Yearbook controversy takes a heartening turn
If you look at this photo, chances are you see a group of youngsters gathered in a house, posing.
Officials at a Princeton, N.J., high school saw a lot more. They saw the painting of lynchings in the background — you see that, too, to the left of the photo. They also saw an N-word.
The word in question is half-visible on the canvas in the centre, and I read it as “hugger.” The painting, which you can’t see fully in the photo, actually says N----- Rich, and also has chopped up dollar bills.
Princeton High School handed out a one-day suspension to 18-year-old Jamaica Ponder this week, “for the submission of a collage with offensive wording and symbols.”
Yearbook controversies are not new. Remember the Anaheim, Calif., girl Bayan Zehlif who found herself — maybe mistakenly — called Isis Phillips, or Kentucky High School’s gay basketball player Dalton Maldonado who was — maybe mistakenly — excluded altogether, or the Texas schoolgirl Shadoyia Jones who was — definitely mistakenly — identified as “Black Girl” in their respective yearbooks?
Compare Ponder’s plight to the other story that’s getting way more traction this week, about the other yearbook at the other New Jersey high school, where a teacher was suspended after references to Trump were foolishly erased from photos and captions.
One of the students whose T-shirt was scrubbed appeared on Fox & Friends where he expounded on the values of freedom of speech to the sympathetic panel.
His argument is legitimate, and if students want to immortalize themselves on the wrong side of history, that is their prerogative. The bigger question is, why is it that those who mostly enjoy unfettered freedom also get more platforms on which to complain about it?
Where is the more nuanced discussion on Ponder’s freedom of expression?
The yearbook committee at her school apologized for allowing the photo to be published, but escaped punishment. Another student published a picture of Nazis, Ponder tells me, photoshopped it into his collage and covered the swastikas with his friends’ faces. Elsewhere in the same yearbook, the names of the Japanese and Chinese teachers were switched.
The Nazi fan was also reportedly suspended for a day, the same penalty as Ponder. Ponder is Black. There is no equivalence between her photo containing background art pieces that are an expression of pain from her own history and the other student deliberately adding a historical symbol of slaughter.
“I didn’t even see the N-word when I submitted it. It was completely an oversight on my part. I wouldn’t have submitted it in a yearbook myself, that’s not an appropriate place for it,” she says.
The artwork is from an exhibition her father produced called The Rise and Fail of the N-word.
“It’s been in my house for a long time and it’s easily looked over by us.”
Even if her submission was deliberate, her use of it would be legitimate.
“No one can tell me I can’t use the N-word, especially as an AfricanAmerican. That’s a word that my community has reclaimed and therefore belongs to me.”
She expands on this in a blog post: “It was a weapon — one which black people are now granted use of so that it can no longer hurt them.”
There’s that other niggling little thing about Ponder. She has spent the better part of last year expounding on and exposing incidents of racism at her school. She thinks this is retaliation. “It’s an opportunity the school took to punish me for pointing fingers at the fact that they don’t treat Black students very well.”
In another blog post she says, “I wondered where they explicitly saw the word ‘n-----,’ when I understood that they didn’t; that there is no n----- in the yearbook; that the only n----- in that photo is me; that she had said too much, disrupted the show and that she had to be silenced.” Then a heartening thing happened. On Monday a diverse group of students protested Ponder’s suspension, walking to their principal Gary Snyder’s office with signs saying, “Suspend me.” They asked that all administrators and faculty read about the differences in profanity used by different racial and ethnic groups, according to Newsworks, the online home of the radio station WHYY. They also demanded that the suspension be removed from Ponder’s permanent record. On Wednesday, they were voicing their concerns at the board of education.
I don’t know if they will impact change — Snyder gave me a statement but would not comment on the specifics “due to the students’ right to privacy” — but this much is clear: While grown-ups prattled on about the Trump erasure in the yearbook, teenagers took on the tougher task of effecting change at the grassroots. Thank goodness for tomorrow. Shree Paradkar tackles issues of race and gender. You can follow her @shreeparadkar