Students at a Chicago high school have planned a strike over the response to a classmate wearing what some took to be a Nazi uniform on Halloween.
Pupils at the Jones College Prep school in the wealthy central Printers' Row district will walk out on Monday afternoon over "the way administration ‘handles’ racial & ethnic discrimination at Jones," according to a social media post announcing the protest.
Local media reported that principal Joseph Powers was suspended after the incident, when a boy at the school goose-stepped along a catwalk in the school hall and saluting in a vintage military uniform, while other students booed.
Powers explained in an email to staff that the outfit was in fact a "communist-era" East German uniform "probably from the 1980s" and not related to the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler.
"I tried to explain the context and time period of the uniform to the students who spoke with me, but apparently the student who wore the uniform may have told people it was from the 1940s," Powers wrote to colleagues. "I spoke with him this afternoon and explained the same thing to him and the inferences others may have drawn."
In a later email to the school 'community' on Thursday, the principal conceded the boy's costume had caused "harm" to other students and staff.
"Let me say clearly and plainly that what occurred caused harm to many of our students and staff who recognized this as an act of anti-Semitism. Let me also say clearly and plainly that intolerance, bigotry, and bias-based behaviours have no place in our school," Powers wrote. "We want you to know that we are addressing this situation directly with the member of our school community who wore the costume in accordance with protocols for processing bias-based harm."
Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez announced Powers' suspension last Friday.
"I fully understand why a member of the Jones community coming to school dressed in a German military uniform as a Halloween costume was widely recognized by many students, staff, and members of our broader CPS community as anti-Semitic,” Martinez wrote in an email to the school community.
Last yearб a theatre teacher at the school was suspended after students complained about offensive language in the script of a school play production.
While the 'goose step' is strongly associated in the West with Nazi Germany, it originated in the Prussian army in the 18th century before being adopted by the imperial Russian army in the 19th century thanks to German military advisors.
The marching style was kept by the Soviet Red Army — which defeated three quarters of the fascist forces in the Second World War — and the modern Russian army. The National People's Army of the German Democratic Republic also maintained the tradition until the end of the 1980s.
Chicago's city government is dominated by the Democratic Party of President Joe Biden, whose administration has supplied tens of billions of dollars' worth of heavy weaponry to Ukraine to arm its Neo-Nazi militias.