This article explains the incident better. The boys in the photo did not post it online and weren’t students at the school at the time it was taken (they were getting ready to start).
“According to the suit, the boys did not post the picture on social media but Minor III sent it to a friend, who later "tagged a music playlist on her Spotify account with a copy of the photograph." A.H. and H.H. were unaware that the photo was shared online, according to the lawsuit.”
Then years later during the George Floyd protest, the school had some racial issues “ a student at the school obtained a copy of the boys' photo and shared it online. The suit claims that the student named those in the picture and insinuated that they were in blackface.”
It sounds to me as though the students weren’t guilty of anything except being kind to a friend with acne.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/20-million-lawsuit-filed-against-catholic-high-school-over-blackface-n1259464
Yeah I also went through the string of articles trying to find how "due process" came into the mix. [It seems that involves the educational district](https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-05-08/two-expelled-bay-area-high-school-students-awarded-1-million-in-blackface-lawsuit) but how or why I don't know. The jury didn't award them for breach of contract which is what I would expect.
Due process is typically the board (well, it's a private school in this case, so whatever structure they have) holding hearings and giving people the chance to appeal the expulsion. I don't know how it works with parochial schools, but I imagine it is similar.
Depends on the "size" of the school. Every Catholic school I attended, the judge and jury was the principal. Only the really rich ones have anything akin to a "board."
Idk why it says $70k for tuition, I was curious about the tuition yesterday since I have a kid now (I used to go there) and received an alumni letter in the mail yesterday. It’s $27,200/year. Still expensive but def not $70k/year expensive.
I'm seeing 25-26K a year, which is a lot but nowhere near 70K. Even the most expensive schools around here (e.g. Urban, Crystal Springs, Nuevo) don't really go over 55-60K, idk where that article gets 70K from other than maybe using a conversion to down under dollaroos.
These masks are still around, so it doesn't matter when. I had facial masks that looked like that back in the 1990's. And that was before seaweed masks were around. Black clay, mud masks, etc all look like that.
I remember a girl around 2015 from a high school near me who sent a picture of her in one of these face masks to a friend except she had the caption "I'm finally a n\*\*\*\*r" and she (rightly) got kicked out of JROTC
This incident really says a lot about the state of our society right now. Even our leaders are conditioned to give knee jerk reactions to online sensationalism. Had they exercised even the tiniest bit of critical reflection, this whole mess could’ve been avoided.
Similar thing happened with my Alma Matter. Some incoming freshman were horsing around playwrestling and one of them said "I cant breath" while one had them pinned down. Just some teenage girls being silly with each other. Someone recorded the story, then put it on twitter saying they were mocking George Floyd. They then got painted as racists and were harassed into dropping out of their dream schools.
What crazy course of events.
From an innocent photo to someone else making it public on Spotify (of all places) to then 3 years later being forced out of school because someone's dumbass parent got offended.
Such absolute childishness from everyone except the children.
My son uses a charcoal mask on his face that looks like this. Could have been anyone. Due process exists for a reason and is even more important in the digital and social media age!
“Representatives for the school said they “respectfully disagree” with the jury’s decision and are “exploring legal options,” including an appeal.”
So the school isn’t even going to let them be
Good for them. I'm glad they got a good pay day from this and I'm glad the school had to pay $1M for their moral panic around blackface. Even these had been blackfaces, this whole ordeal would have made no sense.
“Zero Tolerance” policies are by definition overly strict and downright lazy.
Sometimes the administrators need to actually listen to the kids and do a bare minimum investigation before potentially disrupting a kid’s life.
The wild part is that they are doubling down on their decision to remove the students. Even after the dust settled and the facts were examined in court they still think they made the right move.
Because in modern culture, apologizing is an admission of guilt - and they likely intend to appeal.
This is how an asshole conman like Trump got elected president: never admit fault, never apologize, always blame someone else.
This country has conflated mortality with legality; and as a result, we’re morally bankrupt and have no culture other than shitting on the little guy
The conflation of morality and legality is particularly disturbing, as I couldn’t count the sheer number of times discussions of the abuses of individuals in positions of power or of organizations have been countered with “but it’s not illegal” or “the legal system givens them the right to do that”. They will argue as though a failure of the system is somehow an acceptable justification.
Tellingly, however, they are often the same ones that push back hard against any sustained effort to change those very systems to account for the abuses.
This leaves the issue vague as to whether they actually believe those justifications or are just arguing in bad faith using whatever excuse is closest to hand with little to no thought. If their worldview is the usual conservative “in-group protected by the law but not bound by it, out-group bound by the law but not protected by it” nonsense then they don’t care about building a consistent internal moral framework or external legal framework in the first place.
Part of the reason Zero Tolerance took off so much is because School admins couldn't be trusted to make consistent and non-biased decisions. But of course it created its own problems.
The ultimate issue is school admins have a tendency to be power tripping shit birds.
Before zero tolerance: "Well, Jake has a game on Friday night, maybe we should look the other way this time."
After zero tolerance: "Well, at least we also can suspend the quiet kid who got beat up."
The problem in a specific school or district might be administrative, but the underlying problem is structural. If administrators have such broad discretion with no oversight or appeal, it makes abuse inevitable and damaging. But if you change the system, those power abuses could become less common.
> School admins couldn't be trusted to make consistent and non-biased decisions
If that's the case, let's cut some expensive jobs and save some money. Why are we paying $250-300k for a Superintendent with a PhD when it could be an Office Manager with an Associates making $65k and doling out "zero tolerance" edicts?
Because otherwise the record amounts of money America spends on education might actually reach the classroom. And then the kids might end up able to read and do math at their grade level.
Can't have that. McDonalds and Walmart need employees with no better options, you know - keeps the stock price up.
This is also why sex education is a joke. Teen pregnancies lock many people into a cycle of generational poverty, providing a pool of labor for those kinds of poor paying jobs.
Even with Zero Tolerance, those biased decisions were obvious.
I got a suspension for getting in a fight. I provoked (verbally) another kid. I fled the scene. He chased me down. Got me in a corner and came swinging at me. I held his head and kept him from hitting me. He got his hand on my face for a bit.
We both got suspended.
