Missouri students pilloried for white supremacist gesture were doing no such thing
A Poplar Bluff High School alum wants to apologize to some 2021 graduates of her old high school for inadvertently spreading misinformation about them on social media.
She thought she was calling out members of the school’s student council for flashing a hand gesture associated with white supremacy in a group photo they posted on Instagram. Only, that’s not what they were doing in the shot.
In the photo, the students were mimicking a hand gesture made popular by Michael Jordan after he and his Chicago Bulls twice won the NBA national title three years in a row — a three-peat.
Like Jordan, the students are holding up three fingers, palms turned inward. They were innocently celebrating the third consecutive time they had won something called the Powder Buff championships, a local whimsical volleyball tournament played by the boys instead of the girls.
The woman regrets her faulty assumptions and the harm it’s done, but before she learned she was wrong and took down the post from her Facebook page, it had already been widely shared. “So I guess the implication is that I’m partly responsible for ruining innocent young lives for forwarding that screenshot,” the woman said in an email to The Star Editorial Board. “If true I much regret it.”
Let’s hope no one’s life will be ruined. And no, we’re not naming the woman in this editorial, because the point isn’t to redirect the anger mistakenly aimed at these young people at her.
But outside of their small southeast Missouri town, their faces and their high school may still be linked with white supremacy because their gesture was taken for the OK sign, palm turned outward, that’s been associated with white supremacist groups. Maybe one clue should have been that at least two of the smiling seniors in the photo are students of color.
Such an accusation would be damaging for any school, but especially for a school that was rightly criticized after a teacher there allowed a student to come to school dressed as a Ku Klux Klan member in a white robe and hood.
“It’s most unfortunate that so many are so quick to believe the very worst of one another,” said Superintendent Scott Dill, who knew when he first saw the picture that it might be misconstrued, but was still surprised by the speed and ferocity of the response.
“It was vicious,” Dill said. “People were brutal, commenting on individuals, portraying it as a racist gesture.” He said school officials, teachers and parents tried to shield the students but that wasn’t possible.
“The students were really taken aback by the comments and when you see someone attacking your kids like that it is hurtful,” Dill said.
The original post has been pulled down now, but screenshots of it and the false information that accompanied it, are almost certainly still circulating. “Oh yeah! It’s still out there, probably for a long time,” Dill said.
Which is a lesson for all of us, that what we think we see on social media may not be what it looks like.
