Stupid Mistake
The Waxahachie, Texas school district has issued an apology for a photo in the local high school's yearbook in which the only African-American student in the Honor Society is labeled as "black girl." The school district has asked all students to return their yearbooks so that the affected pages (there are four, due to the printing and binding method) can be replaced.
The victim was understandably unhappy with the error.
"If it was a placeholder, why would you put that?" Jones asked. "Anything else would have worked for me but that."
While the "placeholder" text might have been better thought through, and while it certainly should never have made it into the final product, it was still a descriptive and, in and of itself, relatively inoffensive bit of language. What's much less excusable is the fact that out of the fifty members of the Honor Society, the yearbook staff was able to identify 49, all of whom are white. How is it possible that the lone minority student (based on skin color, anyway) was unidentifiable?
According to the Waxahachie Independent School District's website, the high school has 1,362 students. According to the 2000 Census, 8.62% of the population of Ellis County, of which Waxahachie is the county seat, is African American. If you apply that percentage to the high school enrollment, you could assume that the total population of black students in the high school is about 120, and a logical assumption would be that there might be about 60 females in that group. That's not a lot of kids to keep up with, you know?
I want to be careful not to read too much into this incident, but I can't help wondering if the problem at Waxahachie High School is more basic than an inability to proofread photo captions.
Technorati tag: Waxahachie, Texas
Bill, I wonder if the folks on the mansion side of town knew the names of any of the folks on the shack side?
I realize that you're not implying anything with your comment, but it's a reminder that chasms which divide us aren't always so obvious.
Posted by: Eric at May 24, 2005 06:41 PMWhich brings back to mind my first dictum of journalistic layout. Never put anything on a final layout page that you don't want to see in print.
Posted by: bryan at May 24, 2005 07:10 PMWhich is scarier to contemplate: that the yearbook staff wasn't taught that lesson...or that they were?
Posted by: Eric at May 24, 2005 08:34 PMAbout the publisher
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This has nothing to do with the issue really but it brings back memories of sights seen from the back seat of the family car as we drove through Waxahachie on the way to my grandmother's house. The west side of town had the most beautiful elaborate Victorian mansions and then across the tracks were shotgun shacks with children playing in the streets. The contrast burned into my mind.
Of course that was forty years ago. And it was probably unique from other small towns only in that it had such beautiful mansions to start with. Anyway it has nothing to do with the post. It's just that I can never think of Waxahachie without remembering that.
Posted by: bill at May 24, 2005 06:24 PM