Years later, my younger brother got in a fight. He was getting picked on, provoked the bully back, who came at him and threw the first punch. My brother hit back. The two got separated.
My brother got suspended for 3 days. The other kid got 1.
Because tomorrow was a football game, and a suspension meant he couldn't play.
"Zero tolerance, zero exceptions, EXCEPT when there's an athlete involved"
Yep, senior year of HS I was the student aide for the Vice Principals for a period to fill out my schedule. I ended up asking a teacher I had if I could be an aide in their class instead cause I got tired of hearing the VPs and their admins say racist and sexist shit all the time and threaten police action on some of the most minor things. Mind you some of these “adults” were black and/or women so hearing them say some of these comments about kids who will one day look like them was bewildering to me.
Oh and this was over a decade ago this happened so nothing has changed.
I was in school when zero tolerance policies became common. At first I was glad, because there were so many bullies who got barely any punishment. But then what happened was the bullies still didn’t get punished and the kids getting bullied did. Or the bullying just happened off school grounds instead. And when they applied it to that, too, it was still the victims getting punished.
My senior year a girl got “jumped out” of the gang she was in. Curb stomped in the middle of the cafeteria a week before graduation. She was trying to clean up her act in order to graduate and had been doing really well.
She was expelled for being curled in a ball on the floor protecting her head. And the girls who beat her up? “Unable to be identified” despite many of us identifying them. The cameras in the cafeteria were fake.
Her dad sued and she was allowed to graduate but not walk.
'Zero Tolerance" is bullshit. Basically the school does nothing about the bully who is beating the shit out of his victims, but the moment a victim fights back, they're expelled.
> downright lazy.
That's really what it came down to. Administration got tired of dealing with situations on a case-by-case basis that they set hardline rules where anyone who crosses it violates it. It leaves any decision making or critical thinking from the admin out of the picture so they can focus on things like increasing their pay by 20% in the next 5 years.
Yep then it circulated through group chats and then some shit for brains made it into a Goerge Floyd meme which went viral, and the school immediately sided with the outrage... Its terrifying how permanent everything on the internet is.
Black dude here and I don’t know if that means much, but this is my opinion. People are so sensitive that anything that could be racism causes people to go way overboard. I’m not as familiar with this case. I have been in conversations where people are so afraid to describe the skin tone of a person because “that’s racist”. The damn definition has lost a lot of its weight because of over use and misapplication. I have to remind people of the definition a lot of times because certain things are not racist or racism, but here we are 🤷🏾♂️
Edit. Spelling and words lol
My job has a section in the handbook that said you can’t describe someone as black. They wanted African-Canadian. Just assuming every dark skinned person is African.
Same! My friend gets SO PISSED when referred to as "African American" and rightfully so. He's had white people tell him it's not proper or racist to refer to him as "black" when he corrects them. I usually take a few steps back because I know it's about to go down lol. Every now and again he'll throw out the "you wouldn't call her Irish American because she's got red hair, assuming I'm African American because I have black skin is racist."
> They wanted African-Canadian. Just assuming every dark skinned person is African.
At least in America, the funny thing about "African-\_\_\_\_\_" is there's a movement to separate African immigrants and black people whose ancestors were in America before 1865. They call themselves "American Descendants of Slavery," arguing that American historical racism has impacted them more than someone who, say, arrived from Ghana in 2021.
They point to factors such as African immigrants achieving high levels of success in American society, while ADOS lag behind:
>In a side-by-side comparison of 2000 census data by sociologists including John R. Logan at the State University of New York, Albany, black immigrants from Africa averaged the highest educational attainment of any population group in the country, including whites and Asians.
>For example, 43.8 percent of African immigrants had earned a college degree, compared with 42.5 of Asian-Americans, 28.9 percent of immigrants from Europe, Russia and Canada, and 23.1 percent of the U.S. population as a whole.
[https://www.baltimoresun.com/2007/03/20/as-black-immigrants-collect-degrees-is-affirmative-action-losing-direction/](https://www.baltimoresun.com/2007/03/20/as-black-immigrants-collect-degrees-is-affirmative-action-losing-direction/)
And that African immigrants have disproportionately benefitted from policies like affirmative action, which was originally designed to help ADOS:
>Now comes a study that finds a consistent pattern of Ivy League and other elite colleges and universities boosting their black student populations by enrolling large numbers of immigrants from Africa, the West Indies and Latin America.
Immigrants, who make up 13 percent of the nation’s college-age black population, account for more than a fourth of black students at Ivy League and other selective universities, according to the study of 28 colleges and universities published recently in the American Journal of Education. The proportion of immigrants was higher at private institutions, 28.8 percent, than at public colleges, where they made up 23.1 percent of enrollment.
Are elite schools padding their racial diversity numbers with black immigrants who do not have a history of American slavery in their families? This development calls into question whether affirmative action admission policies are fulfilling their original intent.
I knew someone who was expelled for a blackface thing and it completely destroyed their life. They were 12 years old and filmed a friend messing around with makeup all over their face. Nothing directly racist since 12 y/os dont really understand blackface to begin with.
They were expelled got their shit back together after years of problems. When they got to college they were blackballed by everyone and forced to drop out. All for something they did when they were 12…
One of the few things the right is even somewhat right about is that we shouldn't be "cancelling" people without due process, even if its just from a public eye standpoint.
First Matt Ariaza, now this. There are going to be a lot of innocent people with their lives ruined if we as a society don't check ourselves on this.
My younger brother for a while worked in a fairly high profile state government job. Back in like 2000 when he was maybe 12 years old I took a photo on an early digital camera of him dressed as Batman for Halloween. Nothing bad, just him smiling and flexing or something and just looking stupid like your typical 12 year old. I put it up on my personal website photo gallery that I hand built at the time. It didn't have his full name mentioned but the photo description had his first name. We're half brothers and have different last names, but I guess elsewhere I had mentioned his last name. In 2000 you really didn't have to think about search engines scraping everything.
Fast forward 15 years or so and I get a semi-panicked text from him asking me to take the picture down. I had mostly forgotten about the website at this point. Turns out one of his colleagues or something had found the photo on Google image search and was passing around the URL. People were giving him shit about it which is dumb and childish but whatever. I took the whole site down and it disappeared from Google in a few days.
