The post I was responding to made the claim that the students would have to be “psychic” in order to know about the white power association in Oct 2018. I was simply correcting that bit of false information.
I agree that, despite a thread specifically about the symbol here on the dope, it’s still not “widely known” outside of a certain subset of people who live and breathe on the internet.
Like me. And also, most teenagers. That’s all I’m saying, the odds of a few teenagers knowing about the white power “hoax” symbol in Oct 2018 out of an entire class of students is extremely high.
These “high school outrage” stories bubble to the national media periodically, and we discuss a lot of them here on the dope, and they’re all extremely frustrating due to a lack of information. Initially you knew nothing, then you knew it was one student in one photo, then we knew it was “a number of” students, and now we seem to know that it’s 18 photos across different racial and gender groups.
But we still don’t know what the photos were. If there was 1 black guy giving the OK symbol, and one Hispanic girl, and 16 douchey white guys who the school knows as “the 4chan type,” then the school’s statement is both accurate and also not the whole picture. You keep giving the benefit of the doubt to the students, which is fine and probably appropriate for a parent, but I don’t see any reason to do so. Something about a proportion of the 18 photos was alarming enough that the school basically went into crisis control mode. Could it be possible that some of the students are 4chan dweebs, and some of them decided to be edgelords in the yearbook? Yes! It’s absolutely possible. And nobody can prove it. We can certainly disprove it, but I’d want to see all of the pictures before making that call, and nobody has.
I don’t know if there’s a good answer. But I know that I have the luxury of not being terribly affected by flipping through my high school yearbook and seeing faces of people who may be making a sign that they hate me for who I am.
Did you not know about the circle game before you looked it up? There were meme images of the circle game as a “gotcha” well before the white power connotation. There were car bumper stickers with the circle and a “gotcha” or “made you look” or whatever message before the white power connotation. So, yeah, pictures involving the circle game are a thing and have been for a long time.
FWIW, I’ve never heard of the circle game until this thread. I guess it wasn’t a thing in NYC or at least in my schools. I guess the OP can tell us whether it’s a thing at his kid’s school.
Yeah, there were several stories about the gesture that went viral before October 2018. I heard of this story and thisstory and thisstory before October 2018. All of them made the rounds on twitter. I’m not going to say all of these kids knew or that it was widely known among the general public, but a lot of people who get their news from the internet and are involved in social media knew.
Yes, Velocity. That was shared here within minutes of the board voting on it.
steronz, again, those who have viewed the pictures say that they do not believe there was bad intent and part of the problem is that without being able to see the pictures students and others are able to imagine anything to fill in the blanks of these pictures that had been thought to be benign when originally reviewed and approved by administration before going to print. Imagination and people being what they the blanks are likely to be filled in with images much worse than what was actually there. Indeed we’ll never know, so the worst can now be held as believable as the case stated by those who decided to pull the books.
Panning out to a bigger picture item is the principle expressed by both administration members and in that Jasper link, that intended meaning doesn’t matter. Let’s move out of this specific instance and focus on that as a principal.
The word contains the sounds of a word that cannot be said by a white person (even in this context I am hesitant), and certainly could be used with that same intent the “okay sign” was co-opted to achieve: to signify a racist intent with some degree of deniability. Mr. Howard clearly had no such intent but it was heard as an offensive word and he experienced the consequences of saying an offensive word.
Are the responses of Julian Bond then
and the SD column take
now out of date?
Should the current standard be that if even one person of a traditionally considered oppressed group interprets a word or symbol used as something hurtful then the word is to be forbidden and removed from the record, no matter how much the context is very clear that the word or symbol had no bad intent?
Is that what they say? The email says “I want to be clear that we are not making any presumptions about students’ intent in using the gesture.” That’s not an exoneration, that’s them sidestepping the issue.
It certainly is a squishy issue. I think intent does matter, up to a point, in that there are certainly going to be uses of the OK sign that are clearly not intended to be either racist or prank-racist, and in those cases the clear intent should be taken at face value. However, if 16 of the 18 pictures were of a few white boys making the symbol, and those pictures make the minority students think there was malicious intent, does the true intent matter? Do you want to sit down with the black kids who feel unwelcome in their own school and tell them not to be so sensitive, that you trust the white kids when they say they didn’t mean anything by it?
