My high school from a red state was like 99% white and also 99% conservative and had this attitude of racism is bad but also racism doesn’t exist anymore then proceeds to make racist jokes and support racist politics (including students who were very academically focused), although it never evolved to anything as stupid as taking a group photo holding up a racial slur. There was a lot of stuff from there though that seemed normal at the time then after I left realized how fucked it was, and I know of other people who think the same thing.
This was just an advertisement for Xbox Live that’s all. 🤷
I just do not understand how anyone involved thought this was a good idea.
Surely you were a dumb high school student at one point, no?
Not this level of “putting a needle in your arm” dumb. We did stupid shit like Jackass, not hateful shit.
I was definitely a dumb high school student. At no point did I think it was ever ok to use the n-word though.
Sure, but did you grow up in a community with a healthy population of minorities? If not, then you probably don’t really have the same experience as these kids.
When you don’t actually know anyone a slur references, it’s pretty easy to not take it seriously. A lot of my friends in school make “gay” jokes, until we made friends with a gay kid, at which point we stopped because we suddenly had a personal experience with it. That’s how a lot of these types of things go.
Yes but also racism and homophobia deserve derision and to be laughed and joked about in ways that don’t hurt people. Hear me out. It’s a weird situation because the people who are offended by it deserve to be and are valid but so are the people that say stuff like “telling people that you can’t say that word gives it power” because it absolutely does.
It’s why myself and my gay partner will jokingly use slurs in private. Because it’s funny and we’re mocking the people that hate us. And by using their words as a joke, we take the sting out of them. Because it’s absurd theyre used seriously in the first place.
So we exist in this weird spot where we’ve said “yes the gays can reclaim their slurs. And yes the minorities can reclaim their words. But no one else can say them” and it’s like sure but then other people aren’t able to properly take the sting out of the words.
Not saying there’s a right answer, I’m just saying that we have weird standards that may not be serving our goals.
Im not condoning it but you were probably born post Xbox 360 Xbox live era.
Real
I couldn’t imagine doing this though. I’m imagining they somehow expected social benefit for this, and that blows me mind SpongeBob
I hope someone puts this on a static website with their names so future employers can find it easily
I use to have this way to thinking but then we are encouraging people not to change. This is a group of kids maybe raised wrong maybe thinking it’s okay to joke about so should this ruin the rest of their lives? Should they not be given the chance to do better and learn from this? It’s not murder and nobody was harmed by it. Being offended isn’t traumatizing.
At what point is the punishment fitting the crime in a case like this. We’ve learned posting this to social media already effects people long term so wouldn’t just posting it here be enough since they may have also been reprimanded by their community.
That’s fair i guess. I did some stupid shit as a kid but I’m also a completely different person than 40 years ago. Otoh i never did anything quite like this. Id hope their eyebrows burn off from the backlash and they learn at least.
If society has gone a different direction what you did do may have been just as condemnable.
But it didnt and I’m glad because we shouldnt let people be racist. What’s your point here? R u js pulling a “what if some things were worse” cause they are, racism is far from the worst thing u can do today. I’m taking a guess and saying they probs didnt murder anyone as a teen. now I’d hope u could agree that is a step too far that being a dumb kid doesnt justify same deal w racism
The difference is 40 years ago when i lacked better judgement, i didn’t do things that were condemnable and they still aren’t to this day.
These kids have done something current date that is condemnable. Maybe they just weren’t raised right and can turn their lives around but it’s not quite the same situation. What they did will always have been bad at the time they did it.
Parents.
As a Texan, in a purple area, this doesn’t surprise me from Oklahoma.
I had the displeasure of driving through OK to get to my late father in law’s hospital bed before he passed.
I ended up blowing through a toll entry because they didn’t accept paper money or cards. Just coins. I went to the little building to try to pay my way, and it appeared to be abandoned.
Mother fuckers, I can buy a legal variant of weed with my fucking watch. Coins? Join this century please.
There’s a few states that I just can’t even.
Idaho for example.
The punishment fit the crime. Let the picture follow them forever and let their fellow students take out the frustration of losing homecoming on them.