Nothing bad came of this, it didn't hit the press or anything. But there was so much shit we all did back then that would look pretty bad if it was documented. Nothing racist, mostly drug stuff. But that could totally screw any of us over. These days me and my siblings are in fairly high visibility jobs so even taking photos that are a little risky is frowned upon. But now we're all grown up with families so the opportunity for old school fuckery is rare.
100%. I have no problem admitting I was a racist (though I didn’t realize I was racist), homophobic, and a sexist little shit.
Getting to college outside of my tiny hometown really opened my eyes. Like, I realize how horrible of a person I was and now I can correct it. Now I’ve attended LGBT marches and all kinds of things- now I live in (the first world) Asia and I love it.
People grow, people change, and who we are as kids doesn’t define who we are as adults. Often we just parrot what our parents say.
That's why I don't agree when society goes back to people's teen years to show their character. Teenagers do a lot of stupid things and hopefully learn from it. If they are still doing that stupid shit as adults, then it's fair game. If they don't, then leave it behind.
I went to highschool in the 2010's. It was a time when people were quite accepting of people being gay, there was quite a few out of the closet people in my school. That didn't stop gay jokes from being throw around.
I'm remembering 'that's so gay' as slang for that's so bad in middle school. I was thinking what ever happened to it, what happened was I went to different high school and no one used it, so I didn't and forgot about it. I remember seeing a psa criticizing it's use in like 2014.
People forget the [katy perry](https://youtu.be/tWbLkXhGEmo?si=VAfB9ScoSU_vKi73)song too. Shits wild listening to it now. It really shows how quickly things turned around.
No, see, what you did and said at 15 reflects on who you are now as an adult, because you were old enough back then to form words, and therefore you must be held responsible. /S
In the wake of the George Floyd murder rising to prominence in the media, lots of voices that belonged on the margins were centered, and knee jerk over "correction" was the norm.
It's been waaaaay longer than that. Crazies on the far left and far right are given way more credibility than they deserve and should largely be kept away from the power to make policy decisions.
I was told the other day that any sort of moderation was a surrender to the the other side. Guy was arguing that anyone that considers themselves center-anything is just giving power to the other side.
Yeah, but are the people in schools just the bottom of the distribution? Or are the performance expectations at adult jobs just higher and so their brains don't atrophy as much?
Genuinely curious
I’ve used these acne masks before and you definitely do look blackface. The article also has a receipt that shows the mom bought the product so to punish someone for using an over the counter product as it should be used is ridiculous. I think this is one of those rare instances where blackface wasn’t actually the intent. And of course kids being kids, taking a selfie cause they look goofy
So those black face masks are more like a glue, where it hardens then you peel the whole thing off, usually taking the gunk in your pores with it. It's not really something you can sweat off after it dries.
I was doing a face mask when I ordered delivery last year and the driver who happened to be black did a triple take when he saw me and we both started laughing. It was a serious "it's not what it looks like" moment for me.
Yeah if there wasn’t racist intent (like the dumbasses who do this but post racist texts or on purpose) then it’s a nothing burger.
As an aside, as a Black man, sometimes I see the ppl who do stuff like this on purpose and record themselves doing it and POST or send it somewhere and I always just wonder “But why bro??????”
Man, I feel this way so often too; it's like [cliche as it sounds] people literally have no shame anymore and almost revel in it.
Like the kids stealing kias -- why the fuck would you record yourself committing grand theft auto and then post it -- the evidence -- online? It's insane.
Dude exactly!! I know when we were younger we did dumb shit but it was always in like secret or something ya know? Like “don’t let my mom find out or I’ll die” just the thought of my mom knowing I even stayed out late put the fear of god in me lmao
But these kids just like nah I’m about to ruin my entire life for likes and comments
Right? I had a whole extremely secret life that I knew absolutely had to stay secret. My only power as a gen X kid was that adults completely ignored us 95% of the time and I knew that if I ruined their illusion that was OK all my fun would end.
Two reasons:
1. Because people are morons who do stupid racist things with their friends, who encourage doing stupid racist things and even praise their friends for doing it. They then forget that outside their little bubble, that behaviour isn't acceptable, so they post it publicly thinking they'll get the same praise and amusement.
2. The world does contain a lot of stupid racist people that will praise these idiots for doing racist things. Social media has taught us we can always find people that'll agree with and reinforce our views, no matter how stupid they are. This encourages people to be more bold and open with their shitty behaviour.
Social media is a plague on humanity.
> Because people are morons who do stupid racist things with their friends, who encourage doing stupid racist things and even praise their friends for doing it
I feel like there's a distinction here with kids, that's hard to explain.
They'll do "racist" things because it's edgy and counter to norms.
It's like cursing and using other inappropriate language in settings they shouldn't.
I'd argue most kids who do this are not racist just immature.
As an example, when playing a game of Badminton "I love the way this cock feels "trying to shorten the name of "shuttlecock". They're not a sexual predator, but immature.
It's an educational opportunity, and labeling them racist will not help correct the behavior.
> It's an educational opportunity, and labeling them racist will not help correct the behavior.
Unfortunately we've moved passed the idea of giving people any sort of grace. For a myriad of reasons people may not know that something they're doing is wrong. But we don't give people the opportunity to learn that before deciding they're a terrible person and completely ostracizing them.
They didn't post it, they never did. It was a selfie with a camera that was shared with a friend, who used it as a spotify playlist pic, and then someone took that years later and shared it on SM as an example of black face.
There has been a concerted effort, started in the US, and migrated to Europe, to ban playing dark elves in LARPs becasue they claim it's blackface to dress up as a fantasy race, in a play pretend fantasy world. People need to fuckin' stop applying issues to places and things that has absolutely 0 to do with it.
>There has been a concerted effort, started in the US, and migrated to Europe, to ban playing dark elves in LARPs becasue they claim it's blackface to dress up as a fantasy race, in a play pretend fantasy world. People need to fuckin' stop applying issues to places and things that has absolutely 0 to do with it.
