Valley Perspective : Getting Racism Out of the Picture
Something is awry when youths ruin a high school senior class photo with white supremacist hand signs, and only one student cares.
It happened at Littlerock High School in the Antelope Valley Union High School District.
Jamie Jones, the one who cared, complained to a newspaper after unsuccessful requests to get school officials to retake the photo. School officials should have, but didn’t.
They did offer to airbrush the offending symbols out of the photograph, upon request.
“Those students won’t have hands in this photograph,” said school Trustee Bill Olenick, adding that he found the photo “extremely offensive. This is a memento for these graduates for the rest of their lives.” All the more reason, we think, to have shot another photograph.
But the interesting thing here is that only Jones requested a sanitized photo. “A lot of people just don’t care,” Jones said.
They don’t care that their senior class photo contains hate symbols? That kind of silence speaks loudly enough, clearly, for school officials to make a genuine attempt to understand why.
Start your day right
Sign up for Essential California for news, features and recommendations from the L.A. Times and beyond in your inbox six days a week.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
