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Mon 24 Nov, 2008 03:37 pm
'Kick a ginger' day left redheads with legs covered in bruises
Inspired by South Park, Facebook group encouraged violence against redheads
Catherine Rolfsen, Vancouver Sun
Published: Saturday, November 22, 2008
BRITISH COLUMBIA - When Nanaimo high school student Aaron Mishkin appeared for classes Thursday, he heard his classmates talking about "kick-a-ginger day."
It was the first the 13-year-old redhead had heard about the online phenomenon, and initially he thought nothing of it.
"But then I left the class, and we have seven minutes to get to the next class, and I was amazed by the amount of people that kicked me along the way," said Mishkin.
Nanaimo's Aaron Mishkin, 13, found out about "kick a ginger day" in his first high school class Thursday morning.
Over the course of the day, Mishkin figures he was kicked or hit about 80 times, all because of a Facebook group, apparently inspired by an episode of the satirical cartoon South Park that urged members to "kick a ginger" on Nov. 20.
In Sooke, west of Victoria, more than 20 students at Journey Middle School were suspended after shocked teachers received complaints they were kicking redheads.
School district official Jim Cambridge said the problem started with a few students and then others joined in.
"They came to school with the idea it would be a fun thing to do, more as a prank than anything else. They started looking for redheaded students and kicking them in the shins, then other students thought it looked like fun and it grew rather rapidly," he said.
For Mishkin, the worst came when the bell rang, and he was in a crowd of kids leaving school.
"Three people saw me and they decided they would kick me. They were much older than me, maybe like 15, 16 years old," he said. "I became trapped trying to get through this press of people. And that's when they kicked me from behind and I fell over."
Mishkin stayed home from school on Friday. His legs were bruised, but his faith in his peers took an even harder hit.
"I was amazed by the lack of compassion in the people that I knew and the fact they would think that this is a fun thing to do," he said. "I just never thought that people were capable of that before."
Katie Marshall, 15, a student at New Westminster secondary, was also victimized Thursday.
" was just walking down the halls and then a bunch of random people started kicking me and I had no idea why they were kicking me," Marshall said.
"I started running away and then suddenly one of them said something like 'Oh, I'm going to kick you. You have no soul, so you probably can't feel pain either.'"
The comment was likely a reference to a South Park episode called Ginger Kids in which one character says redheads are soulless and inherently evil.
"This whole 'kick a ginger' thing [is just] so out of hand," Marshall said. "My legs are still sore from people kicking me."
On the Facebook group, many posters claimed to have acted on the group's premise. Others deplored the page as a hate site or defended it as a joke.
A 14-year-old Courtenay teen, who was listed Thursday as the group's administrator told The Sun the site was just a joke and apologized for offending people.
But police, educators and experts said it's no laughing matter. Comox Valley RCMP were investigating the group, saying it potentially involved hate crime.
Prince George school board chairwoman Lyn Hall said one high-schooler was left with welts on his legs after being kicked Thursday. The school was considering suspending those responsible.
Cyber-bullying expert Karen Brown said the Facebook group was a serious concern.
"I'm just absolutely appalled," said Brown, who is a sessional professor and PhD candidate at Simon Fraser University.
"It's really unprecedented," she said, explaining that it's common to see smaller groups making fun of a specific teacher or student. But this phenomenon was different, she said, since it was international in scope and advocated violence.
"This is inciting hate," she said. "This is tantamount to almost a hate website."
She said the group should be immediately shut down - by Facebook itself if necessary - and police and parents should deal with the creators.
@edgarblythe,
Honestly, that's bloody scary.
All it takes is some dumb crap on Facebook?
And some people will do that?
@edgarblythe,
There was some earlier a2k thread about having ginger hair in England - or something about ginger. I take it, and obviously may be wrong since I don't know, as anti irish. Is that the deal? Rather brutal for a joke - maybe more a dump on people of mixed heritage, so au courant.
but very pleistocene to me.
@CalamityJane,
CalamityJane wrote:
It is scary indeed.
Quote:She said the group should be immediately shut down - by Facebook itself if necessary - and police and parents should deal with the creators.
I hope so!
You'd kind of hope it might take a Goebbels or the kind of defense mechanisms associated with guilt about slavery or colonization or such to get such behaviour happening.
But no.....just being to dumb too comprehend satire plus peer ****, and voila!
Humans suck.
@dlowan,
red hair is fuckin gorgeous.
what a bunch of tards. if i had red hair or not and someone kicked me id choke them to death.
put a right quick stop to the nonsense.
@OGIONIK,
OGIONIK wrote:
red hair is fuckin gorgeous.
what a bunch of tards. if i had red hair or not and someone kicked me id choke them to death.
put a right quick stop to the nonsense.
Ah! Such a force for civilization over the reptile brain!!!!
@dlowan,
It's like I've always told my students. If there were no racial issues or religious issue or ethnic issues, if our communities were seemingly homogeneous,we would still find irrantional causes for hate -- color of eyes, color of hair, heights, weight differences etc.
Dlowan wrote:
Don't know if I'd put it quite that way, but humans are inherently haters.
@Merry Andrew,
I think this and that poor kid suiciding while idiots egged him on and shat on him has put a dip in my sunny optimism.
The kids that were kicking others should be punished for their actions.