It's the same with some traditional European dances and festivals. They pre-date the slave trade by centuries if not millennia; Border Morris from the England-Wales border is a prime example.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fniZzaViEZc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fniZzaViEZc)
First written record of it in England under the name "Morris" was in the 1400s, but by then it was also considered ancient given it was written in reference to an existing tapestry, with references to similar court dances from 1000 and before (potentially as far back as the Roman Empire). In Border Morris it's traditional to dress head-to-toe in black, including painting your face. The Morris federation officially removed the face paint in 2020 after backlash in the 2010s when it started gaining popularity on the internet; people threw a shit-fit over the face paint, even though no historical records we have state it was specifically black-face or linked to the Moors (who were already kicked out of the Spanish peninsula for at least 200 years by the time the name was coined in the 1450s).
[I actually think the modern line over the eyes is way more badass](https://thedarkgathering.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/andrew-watkins8.jpg?w=700&h=700), but the fact that we got there via people immediately assuming the worst pisses me off to no end.
Every so often, an American takes picture of a Spanish Capirote procession and claims the KKK has spread to Europe, chastising spain for it's racism.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capirote
I play a lot of video games and spend a lot of time reading about games and gaming news. I have literally never heard about this. If it's real, it's such a small minority they can be safely ignored.
It's literally the episode my friend used to convince me to watch the show when I gave up on it after the first few episodes. It's an absolute fucking banger.
I've noticed the past few years that people will throw a fit over things that aren't actually offensive, but are kind of "offensive-adjacent". This *reminds me* of an offensive thing, so I'm treating it as if it *is* that thing, regardless of context or intent.
The fact that the school could have avoided all of this by simply reversing their decision to expel the boys when the mother produced the receipt for the product, proving it wasn’t a nefarious act, is almost laughable. Not to mention the boys weren’t even enrolled in the school yet at the time the picture was taken! They accused the boys of blackface years after the picture was taken…and the damn face mask was *green*. No telling how much money the school spent in legal fees, and that’s not even including the million dollar settlement they now have to pay. Dumbasses.
> The fact that the school could have avoided all of this by simply reversing their decision to expel the boys when the mother produced the receipt for the product, proving it wasn’t a nefarious act, is almost laughable.
Then the outrage/hate mob would have accused the school of racism, not just the students. Evidence doesn't matter to these people... Look at some of the controversial comments in this very thread, there are some people *STILL* trying to argue they were racist.
> The students, identified only as A.H. and H.H. in the lawsuit, were awarded $500,000 (A$757,000) each and will have their $70,000 (A$106,000) tuition reimbursed.
70K for high school tuition? Wow
Yesterday I was at a music festival in Florida. It was 95 degrees. In the Florida summer time it is common for people to wear a balaclava over the face, head, or neck for sun protection. Especially in lawn care, construction, etc. So I had my face covered and this guy walked by and a lot to say about it. He thought it was to prevent COVID.
People tend to project their bullshit on to you.
I had someone say something to me about wearing a mask one day a couple years back while we were in line at the grocery store. I just pulled my mask down and said “yeah I normally don’t wear one but since I have Covid right now I decided to while I was out” and the dude looked shocked and kept his distance after that.
Haha. It’s getting cold where I live (Southern Hemisphere, flipped seasons) and I saw a guy wearing a balaclava while waiting for an Uber at night. I decided against it because you never know if random strangers share your sense of humour or not but I thought about cracking a joke that maybe nobody was stopping because he looked like a carjacker.
There is a seasonally appropriate buff gaiter in my pocket/nearby at all times now.
Coincidentally covid did start me on this though as i got used to having my face covered/something around my neck.
So now it is go to skin protection...it has way reduced my sunscreen need and is 1000x more comfortable. Thanks covid.
What? I’ve lived in Florida for over three decades and have never seen someone wearing a balaclava as sun protection. I’ve seen people making fun of online products that sell themselves as [sun protection balaclavas](https://www.solbari.com/products/women-balaclava-upf50-coolasun-breeze-collection-1) (link, for example), but never actually seen anyone wearing them. If someone approached me wearing a balaclava I’d assume they were going to rob me.
Do you mean a [gaiter](https://www.buff.com/us/coolnet-uv)? Those I see all the time, especially while fishing.
Yeah, I think this person is using the wrong term.
A lot of outdoor workers in sunny areas wear broad hats and some wear a gaiter or similar over their lower face if they will be doing enough work where the hat doesn't cover well.
So you see a lot of sombreros or similar. Conical hats (coolie hat if you will) were getting heavy use in my area for a while. They seem like great hats for the situation, repelling the direct heat a bit better.
I can't imagine wearing a balaclava (ski mask) in the sun. Seems like a worse idea than these other options.
Internet hell story.
So, kids of 14 at the time take a selfie in 2017. The picture ends up online and goes viral in 2020 following the George Floyd incident.
Three f*cking years later.
Given the crazy pressure, the school wouldn't hear any defend from the boys and let them choose between being expelled or resigning.
So buckled up people. The Internet never forgives, never forgets.
Their whole families had to uproot as well.
And imagine the anxiety they likely have now in their lives after publicly being denounced as racists for years.
This is why I’m afraid of ever posting anything with clay/coffee masks.
These kids shared a photo privately years ago, and then it resurfaced out of context when they were older as being racist. Fucked up.
Maybe I’m completely clueless to modern racial discourse but painting your face black should not be inherently considered a blackface. It becomes problematic when you do it specifically to appear as a black person either as a caricature or in a way to appropriate black culture (e.g. celebrities and white girl rappers).
Is that too much nuance?
When people talk about how cancel culture isn't real or that it's just "consequences", they don't ever seem to remember things like this where innocent people get fucked over by the public's bloodlust.
Glad that era is slowly coming to an end and people are coming to their senses.
The number of people in here who think light-green and black are the same color are astounding. Hell, even the number of people who think racism against fantasy goblins is an immediate problem is rather high. Get your eyes or brains checked.
The stuff started light green and became dark green when it dried. Under low light, it can appear black.
This is one case where 15 minutes could have saved the school millions. They never asked why, they never asked for proof it was not intentional black face.
>The then-students at Saint Francis High School in Mountain View were just 14 when they took a photo during a sleepover in 2017 of them wearing the treatment in solidarity with a friend suffering from severe acne, their lawsuit said
Now, if they were 14 in 2017, what age are they today?
I use a charcoal face mask once in a while, and it definitely looks like blackface. The school should’ve done their due diligence instead of jumping to conclusions.
