High school student listed as "Black Guy" in yearbook photo

avatar-katara-eyeroll

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There’s also the awful existence of even worse words being written in ballpoint or drawn in marker on the yearbooks that are scanned and posted on sites like ancestry dot com.

I’ve done searches on some of those for other people, all posted publicly, and whatever some person thought of someone back then and scribbled on their face, drew on their body, or noted about them in the name, is often retained in the searchable scan. — So that one person’s yearbook copy, which I’m guessing is sourced from thriftstores or ebay, becomes the permanent record, all comments included.

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What’s their definition of “perfection”…?
Can you really give the highschool yearbook committee consisting of teenagers the benefit of the doubt to proof read these things???

It’s sloppy yearbooking. You put a placeholder in the caption to draw attention to the fact that you don’t have a name for the kid. Usually you say “kid with glasses” or “guy making a silly face” someone decided to pick race as a distinguishing feature. Whoever proof read it missed it. Whoever signed off on the book missed it too.

Which just happens to also be bigoted.

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Purely circumstantial, I’m sure/S

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Is running a yearbook like playing a game of The Return of the Obra Din? Maybe they should have used a content management system with proper tag support. If the photo has a red tag that says “unidentified”, don’t print the caption.

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Let me tell you when I was in yearbook back in 96-97 we had only just started using a digital publishing program, and it was Aldus Pagemaker. Before that it was paper layouts and wax pencils. These days every yearbook company seems to have their own layout program. One of them might have some sort of system to flag entries but they tend to lean towards keeping things simple.

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The name “Guy” also exists in English, in which it’s pronounced like the English word “guy”.

Of course, Guy Fawkes is the most famous person by that name, but there are plenty of others.

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Inidiana native here. The town of Nashville in Brown County is a mix, with a fair share of liberals, aging hippies, new agers, and an artists’ enclave. Despite the geographic proximity, this isn’t Martinsville. (And even in Martinsville a lot of people are working to distance the city from its KKK-tainted past.

Sure, you can find some real racists there, but they lurk everywhere – Trumpism has served us by encouraging them to become more visible. But I’d give it at least even odds that this was a dumb mistake rather than willful malevolence. (Were it the latter, they’d probably have made their intent much more clear.)

I don’t think anyone here disputes that it was a dumb mistake. It just so happens that the dumb mistake made public the racist structures at that place that would make it possible for someone to use race as a placeholder name until the real one was found.

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Ever since William the Conqueror, sure. :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

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Yes. They do it all the time. And even if they miss a word, plenty do not do racist shit!

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Well I hope that changes and high schools employ hard nosed editors to comb through this trash.

How about people don’t put racist things in in the first place? How about we stop pretending that racism isn’t a thing we should address on a systemic level and make clear is entirely unacceptable, even among HS students? :woman_shrugging:

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Entirely agree. Maybe if they screened the material beforehand and put in a little leg work before it was printed they could have weeded out the individual hiding behind the bed sheet.
On a personal note, we bring our mixed race kids to the neighbourhood parks and are ignored by some families. I’m not turning a blind eye

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Ugh. Sorry that happens to your family. What assholes!

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Sorry if I come across as flippant!

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Like you and @Melizmatic mentioned, they could have asked. It was a sports team. There was a coach who would have known the poor kid’s name. Probably one the easiest names to figure out! Take the pic, go ask the coach. Or the assistant coach. Or the trainer. Send an email saying “Hey Coach, I can’t find the name of the third guy from the right on the second row. Can you give me his name from the roster?”
No pass for the person who put in that place holder, no pass for the proofer, and no pass for the teacher in charge. Consequences all around please.

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No, it’s fine. I get that kids do stupid shit, but I’m just not a fan of that as an explanation for this kind of casual racism. As the parent of a teen myself, I know that while they will still do stupid things, you can instill values in them where they avoid that kind of thing, even while still doing stupid shit.

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