High school reprints yearbooks after students seen flashing alleged racist signs
A Chicago high school will reprint its 2018-19 yearbooks at a cost of $53,794 after 18 photographs show students making a hand gesture associated with white nationalism, according to reports.
Students of “various races, ethnicities, genders and grades” were seen flashing the upside-down “OK,” schools chief Joylynn Pruitt-Adams told parents, students and staff in an email Monday about the Oak Park and River Forest HS, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.
“The photos in question, as well as other club/team photos in which students are striking poses and making gestures, will be replaced with straight-forward group shots,” Pruitt-Adams wrote about the 1,750 copies of “Tabula.”
“While putting stickers over the photos would be a cheaper solution, it would draw attention to particular groups of students and place a cloud of suspicion over all the students in those photos, regardless of whether they used the sign or not,” she said.
The hand gesture has at times been used in the popular “circle game,” in which pranksters holds the circle below their waists to make others look at it, but it has more recently become associated with the white supremacist movement.
Members of the online group 4chan first began using the symbol as a means of tricking others into thinking they were seeing “white power” symbols everywhere.
Groups like the Anti-Defamation League have said the gesture has come to signify an authentic hate symbol.
Among those to publicly flash the controversial sign was the self-described racist accused of killing 51 Muslim worshipers at mosques in New Zealand.
“My understanding is [yearbook staff] followed protocol,” Pruitt-Adams said. “Things in this country change so rapidly. I don’t want anyone to think we are accusing our students of anything. For us, it was the impact of what the publication could have on the student body.”
School board member Matt Baron voted against reprinting the yearbooks.
“One of my biggest concerns: that if we toss out these 1,750 Tabulas, rather than come to the thoughtful conclusion that they should still be distributed, we are playing right into the hands of all the haters whose evil is at the root of this corrosive and divisive angst — and worse — that we are experiencing,” he said on Facebook.
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