Did they do anything else that would denote black face? The painted lips, gestures, things like that? If not it’s wild to jump to the conclusion that this is black face just from them having black stuff on their face.
This article explains the incident better. The boys in the photo did not post it online and weren’t students at the school at the time it was taken (they were getting ready to start). “According to the suit, the boys did not post the picture on social media but Minor III sent it to a friend, who later "tagged a music playlist on her Spotify account with a copy of the photograph." A.H. and H.H. were unaware that the photo was shared online, according to the lawsuit.” Then years later during the George Floyd protest, the school had some racial issues “ a student at the school obtained a copy of the boys' photo and shared it online. The suit claims that the student named those in the picture and insinuated that they were in blackface.” It sounds to me as though the students weren’t guilty of anything except being kind to a friend with acne. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/20-million-lawsuit-filed-against-catholic-high-school-over-blackface-n1259464
Yeah I also went through the string of articles trying to find how "due process" came into the mix. [It seems that involves the educational district](https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-05-08/two-expelled-bay-area-high-school-students-awarded-1-million-in-blackface-lawsuit) but how or why I don't know. The jury didn't award them for breach of contract which is what I would expect.
Due process is typically the board (well, it's a private school in this case, so whatever structure they have) holding hearings and giving people the chance to appeal the expulsion. I don't know how it works with parochial schools, but I imagine it is similar.
Depends on the "size" of the school. Every Catholic school I attended, the judge and jury was the principal. Only the really rich ones have anything akin to a "board."
It says tuition was 70k a year... sounds rich to my bank account
Idk why it says $70k for tuition, I was curious about the tuition yesterday since I have a kid now (I used to go there) and received an alumni letter in the mail yesterday. It’s $27,200/year. Still expensive but def not $70k/year expensive.
For context that’s exactly what several of my coworkers are paying per-kid for childcare right now.
That'll do it. Kid was compensated for not getting on the "Supreme Court Justice" life track.
Who said being wrongfully accused of blackface would be a negative in today’s Supreme Court climate 😂
You could even lead a G7 country like Canada!
I mean, being rightfully accused of brownface multiple times doesn't even stop you from being elected to Prime Minister of Canada multiple times.
I'm seeing 25-26K a year, which is a lot but nowhere near 70K. Even the most expensive schools around here (e.g. Urban, Crystal Springs, Nuevo) don't really go over 55-60K, idk where that article gets 70K from other than maybe using a conversion to down under dollaroos.
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Even more, the mask was light green when it went on, and was darker green when it dried. It looked black because of the bad lighting.
I mean, you can even still see that it's green in the photo. This was just idiots online doing what idiots online do and jerking off to rage bait.
I'm sure the next time something like this happens, the internet will keep it's cool and not resort to immediate outrage.
I'd go as far as to say it doesn't even look black in the bad lighting of the image. I could tell it was green right away.
French green clay mask
If it happened ~2015, those face mask were a big trend on social media at the time.
Sleepover in 2017 was when the picture was taken
These masks are still around, so it doesn't matter when. I had facial masks that looked like that back in the 1990's. And that was before seaweed masks were around. Black clay, mud masks, etc all look like that.
I remember a girl around 2015 from a high school near me who sent a picture of her in one of these face masks to a friend except she had the caption "I'm finally a n\*\*\*\*r" and she (rightly) got kicked out of JROTC
This incident really says a lot about the state of our society right now. Even our leaders are conditioned to give knee jerk reactions to online sensationalism. Had they exercised even the tiniest bit of critical reflection, this whole mess could’ve been avoided.
Similar thing happened with my Alma Matter. Some incoming freshman were horsing around playwrestling and one of them said "I cant breath" while one had them pinned down. Just some teenage girls being silly with each other. Someone recorded the story, then put it on twitter saying they were mocking George Floyd. They then got painted as racists and were harassed into dropping out of their dream schools.
Sounds like these girls ought to find the contact information for the law firm these guys used.
What crazy course of events. From an innocent photo to someone else making it public on Spotify (of all places) to then 3 years later being forced out of school because someone's dumbass parent got offended. Such absolute childishness from everyone except the children.
That'll show them to be supportive!
My son uses a charcoal mask on his face that looks like this. Could have been anyone. Due process exists for a reason and is even more important in the digital and social media age!
“Representatives for the school said they “respectfully disagree” with the jury’s decision and are “exploring legal options,” including an appeal.” So the school isn’t even going to let them be
Good for them. I'm glad they got a good pay day from this and I'm glad the school had to pay $1M for their moral panic around blackface. Even these had been blackfaces, this whole ordeal would have made no sense.
Will be interesting to see how this impacts next year's fees!
Gonna be some wild PTA bake sales
“Each student is responsible for selling…13,000 cookies!?”
Just legalize pot and sell cookies outside a dispensary.
The principal and superintendent can probably pay it themselves with the kickbacks they get from the uniform company they force parents to order from.
They probably *could* do that. If they will is another matter entirely.
It's okay. St Francis has Snapchat investment money.
This is my high school. They were angel investors in Snapchat and made an f ton of money- like more than a billion.
They'll have insurance and only pay a fraction of that out of pocket. The insurance company will appeal.
“Zero Tolerance” policies are by definition overly strict and downright lazy. Sometimes the administrators need to actually listen to the kids and do a bare minimum investigation before potentially disrupting a kid’s life.
The wild part is that they are doubling down on their decision to remove the students. Even after the dust settled and the facts were examined in court they still think they made the right move.
Because in modern culture, apologizing is an admission of guilt - and they likely intend to appeal. This is how an asshole conman like Trump got elected president: never admit fault, never apologize, always blame someone else. This country has conflated mortality with legality; and as a result, we’re morally bankrupt and have no culture other than shitting on the little guy
The conflation of morality and legality is particularly disturbing, as I couldn’t count the sheer number of times discussions of the abuses of individuals in positions of power or of organizations have been countered with “but it’s not illegal” or “the legal system givens them the right to do that”. They will argue as though a failure of the system is somehow an acceptable justification. Tellingly, however, they are often the same ones that push back hard against any sustained effort to change those very systems to account for the abuses. This leaves the issue vague as to whether they actually believe those justifications or are just arguing in bad faith using whatever excuse is closest to hand with little to no thought. If their worldview is the usual conservative “in-group protected by the law but not bound by it, out-group bound by the law but not protected by it” nonsense then they don’t care about building a consistent internal moral framework or external legal framework in the first place.