Imagine this photo popping up whenever any one of these idiots tries to get a job.
That long haired kid looks like he means it the most
That long haired kid looks like he means it the most
You mean the kid with dreadlocks? Lol
Not to defend racists or imply this is acceptable in any way but everybody does stupid shit when they’re a teenager and something like this shouldn’t haunt them for the rest of their working lives provided they mature into well-adjusted adults.
The bigger problem is the poorly-adjusted adults in the communities that raise these kids and teach them to be hateful towards people with harmless differences.
The letters they are holding were provided by the school for some kind of event. It seems like these kids thought they could be funny by spelling out a no no word. To any rational thinking human, this isn’t funny, but teenagers aren’t rational think humans. That’s pretty much the definition of puberty.
But it’s 2024 and kids post everything online, so now it’s gone viral and everyone judges them as racist scum that deserve to never get a job in their lives. Off of a single photo.
That long haired guy thinks he’s the hard G. They should cancel the entire season or kick those dudes off the team. Their choice.
oklahoma. drop it into a blender and start over.
Because they want to normalize the use of racial slurs yet again, separating it from “real racism”.
Why did they cancel the entire football game and punish the entire school, instead of just disciplining these kids?
Why not? It’s just a moronic football game and maybe it’ll teach them consequences.
Schools usually punish the person who gets bullied while protecting the bully so of course they don’t know how to handle this.
They might have been forced to forfeit the game for having too few players. There isn’t a game to watch if nobody is playing.
Probably out of some sense of getting the rest of the school to learn a lesson, and creating anger at the racists. Probably misguided.
Because being teenagers is serious business.
Oklahoma the prototypical red state shithole.
Where if the black community becomes peacefully prosperous, it’s too much for the numerous white inferiority-complex shitkickers to take, they boil and fester like an infection until one night they swarm like a biblical plague of locusts to burn and raze the black community to the ground.
Hollow and ignorant, lazy and angry white madness is synonymous with republican-voting states.
Most of my experience in Oklahoma was in Norman, a fantastic college town. When I would go outside of the Norman/Moore/OKC area to visit the families of my fellow students, it was surprising how much and how quickly things changed.
I mean, I know the dichotomy between rural and urban is everywhere in this nation, but it seemed more stark somehow.
I live in Norman. Only place in Oklahoma that I would live.
I am allways fascinated by people who just have to do things that will cause them a lot of problems.
I get that they lack empathy, that much is clear, but where is their sense of self preservation?
Part of me is envious that they have so few problems that they deliberately make more for themselves.
I used to be a reckless teen. I just didn’t use my foresight. The payoff of doing the joke/dangerous thing is more worth it than self preservation when you’re a dumb kid.
Maybe they want to run to be GOP officials, this is a prerequisite
What, you’re trying to tell us that you were never so comfortable with your station in life that you uh… printed off scrabble tiles to make matching necklaces that spell out a racial slur as a teen??? Geeze what a tragically empty life you must have had.
Compared to others, my teens were what they would call empty, but I had a good and calm time in my teens.
I did some things as a teen that would absolutely humiliate me today if blasted on the internet. I even bullied people as a teen, so we’re talking real dirtbag stuff.
Still. I never was even slightly tempted to take a pic with friends and a slur around my neck, so I guess I have that going for me.
Sure this is racist, but it’s also just teenagers doing stupid teenagers stuff. They probably thought this was incredibly edgy… They should just be punished accordingly, maybe a mandatory course on racism or something.
The racist rhetoric is definitely out there, I don’t know who is denying that. I don’t expect it will ever go away. It’s like when you break a bone at age 40, it will heal but will always remain a weak spot. However, I do think the current generation overall is doing a good effort to push the rhetoric away.
Apologists like you are part of the problem and one big reason why it’s still there.
This is not an abstract problem of rhetoric. Shit like this is actively hurting people. It normalises hateful speech and behaviour against minorities.
I’ve done some pretty stupid stuff as a teenager, because I thought it was funny to upset people. I thought I was being edgy. It never occurred to me that hurting people actually hurt people. I was a teenager, all I cared about was me and my friends.
