My son is a freshman in HS. He and his friends have only recently come across that stupid meme/game where you make the ‘OK’ gesture and trick your friends into looking at it and, if they do, they lose that round.
He was doing it at school, and got sent to the office because they said the gesture is related to white supremacy. And I will admit I’d heard that the white supremacist or white nationalist or whatever group had co-opted it, but it wasn’t really on my radar. I thought it was just something running around 4chan and didn’t give it a ton of thought.
So maybe if I knew he was doing this I’d have told him to maybe not. But I didn’t know he was doing it, so that’s moot.
They suspended him for a day and are prohibiting from participating in the choir concert tomorrow.
Context matters, I think. My son is not a racist. He is really compassionate and tries to be a good ally for marginalized groups. So he has never said or done anything at school to be on their radar here. When I asked him if he knew that gesture was co-opted by racists, he said he recalls hearing something about racists using it but didn’t know that some people thought the gesture was racist out of hand, basically.
I think the punishment is too severe, for one. And two, by just punishing him he isn’t getting anything out of this other than he thinks the administrators are being jerks. I think what would have been perfectly fitting here would have been for them to just pull him aside and explain that the gesture isn’t welcome because some people used it in a racist context. And because they did, some people might be offended, or some people might think he is racist, so he needs to stop. And he totally would have done that, he’s not a jerk.
Reddit, er, GoA, am I the asshole?