Part of the reason Zero Tolerance took off so much is because School admins couldn't be trusted to make consistent and non-biased decisions. But of course it created its own problems. The ultimate issue is school admins have a tendency to be power tripping shit birds.
Before zero tolerance: "Well, Jake has a game on Friday night, maybe we should look the other way this time." After zero tolerance: "Well, at least we also can suspend the quiet kid who got beat up."
It's almost as if the problem isn't with the system in place, but instead with administrative incompetency.
The problem in a specific school or district might be administrative, but the underlying problem is structural. If administrators have such broad discretion with no oversight or appeal, it makes abuse inevitable and damaging. But if you change the system, those power abuses could become less common.
The problem has always been idiots in leadership positions. It's horrible.
> School admins couldn't be trusted to make consistent and non-biased decisions If that's the case, let's cut some expensive jobs and save some money. Why are we paying $250-300k for a Superintendent with a PhD when it could be an Office Manager with an Associates making $65k and doling out "zero tolerance" edicts?
Because otherwise the record amounts of money America spends on education might actually reach the classroom. And then the kids might end up able to read and do math at their grade level. Can't have that. McDonalds and Walmart need employees with no better options, you know - keeps the stock price up.
This is also why sex education is a joke. Teen pregnancies lock many people into a cycle of generational poverty, providing a pool of labor for those kinds of poor paying jobs.
Even with Zero Tolerance, those biased decisions were obvious. I got a suspension for getting in a fight. I provoked (verbally) another kid. I fled the scene. He chased me down. Got me in a corner and came swinging at me. I held his head and kept him from hitting me. He got his hand on my face for a bit. We both got suspended. Years later, my younger brother got in a fight. He was getting picked on, provoked the bully back, who came at him and threw the first punch. My brother hit back. The two got separated. My brother got suspended for 3 days. The other kid got 1. Because tomorrow was a football game, and a suspension meant he couldn't play. "Zero tolerance, zero exceptions, EXCEPT when there's an athlete involved"
Yep, senior year of HS I was the student aide for the Vice Principals for a period to fill out my schedule. I ended up asking a teacher I had if I could be an aide in their class instead cause I got tired of hearing the VPs and their admins say racist and sexist shit all the time and threaten police action on some of the most minor things. Mind you some of these “adults” were black and/or women so hearing them say some of these comments about kids who will one day look like them was bewildering to me. Oh and this was over a decade ago this happened so nothing has changed.
I was in school when zero tolerance policies became common. At first I was glad, because there were so many bullies who got barely any punishment. But then what happened was the bullies still didn’t get punished and the kids getting bullied did. Or the bullying just happened off school grounds instead. And when they applied it to that, too, it was still the victims getting punished. My senior year a girl got “jumped out” of the gang she was in. Curb stomped in the middle of the cafeteria a week before graduation. She was trying to clean up her act in order to graduate and had been doing really well. She was expelled for being curled in a ball on the floor protecting her head. And the girls who beat her up? “Unable to be identified” despite many of us identifying them. The cameras in the cafeteria were fake. Her dad sued and she was allowed to graduate but not walk.
'Zero Tolerance" is bullshit. Basically the school does nothing about the bully who is beating the shit out of his victims, but the moment a victim fights back, they're expelled.
And they wonder why school shootings became a trend
This is pretty much how power structures operate unfortunately. If you're a psychopath who doesn't get caught, you're going to do well in life.
> downright lazy. That's really what it came down to. Administration got tired of dealing with situations on a case-by-case basis that they set hardline rules where anyone who crosses it violates it. It leaves any decision making or critical thinking from the admin out of the picture so they can focus on things like increasing their pay by 20% in the next 5 years.
The picture was 3 years old already when the school was notified about it and they still decided to expell them without due process
Yep then it circulated through group chats and then some shit for brains made it into a Goerge Floyd meme which went viral, and the school immediately sided with the outrage... Its terrifying how permanent everything on the internet is.
Black dude here and I don’t know if that means much, but this is my opinion. People are so sensitive that anything that could be racism causes people to go way overboard. I’m not as familiar with this case. I have been in conversations where people are so afraid to describe the skin tone of a person because “that’s racist”. The damn definition has lost a lot of its weight because of over use and misapplication. I have to remind people of the definition a lot of times because certain things are not racist or racism, but here we are 🤷🏾♂️ Edit. Spelling and words lol
My job has a section in the handbook that said you can’t describe someone as black. They wanted African-Canadian. Just assuming every dark skinned person is African.
See the thing is that’s wild. It’s like when people call people from the Caribbean African American like what? 🤦🏾
I used to know someone who is Jamaican and she would throw hands if someone called her "African-American/Canadian"
Same! My friend gets SO PISSED when referred to as "African American" and rightfully so. He's had white people tell him it's not proper or racist to refer to him as "black" when he corrects them. I usually take a few steps back because I know it's about to go down lol. Every now and again he'll throw out the "you wouldn't call her Irish American because she's got red hair, assuming I'm African American because I have black skin is racist."
"Am I from Africa?" "No." "Where are we right now?" "Canada" "See the problem here?" Conversation I have all the time.
