What’s in a name?

At Charter Oak High School in Covina, California student yearbook staff member replaced each of the nine Black Student Union member names with fake names (such as Tay Tay Shaniqua, Crisphy Nanos and Laquan White) next to the club photo in the high school’s 2008 yearbook.

How did the school handle the situation? Student whose names were changed were given stickers. BSU student Evanne Jackson was given a handful of stickers and told to pass them out to her friends on the last day of school, with the correct names to be placed over the error in their books.

According to a report by KCAL news school officials made an apology to the BCU, and the school is not going to recall all the yearbooks. However, students that request a reprint will get a new yearbook.

How exactly is this racism? Black parents give their children names for many different reasons, but one of the reasons is type of resistance to white dominance. The mocking of black culture and names is a subversive way putting black people “in their place”. It shows a lacking of understand towards blacks culture, and it shows insensitivity towards all the black students. However, at its core it is simply ignorant racism.

The yearbook should be recalled, and reprinted. Not just nine yearbooks, but all of them. Handing someone a handful of stickers to place over the names is an insult on top of an insult. What you are telling your students is that they are paying for a yearbook in which they are insulted, and that somehow a sticker will make up for the insult.

The journalism advisor Bonnie Shockey should be fired. The journalism advisors responsibility is to oversee the student publications, and allowing something like this to happen is gross negligence. The student editors of the yearbook should be removed from the yearbook staff. Each high school yearbook staff has editors assigned to sections of the yearbook, and it is their responsibility to oversee those sections.

According to the Pasadena Star-News article the superintendent Clint Harwick said there were a number of human and printing errors throughout the yearbook, including misspellings and blank pages. That illustrates a fundamental lack of understanding of the issue. It is ridiculous to compare the misspelling or a name or word to the deliberate targeting of a group of people based on race.

According to the same article BSU member Paisley Moore said that “People of color, Latinos and African Americans, are viewed at the school as a joke.” This incident has affects on several levels. It affects the students of the BSU, it affects the black student body, it affects the white student body, and it affects the community.

This becomes another example of racism for the black students, and the indifference shown by the school administrators and those who do not speak up becomes another example of apathy from white Americans.

This becomes an example to white students of race relations, and the way in which the school administrators handle the situation will give the students a perception of what is acceptable. This is absolutely giving white students the wrong impression. It is giving the message that if something offensive is done to a person of another race that pacification and appeasement are acceptable. That the only yearbooks that will be changed are the yearbooks of the students that are members of the BSU sends this message.

Charter Oak High School like many institutions in America is going to ignore an opportunity to talk about race in a constructive way. This incident will be brushed aside, and called an “isolated incident.” However, as many of the people in the community and in the country know, this was not an isolated incident. Racism happens every day in the hallways of our schools, in the offices where we work, and on television that we watch.

What can I do as a white American? I can not be silent, and not be indifferent.

“The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity.”
–George Bernard Shaw