I could’ve done this as a teenager, but I would see the error of my ways after it was pointed out to me by the entire school and the news papers and the whole world. I would not be thinking about the Co sequences of my actions before hand. That’s not what teenagers do. That’s what teenagers need to learn, some are just a bit slower in learning that.
I’m not an apologists. This a hurtful act, a disgrace and it should be punished. All I’m saying is that teenage boys can be stupid like this. If this was done by grown man, it would’ve been pure evil. Now it is a large part stupidity, not less hurtful, just a different origin. If these were grown men, they would be scum. I don’t know these boys, they might be scum already, but maybe they can still change and grow up to be normal, tolerable, non-racist people.
I’m sorry, nobody taught you that “that hurting people actually hurt people.”
But that’s just the point. We can’t excuse behaviour like this as “boys will be boys”. Behaviour like this needs to have consequences that actually hurt, not a slap on the wrist, so these kids have a chance to learn.
If they get away with this with just a “Hey, that’s not okay, don’t do it again. Teenagers haha”, what you actually teaching them, is that it’s not that bad. And they grow up into adults who think hateful language is not that bad.
Teenagers might have underdeveloped judgment, but thats not necessarily something they learn on their own. Moral judgment isn’t genetic and something that you grow into on your own. Moral standards and judgments are taught by your society and your environment.
So do me a favour and teach teenagers instead of excusing them with their age.
physical harm is obvious, mental harm is not. This is even more true when that harm is distributed over a wide area that you are not near.
I agree. But I think that this kind of public shaming in a newspaper is already beyond “a slap on the wrist”, but it is not enough on it’s own. However, an actual criminal sentence would be too much, because that would ruin their futures, which would create resentment and that eventual creates actual nazis.
In the Netherlands we have some form of criminal sentencing for teenagers which gets deleted from your record after you turn 18 or 21 or something. These kids usually get 50 or a 100 hours or so work sentence, like picking garbage or some other tedious manual labour (after school, of course). Maybe it would even be fitting to have them work in some sort of slavery memorial centre or museum. I think such a punishment could be applied here… I don’t know if the US has such an arrangement though or if it’s even legally fitting for this case.
I don’t know where your outcry about newspapers, criminal charges and completely ruined lives comes from.
What are you defending here?
This is a Tweet and not a newspaper. It states facts and the reaction from an affected person. Nobody mentioned lifelong consequences. Not even in the comments when I replied to your first comment.
These boys put this online themselves. That someone shares it should not surprise nor is it a disproportionate consequence.You just assumed something and started excusing their behaviour as teenage stupidity.
I’m not American, but afaik social service hours and the sealing of a juvenile record are a thing there too. I doubt however, that there is any crime committed here, that can be punished in a court of law.
What are you defending here?
Racism. They’re defending what they perceive as the “right” of racists to be racist without consequence. The excuses they’re making for themselves, and these teens, don’t change that.
There’s a partial link to a newspaper article visible in the screenshot.
This seems to be the full link: https://eu.oklahoman.com/story/news/2024/09/19/tishomingo-oklahoma-students-disciplined-after-racial-slur-shown-in-viral-image/75294249007/
I am not defending anything, I am merely saying that teenagers are stupid and that eventhough this is racist, it might have been born from stupidity rather than racism, because that’s what teenagers boys often do. It is not an excuse, but a different view point. The reasons matter. A stupid teenager making a stupid mistake is different from a grown adult trying to purposefully hurt people because of some misguided hate or something. And a punishment should be manufactured accordingly.
I hadn’t read the article before, but it states that the school provided these scrabble letter to all students as some kind of school spirit stunt. Therefor I can imagine that these boys thought it would be funny to spell “nigger”, a spur of the moment thought, not thinking about any consequences. They took a picture, posted it on the Internet, because that’s what teenagers do these days and the rest is history.