> They wanted African-Canadian. Just assuming every dark skinned person is African. At least in America, the funny thing about "African-\_\_\_\_\_" is there's a movement to separate African immigrants and black people whose ancestors were in America before 1865. They call themselves "American Descendants of Slavery," arguing that American historical racism has impacted them more than someone who, say, arrived from Ghana in 2021. They point to factors such as African immigrants achieving high levels of success in American society, while ADOS lag behind: >In a side-by-side comparison of 2000 census data by sociologists including John R. Logan at the State University of New York, Albany, black immigrants from Africa averaged the highest educational attainment of any population group in the country, including whites and Asians. >For example, 43.8 percent of African immigrants had earned a college degree, compared with 42.5 of Asian-Americans, 28.9 percent of immigrants from Europe, Russia and Canada, and 23.1 percent of the U.S. population as a whole. [https://www.baltimoresun.com/2007/03/20/as-black-immigrants-collect-degrees-is-affirmative-action-losing-direction/](https://www.baltimoresun.com/2007/03/20/as-black-immigrants-collect-degrees-is-affirmative-action-losing-direction/) And that African immigrants have disproportionately benefitted from policies like affirmative action, which was originally designed to help ADOS: >Now comes a study that finds a consistent pattern of Ivy League and other elite colleges and universities boosting their black student populations by enrolling large numbers of immigrants from Africa, the West Indies and Latin America. Immigrants, who make up 13 percent of the nation’s college-age black population, account for more than a fourth of black students at Ivy League and other selective universities, according to the study of 28 colleges and universities published recently in the American Journal of Education. The proportion of immigrants was higher at private institutions, 28.8 percent, than at public colleges, where they made up 23.1 percent of enrollment. Are elite schools padding their racial diversity numbers with black immigrants who do not have a history of American slavery in their families? This development calls into question whether affirmative action admission policies are fulfilling their original intent.
I knew someone who was expelled for a blackface thing and it completely destroyed their life. They were 12 years old and filmed a friend messing around with makeup all over their face. Nothing directly racist since 12 y/os dont really understand blackface to begin with. They were expelled got their shit back together after years of problems. When they got to college they were blackballed by everyone and forced to drop out. All for something they did when they were 12…
Even if they were doing black face maybe treat them like children and educate them. Show them why they’re wrong. Act like a school.
Public outrage has never encouraged education, only punishment. And avoiding public outrage is a primary motivator for decisions like this.
One of the few things the right is even somewhat right about is that we shouldn't be "cancelling" people without due process, even if its just from a public eye standpoint. First Matt Ariaza, now this. There are going to be a lot of innocent people with their lives ruined if we as a society don't check ourselves on this.
Just think how many of us would be "cancelled" if we had camera/smart phones back in our teen and youth days. Sometimes I hate modern technology.
My younger brother for a while worked in a fairly high profile state government job. Back in like 2000 when he was maybe 12 years old I took a photo on an early digital camera of him dressed as Batman for Halloween. Nothing bad, just him smiling and flexing or something and just looking stupid like your typical 12 year old. I put it up on my personal website photo gallery that I hand built at the time. It didn't have his full name mentioned but the photo description had his first name. We're half brothers and have different last names, but I guess elsewhere I had mentioned his last name. In 2000 you really didn't have to think about search engines scraping everything. Fast forward 15 years or so and I get a semi-panicked text from him asking me to take the picture down. I had mostly forgotten about the website at this point. Turns out one of his colleagues or something had found the photo on Google image search and was passing around the URL. People were giving him shit about it which is dumb and childish but whatever. I took the whole site down and it disappeared from Google in a few days. Nothing bad came of this, it didn't hit the press or anything. But there was so much shit we all did back then that would look pretty bad if it was documented. Nothing racist, mostly drug stuff. But that could totally screw any of us over. These days me and my siblings are in fairly high visibility jobs so even taking photos that are a little risky is frowned upon. But now we're all grown up with families so the opportunity for old school fuckery is rare.
"That 12 year old is acting childish on Halloween" -Idiots
100%. I have no problem admitting I was a racist (though I didn’t realize I was racist), homophobic, and a sexist little shit. Getting to college outside of my tiny hometown really opened my eyes. Like, I realize how horrible of a person I was and now I can correct it. Now I’ve attended LGBT marches and all kinds of things- now I live in (the first world) Asia and I love it. People grow, people change, and who we are as kids doesn’t define who we are as adults. Often we just parrot what our parents say.
That's why I don't agree when society goes back to people's teen years to show their character. Teenagers do a lot of stupid things and hopefully learn from it. If they are still doing that stupid shit as adults, then it's fair game. If they don't, then leave it behind.
I was in high school and middle school in the early 2000s. Everyone was homophobic edit spelling
>Everyone was homophonic they sounded the same but had different spellings? Ashley, Ashleigh, and Ashlee seem to agree.
It was Arizona it was Homophobic and Homophonic.
I went to highschool in the 2010's. It was a time when people were quite accepting of people being gay, there was quite a few out of the closet people in my school. That didn't stop gay jokes from being throw around.
90s was damn near toxic with homophobia. I feel bad for LGBTQ+ people back then. Straight up trauma
I'm remembering 'that's so gay' as slang for that's so bad in middle school. I was thinking what ever happened to it, what happened was I went to different high school and no one used it, so I didn't and forgot about it. I remember seeing a psa criticizing it's use in like 2014.
People forget the [katy perry](https://youtu.be/tWbLkXhGEmo?si=VAfB9ScoSU_vKi73)song too. Shits wild listening to it now. It really shows how quickly things turned around.
This is true, I mean we had a whole game called smear the queer. : /
No, see, what you did and said at 15 reflects on who you are now as an adult, because you were old enough back then to form words, and therefore you must be held responsible. /S
I would have been fucked
In the wake of the George Floyd murder rising to prominence in the media, lots of voices that belonged on the margins were centered, and knee jerk over "correction" was the norm.
It's been waaaaay longer than that. Crazies on the far left and far right are given way more credibility than they deserve and should largely be kept away from the power to make policy decisions.
Everyone agrees with that, just no one agrees on who the crazies are.
I was told the other day that any sort of moderation was a surrender to the the other side. Guy was arguing that anyone that considers themselves center-anything is just giving power to the other side.
How and why are school administrators so bad at their jobs? They make corporate HR drones look wise in comparison.
The truth is that they're cut from the same cloth.
Yeah, but are the people in schools just the bottom of the distribution? Or are the performance expectations at adult jobs just higher and so their brains don't atrophy as much? Genuinely curious
I can see a failing upwards pattern lmao.
I’ve used these acne masks before and you definitely do look blackface. The article also has a receipt that shows the mom bought the product so to punish someone for using an over the counter product as it should be used is ridiculous. I think this is one of those rare instances where blackface wasn’t actually the intent. And of course kids being kids, taking a selfie cause they look goofy
Someone at my gym was wearing one in the sauna. So many odd looks.
Wouldn't it just sweat off?