However, I think the facebook group is being blown out of proportion. It was just a funny group started in reference to a South Park episode. Its not like they were actually organizing hate crime. Also, the group only has 125 members. As many kids have hundreds and hundreds of friends, this shows that it really was just a group started as a joke among friends. This is also evident by the groups' categories: "Just for Fun" and "Inside Jokes". Hell, even the article states that it was "more of a prank, then anything else". I think saying that facebook should remove the group, and police should deal with the creators, is just ridiculous.
Others are having fun with the news story, starting groups such as "Kick a person who kicked a ginger on kick a ginger day, day.", "Victims of kick a ginger day", and "HUG a Ginger Day - Countering "Kick a Ginger Day" & Fighting Hate with LOVE"
@Nick Ashley,
Listening, Nick but I think I beg to disagree (or maybe I do agree re the last riff part of your post) - not that all went into this with some hatred at forefront. Speaking as an auburn..
I suppose it lands on should one rub the sore or scar it over, a matter I'm mixed on philosophically. So, interesting occurrence.
But in the meantime, lots of people are wobbly when working out who they are in the world and having people kicking you is - albeit no big shakes re violence around the globe - something that can shake your sense of yourself while young.
I'm guessing it is an opportunity for people to learn about bias in action and jokes in action.. but harder on the kicked, even formative.
@Nick Ashley,
I think you're missing something here, Nick. For the kids who came up with this in-group joke it was, undoubtedly, meant as nothing more than a joke. But, as dlowan has suggested, there is something much deeper and darker operating here. Level of violence is irrelevant. Obviously nobody was sent to hospital or received physical injuries that will last a lifetime. But there's a psychological factor here which could well lead to permanent psychic damage. To be singled out for even a joke because of a physical characteristic -- in this case, red hair -- can be devastating at an impressionable age. It may have been meant as a joke to the perpetrators but I doubt that their victims saw any humor in it. The real point, I believe, is that there is already a sociopathic streak in the kids who thought up the "joke" and then carried it out. It is so very, very easy to substitute some other word for "redhead". Say, Jew. Or black. Or foreign-born.
I think the point is that sites such as MySpace or Facebook, both of which are frequented primarily by very young people, have a responsibility to monitor antisocial behavior which borders on the sociopathic.
@Merry Andrew,
Oh, yeah. And I think that Jespah and Joe from Chicago and Debra Law and other lawyers on this site will bear me out on this: if there were to be a lawsuit by any of the victims here, Facebook would inevitably be named as a co-defendant, probably along with the schools where the incidents took place. In fact, Facebook would bear the brunt of responsibility, more than the school administrations, because they enabled the spread of the hateful message.
@Merry Andrew,
Interesting point, MA. But the internet as a (what, a clump of people intermixed with bots?) values, for many good reasons, free expression. Do you want to censor? Or simply warn on a log in page?
@ossobuco,
Quote:But in the meantime, lots of people are wobbly when working out who they are in the world and having people kicking you is - albeit no big shakes re violence around the globe - something that can shake your sense of yourself while young.
I agree. I just think the damage caused by the facebook group itself is blown out of proportion. In my opinion there is absolutely no reason the group can't exist on the internet. Having facebook shut down the group, and authorities called? Nah. How about the parents punish the kids who kicked others. If kids start beating up blond kids, don't blame dumb blonde jokes, blame the kids. That's my thought, anyways.
@ossobuco,
No, Osso, I'm violently opposed to censorship of any kind. But I think that even our TOS here on A2K warn posters against actually
advocating antisocial behavior. (To express even hateful views is one thing, to advocate violence quite another.) From what I can gather, this is what that "small" group of 100-plus Facebook posters was doing.
@Merry Andrew,
Quote:I think the point is that sites such as MySpace or Facebook, both of which are frequented primarily by very young people, have a responsibility to monitor antisocial behavior which borders on the sociopathic.
Are you honestly arguing that transforming a joke from one medium (cartoon) to another (web) makes you antisocial, and possibly a sociopath? I can't disagree more.
Q: How do you drown a blond?
A: Put a scratch and sniff sticker at the bottom of a pool.
Oh my! Did I just advocate a mass genocide of all blonds? Somebody stop me!
@Nick Ashley,
Nick Ashley wrote:
The kids that were kicking others should be punished for their actions.
However, I think the facebook group is being blown out of proportion. It was just a funny group started in reference to a South Park episode. Its not like they were actually organizing hate crime. Also, the group only has 125 members. As many kids have hundreds and hundreds of friends, this shows that it really was just a group started as a joke among friends. This is also evident by the groups' categories: "Just for Fun" and "Inside Jokes". Hell, even the article states that it was "more of a prank, then anything else". I think saying that facebook should remove the group, and police should deal with the creators, is just ridiculous.
Others are having fun with the news story, starting groups such as "Kick a person who kicked a ginger on kick a ginger day, day.", "Victims of kick a ginger day", and "HUG a Ginger Day - Countering "Kick a Ginger Day" & Fighting Hate with LOVE"
However it was intended, what's worrying is that people actually DID it!!!!
@Nick Ashley,
Nick Ashley wrote:
Quote:I think the point is that sites such as MySpace or Facebook, both of which are frequented primarily by very young people, have a responsibility to monitor antisocial behavior which borders on the sociopathic.
Are you honestly arguing that transforming a joke from one medium (cartoon) to another (web) makes you antisocial, and possibly a sociopath? I can't disagree more.
Q: How do you drown a blond?
A: Put a scratch and sniff sticker at the bottom of a pool.
Oh my! Did I just advocate a mass genocide of all blonds? Somebody stop me!
you are SICK!
what kinda of person are you? dear god your ruthless! utterly RUTHLESS!
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