They did put it online and it being shared is therfor an obvious result. I don’t know if it’s a fitting punishment though. Maybe these kids are actual scum and they just enjoy the attention. Maybe these kids aren’t that bad, just immensely stupid and they never intended it to go viral and are regretting their decision now. Maybe that is a fitting punishment. But it’s dangerous if it goes so viral that people with strong opinions decide to take matters in their own hand. The person from the doesn’t seem to be involved with the school(but that’s an assumption on my part). That’s the kind of different viewpoint I wanted to offer. Don’t get too angry over this. This is a problem to be solved by the school, the parents and the people involved, not a national witch Hunt.
The OP didn’t say they should get away with it, they’re just pointing out how idiotic teenage boys are. I think we can all agree that they deserve serious consequences for this, it’s vile. Do they deserve to have their lives ruined?
Beyond typical teenage stupidity, they learned this behavior from somewhere and that’s usually at home. So I think they don’t bear sole responsibility here. This happened as a result of their environment. The boneheaded teenager says the quiet part out loud to be edgy or whatever. The solution is to punish them, but also take a deeper look into the situation which allowed it in the first place.
Also, I can tell from that picture that the ringleaders # 1 and 3 are total dickwads.
Meanwhile my white daughter is being taunted at school by black children calling her the n-word (with hard R) and saying “you can’t say it but we can”. Soo what can we do about that? If it’s going to be an unspoken word it should be for all. Kids will do stupid shit.
Edit: so downvotes and no response is just as much an apologist as the other response. Why can kids taunt with words that are supposed to be off limits? It only perpetuates the issue by reminding kids that those words exist, their usage should be stopped by all so they can fade from the vocabulary.
Soo what can we do about that?
Talk to the school authorities? That’s what I would do if my kid were being bullied.
The bullying is the problem here, not the word being used.
Why can kids taunt with words that are supposed to be off limits?
They can’t? Bullying is wrong no matter what words you use.
“you can’t say it but we can”
Presumably the same punishment is given whoever says it.
Because it’s not your place to tell people from a marginalized group how they are allowed to interact with the slurs that have been used against them. Reclaiming words and for once holding the power around the word is their right if they so choose.
It’s your job as a parent to explain the historical and social context to your children. You have work to do if your child is bothered they can’t call other kids a slur that those children have reclaimed. It does nobody any good to bury our heads in the sand, say persecuted people can’t say it if my privileged child can’t say it, and pretend there’s no complex history there.
Marginalization is not universal or absolute. You can easily have people who are marginalized in some contexts, and privileged in others.
An easy example is religion.
A christian in Spain is probably considered part of the majority and privileged, meanwhile, that same person could be subject to intense persecution in a country like Saudi Arabia because of the same beliefs.
The same can be applied to this child being bullied by their racist peers.
It’s not absolute, yes. But we’re not talking about any situation—specifically white and black children using a specific racial slur. One of those belongs to a group that has been (and still is) systematically persecuted with that term connected. The other has not. We’re not seriously going to say that one white kid potentially being bullied is somehow comparable to the history of societal persecution against black people I hope.
The point I was making is it’s not reasonable to turn one situation of someone being bullied as evidence that black people are not allowed to use the n word if white people can’t. That’s it. I’m really amazed that is somehow controversial.
My kids should not be punished for things they have never caused and never said. We need to stop punishing for sins of the past.
It isn’t punishing for sins of the past, it’s punishing for sins if the present. If your daughter calls a black classmate a slur today, then that happened today. The reason why it’s bad has to do with a whole lot of history, but it was still said today.
Nobody is going around suspending students because their great granddaddy used a slur in 1840.
No my daughter doesn’t say that. The black students taunt her and call her it and say she can’t say it. She is respectful.
Then what are you complaining about? A white girl saying “nigger” is disgusting anyway. They might as well taunt her for not being allowed to eat feces. If she’s a decent person she’ll have the same inclination to do that as to say slurs.
How is it taunting if she doesn’t want to say it back? The entirety of her response could be, “Yep.” It wouldn’t be taunting for someone to tell me, “You can’t do nuclear physics.” I would agree with them and be slightly confused why they were apparently out of the blue stating it.
If she’s truly being randomly bullied, that’s not going to be solved by telling black people they can’t use that word. A bully would just say something else. This is a rather easy one to deflect.
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Plenty of teenagers who not only wouldn’t do this, but feel disgusted looking at it.
