Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/10/20/high-school-student-listed-as-black-guy-in-yearbook-photo.html
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Jesus, who was proof reading? Hell, what software are they using? Most modern yearbook software will get a set of names from your headshots so you can easily flow your index.
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Also see:
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Yeah, I was expecting it to be one more issue with that yearbook rather than a different one.
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An “error” would be dividing by zero or maybe a typo or something. This required intent. Pretending otherwise is offering excuses for racist shitweasels.
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According to wikipedia, in 2010 the town had a population of 803 people with 98.1% white and 0.4% Black which means there were 3 Black people in town (likely this boy and his parents). There are a lot of reasons people can’t just pack up and move somewhere else, but they have to at least be considering leaving which would likely make someone at the yearbook office quite happy.
exactly
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I was going to pretend that maybe his name was “Guy”, like “Guy LaPointe” (it’s French, pronounced like “Ghee”), but now I don’t want to make excuses for racist shitweasels.
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The school serves all of Brown County which had a population estimated at 15092 in 2019 with an estimated of 0.7% that identifying solely as black. That makes roughly 1056 106 black people in the county.
It’s not inconceivable that an idiot yearbook student didn’t know the kid’s name and wrote “black guy” as an ignorant placeholder. It’s racist but also less intent and more ignorance coming from someone we barely trust to be able to drive. It’s also something that should have been caught way before going to press.
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I’m sorry, but I think that’s way too charitable. I don’t buy this as an innocent proofreading error. They yearbook club knew all the white kids’ names? They all had White Guy placeholders while the research department tracked them all down? That doesn’t make sense. Why use “black guy” as the placeholder anyway? Why not “unknown” or “TBD”?
More like some snide teenager thought it would be funny because he’s being raised in a racist society and nobody has taught him not to be intrinsically racist all the time.
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“It was just a joke! You stupid libtards have no sense of humor!”
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Ooof. There’s a reason I didn’t major in math.
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I am a yearbook advisor in a high school, and this is the stuff of my nightmares. That one of my students would do nonsense like this and I wouldn’t catch it before it went to press.
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It’s not inconceivable at all. That kid lives in an entirely different bubble than people who frequent BBS. People tend to immediately assume the worst of others whenever we have a post referencing racism. I could assume it’s just herd behavior, seeking “likes,” or any number of possible reasons, but I certainly won’t put thoughts in their heads when I disagree with their apparent belief in mind reading.
edit-forgotten word inserted
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It’s lucky we don’t have any racism or any other kind of enabling bullshit on here.
That would be awful.
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Yeah, but that’s the problem, right? Not that they forgot to take out their “placeholder”, but that they put there in the first place.
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Seems to me that I read somewhere that there are only 3 Black students at that HS, but maybe I misread. Still, seems like with so few Black students, it’s likely that the rest of the school would know their names, simply because they can’t help but stand out.
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Racism in southern Indiana. You don’t say?
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I used to live in S.IN (see what I did there?) When you went to a local hangout, it was a sea of beer brand ball caps, sleeveless flannel shirts, scraggly moustaches, bad breath and tobacco spitting racists. The men were even worse.
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I’d certainly think so.
Somebody could just have asked. Yet they didn’t.
That’s not a “mistake”.
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