Unless the intent is obviously not malicious, I wouldn’t fault any minority for being concerned, and I sure as heck wouldn’t try to talk them out of feeling the way they feel.
Let us be clear: no student has been offended by any of the picture because the only ones who have seen them are the members of the staff that submitted them. The concern is over the potential that someone may be offended. No one knows if any actually would have been. The Black staff of the yearbook had not seen it as offensive when they submitted it. Black administrators had not experienced it as offensive when they approved it.
The administration’s expressed take during the meeting is that at the time they reviewed and approved the photos, months ago, they were of a benign nature. That’s why they were approved. It is the fact that with the recent news cycle of the individual making the gesture at Wrigley and the attention in more mainstream media that the symbol’s co-option now has, the potential for an offensive received meaning (and “trauma”) now exists.
As to students’ takes on it I can only go by my daughter’s report. Again, her friends are a diverse lot by both race and SES. Her report is that students are all upset that the book was pulled, unhappy that the board is making presumptions about what they’d want without any student input, and unhappy that the administration at least initially seemed like they were throwing the yearbook staff under the bus. The racial difference she reads is only in degree of upset with her Black friends tending to be less upset. She doesn’t know of anyone of any group who is happy that this decision was made. No doubt though that they exist; her experience is not a complete poll of the school. (And for further context, she is adopted and not racially white herself.)
In your take, how “obviously not malicious” does something need to be and by whose read? Tautologically if one person experiences a word or symbol as hurtful it was not obviously not malicious to at least one person.
Again, taking it out of this instance, given that no one here has the actual facts of how obvious or not obvious this was.
Personally, if someone is feeling distressed based on what they’ve heard from the media, I wouldn’t shy away from criticizing the media in replying to them.
Unless you tell me he Black yearbook staff were actually making the signs, that’s immaterial. Also, imagine, Black adults not being aware of what racist thing white teenagers are doing this month!
You mean the Administration thought the signs were benign. If those signs had a racial context at the time of the Wrigley incident, it’s very likely they had a racial context before then. And a bunch of white adults might be even more clueless about what subtext a sign has than a bunch of Black adults.
My take is that the school administration is dealing directly with hundreds of students and parents, a school board and (is this a public school?) thousands of taxpayers ready to complain whichever position they take.
Just remember that this is what these nimnods do. They co-opt otherwise innocuous signage so that they have their"plausible deniability" built in up-front. Viewed objectively, an OK sign is about as racist as a cartoon frog. But…
Personally I’ve always made the OK sign with the circle comprised of the the thumb and middle finger, so I’m good.
Hey Dseid. Ya might wanna correct that location in your profile. Where it says Chicago, I didn’t realize you actually meant Chicago-adjacent!
Hadn’t checked into this thread until this a.m. when I showed up to play at the local farmer’s market, and one guy was bitching about the cost of reprinting.
I thought the better idea was to just put a stamp over the images, saying something like “No hateful images allowed.” But, as I understand it, the thought was that such a step would potentially harm these little darlings down the line. :rolleyes:
If you ever happen to stop by the farmer’s market, say hi! I’m the guy playing bass.
Next Saturday I am off and I will! I’ll be the guy who looks my avatar! Yes, Chicago-adjacent is more accurate.
At the meeting the concerns of the administration with stamps included that they might interfere with the longterm structural integrity of the book with the added thickness, that they might be able be removed and allow identification of the students in the images who could then, as a consequence of all this, be targeted by others in some way, and that doing such would be too time consuming for staff to pull off and as or more expensive than reprinting to have the printer do.
Kent Clark I am a Jewish adult and I am clueless about what the newest Jew-hating (which White Power endorsers are) signs are. In a time that has included mass shootings by members of these groups of Jews and Muslims both. Really, you think most parents of targeted minority groups spend much energy trying to stay hip with the newest White Power decoder rings?
It is an … interesting … position to take that if something historically benign is interpreted as offensive by some now, in the context of a current news cycle, it must have always have before.
Your last “answer” is completely unrelated to the question that you quoted being asked btw. Maybe you can re-read what you quoted and try to answer it? Or not if the question is not of interest to you. But yes, a public school with a few thousand students and more thousands of parents, and tens of thousands of taxpayers in two towns.
controversy