Santa Clarita / Antelope Valley : Security Official Alleges Racist Slur in Yearbook

A black high school campus security director said the comparison made of him to Buckwheat--the character from the “Our Gang” comedies of the 1930s--in a school yearbook is racist.

George Jenkins vowed Monday to “right the wrong” in the 1993 Palmdale High School yearbook through the courts, saying it has caused hardship to his family.

School yearbook adviser Jim Gardner contends the comparison was supposed to be edited out of the yearbook before it was printed. Nonetheless, he said the statement was not made in a derogatory way. Gardner said he and Jenkins have worked at the same school nearly two decades and have always gotten along fine.

“If one (error) slips through, it ain’t no big deal,” Gardner said. “There was no culpability or malice.”

After the yearbooks arrived with the Jenkins-Buckwheat comparison, Gardner said it was covered over with an opaque tape in a futile attempt to keep it from students, who simply peeled off the tape.

Herff Jones, the Utah-based yearbook company, did not return repeated telephone calls Monday.

The comparison between Jenkins and the big-eyed, grinning Buckwheat was made in the yearbook in which students identified the personality they thought of when “someone says your favorite teacher’s name.” Other school staff members are compared to Santa Claus and Ronald McDonald.

Gardner, also president of the district’s teachers union, said the fact the reference is made in a positive way should serve as proof it was not racist and that high school students do not view the word Buckwheat as derogatory.

But Jenkins, who has worked security on the Palmdale campus for 18 years, disagrees. He said students are suspended for calling African-Americans “Buckwheat.”

Charles Whiteside, the only black member of the high school district’s board, said he believes the comparison is racist.

“It’s a very derogatory kind of thing, it’s an insult,” Whiteside said. “In the community I’ve grown up in it’s always been an insult to be called anything other than your name.”

School officials as well as Jenkins and his family expressed concern about the incident’s impact on race relations.

“I don’t want this to turn into a Pete Knight poem,” said Steve Landaker, president of the board of trustees for the Antelope Valley Union High School District.

Assemblyman William J. (Pete) Knight drew the ire of Latinos after last month distributing a poem to colleagues, mocking illegal Mexican immigrants.

The Antelope Valley Union High School District is investigating the yearbook incident, said Landaker.

Landaker, describing the comparison as a “very unfortunate mistake,” said he believes the comparison was made in fun rather than with intent to hurt anyone.

But Jenkins said he and his family have been hurt. His youngest daughter, a freshman at Palmdale High School, was mocked so much by other students over the reference that she became depressed and missed the last several days of school, he said.

Jenkins said it is impossible for him to simply put the incident behind him and move on. The yearbook, he said, will always serve as a reminder. “I can go to a 10-year reunion (of the class of 1993) and that’s how I’m going to be remembered,” Jenkins said.

Landaker said in the future students should be prohibited from labeling people.