Union High School District Board of Trustees meeting early this month, anti-mascot activists argued that the high school's predominantly white class of 1967 chose Rebel to represent them in “a clear message that people of color were not welcome at Savanna High School or in Anaheim,” the Daily Beast reports.
Since then, the school has become more diverse and thus, its political leanings have also changed.
Of course, not everything is all peachy and there is still racism in the air in a new way thanks to social media (Snapchat and Instagram being the most popular platforms).
One of the student leaders of the anti-mascot campaign, 15-year-old Lay-Onna Clark, said that she has received a lot of online abuse for her part in trying to change her school's mascot.
“They were calling us n*ggers and all kinds of stuff, saying they were going to jump me after school," she said. The harassment got so bad that she had to stop taking the bus home from school. Now she waits in the safety of the principal's office for her mother to pick her up.
Despite this, school leaders remain hopeful that the story of their school's mascot and students' efforts to have it changed will help and inspire other Americans. “I believe this could be a teachable moment for the entire country,” said Superintendent Michael Matsuda.
The Savanna school board is set to meet early this week for a special forum on the issue. A final decision is expected to arrive soon!
