High School Yearbooks

The local news stations here are into their second day coverage of an embarrassing screw up in a Grapevine high school yearbook. A caption under the group photo of the honors society indentifies a young lady as simply "black girl". In the second day coverage of this story, it was reported that the NAACP has pledged to investigate. I'll tell you what likely happened. When the students were laying out the page, they placed "identifiers" on the students whose names they needed to check or verify. Then they simply forgot to take out the indentifier such as "guy with cap" or "girl with sweater" and place in the student's real name. A simple screw up --- probably not racial. But I understand that some may feel that this mishap was some sort of statement --- that nobody at this predominately white school saw this bright young lady in the honors society as anything more than a "black girl".

Something like this happened when I was in high school and there was no doubt it was racial. The 1983 yearbook for J.J. Pearce ran a picture of two students who attended an off-campus halloween party. One of the students went to the party in blackface, wearing a bandana on his head. And the picture was captioned "Senior Spooks". It was arguably a screw up too, but one that was so insensitive and stupid, it's unbelievable it happened. The kid wearing black face needed to be taught a lesson. He needed to be embarrassed and shamed as well as the kids who produced the yearbook. Pearce High School received critical news coverage because of that incident and it was well deserved. Everybody learned something. Is there sublime racism at the Grapevine school or just some kids on the yearbook staff who need to become better copy editors?