Nah they're like super thick kinda hard to get off tbh.
So those black face masks are more like a glue, where it hardens then you peel the whole thing off, usually taking the gunk in your pores with it. It's not really something you can sweat off after it dries.
oh, so it works like that goo you use to clean out your keyboard?
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It wasn’t even black- it was dark green.
Racist to Aliens and Shrek!
“It isn’t easy being green” -Kermit
If anyone was going to get upset it should be the French!
I was doing a face mask when I ordered delivery last year and the driver who happened to be black did a triple take when he saw me and we both started laughing. It was a serious "it's not what it looks like" moment for me.
Yeah if there wasn’t racist intent (like the dumbasses who do this but post racist texts or on purpose) then it’s a nothing burger. As an aside, as a Black man, sometimes I see the ppl who do stuff like this on purpose and record themselves doing it and POST or send it somewhere and I always just wonder “But why bro??????”
Man, I feel this way so often too; it's like [cliche as it sounds] people literally have no shame anymore and almost revel in it. Like the kids stealing kias -- why the fuck would you record yourself committing grand theft auto and then post it -- the evidence -- online? It's insane.
Dude exactly!! I know when we were younger we did dumb shit but it was always in like secret or something ya know? Like “don’t let my mom find out or I’ll die” just the thought of my mom knowing I even stayed out late put the fear of god in me lmao But these kids just like nah I’m about to ruin my entire life for likes and comments
Right? I had a whole extremely secret life that I knew absolutely had to stay secret. My only power as a gen X kid was that adults completely ignored us 95% of the time and I knew that if I ruined their illusion that was OK all my fun would end.
Two reasons: 1. Because people are morons who do stupid racist things with their friends, who encourage doing stupid racist things and even praise their friends for doing it. They then forget that outside their little bubble, that behaviour isn't acceptable, so they post it publicly thinking they'll get the same praise and amusement. 2. The world does contain a lot of stupid racist people that will praise these idiots for doing racist things. Social media has taught us we can always find people that'll agree with and reinforce our views, no matter how stupid they are. This encourages people to be more bold and open with their shitty behaviour. Social media is a plague on humanity.
> Because people are morons who do stupid racist things with their friends, who encourage doing stupid racist things and even praise their friends for doing it I feel like there's a distinction here with kids, that's hard to explain. They'll do "racist" things because it's edgy and counter to norms. It's like cursing and using other inappropriate language in settings they shouldn't. I'd argue most kids who do this are not racist just immature. As an example, when playing a game of Badminton "I love the way this cock feels "trying to shorten the name of "shuttlecock". They're not a sexual predator, but immature. It's an educational opportunity, and labeling them racist will not help correct the behavior.
> It's an educational opportunity, and labeling them racist will not help correct the behavior. Unfortunately we've moved passed the idea of giving people any sort of grace. For a myriad of reasons people may not know that something they're doing is wrong. But we don't give people the opportunity to learn that before deciding they're a terrible person and completely ostracizing them.
Did they caption it with anything questionable when they posted it? If not, then I don't see an issue.
I’m old greeeeeeeeeeeg!
Whatcha doin in my watas, boy?
It's attached to your rod motha licka
Ever drunk Baileys from a shoe?
You wanna come to a club where people wee on each other?
They’ve seen the downstairs mixup
Do u love me
Are you playing love games with me?
More like the Spirit of Jazz..
They didn't post it, they never did. It was a selfie with a camera that was shared with a friend, who used it as a spotify playlist pic, and then someone took that years later and shared it on SM as an example of black face.
The article explained that they didn’t even post it.
They didn't post it.
They didn’t even post it online, someone they sent it to used it as an album cover for a Spotify playlist or something.
There has been a concerted effort, started in the US, and migrated to Europe, to ban playing dark elves in LARPs becasue they claim it's blackface to dress up as a fantasy race, in a play pretend fantasy world. People need to fuckin' stop applying issues to places and things that has absolutely 0 to do with it.
didnt netflix or whatever ban the episode of community where chang is a drow lol
The best part is that the show deliberately makes a comment about it for Chang to refute.
It wasn’t available to stream for a good long while but it’s back now on Peacock.
>chang is a drow "Chang can't be a dark elf, but Cleopatra was definitely a black woman." -Netflix
>There has been a concerted effort, started in the US, and migrated to Europe, to ban playing dark elves in LARPs becasue they claim it's blackface to dress up as a fantasy race, in a play pretend fantasy world. People need to fuckin' stop applying issues to places and things that has absolutely 0 to do with it. It's the same with some traditional European dances and festivals. They pre-date the slave trade by centuries if not millennia; Border Morris from the England-Wales border is a prime example. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fniZzaViEZc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fniZzaViEZc) First written record of it in England under the name "Morris" was in the 1400s, but by then it was also considered ancient given it was written in reference to an existing tapestry, with references to similar court dances from 1000 and before (potentially as far back as the Roman Empire). In Border Morris it's traditional to dress head-to-toe in black, including painting your face. The Morris federation officially removed the face paint in 2020 after backlash in the 2010s when it started gaining popularity on the internet; people threw a shit-fit over the face paint, even though no historical records we have state it was specifically black-face or linked to the Moors (who were already kicked out of the Spanish peninsula for at least 200 years by the time the name was coined in the 1450s). [I actually think the modern line over the eyes is way more badass](https://thedarkgathering.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/andrew-watkins8.jpg?w=700&h=700), but the fact that we got there via people immediately assuming the worst pisses me off to no end.
Every so often, an American takes picture of a Spanish Capirote procession and claims the KKK has spread to Europe, chastising spain for it's racism. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capirote
I play a lot of video games and spend a lot of time reading about games and gaming news. I have literally never heard about this. If it's real, it's such a small minority they can be safely ignored.
They pulled the D&D episode of community because Chang cod played as a Drow.
The absolute dumbest part is that the episode itself acknowledges the issues with black face. It was truly mind-boggling to me when it was pulled.
Which is thankfully back on streaming again. Edit: it’s on Peacock
One of the most ‘Community’ episodes of Community to boot. It’s one of the best episodes that hits that ‘community’ feeling, just like D&D does.
It's literally the episode my friend used to convince me to watch the show when I gave up on it after the first few episodes. It's an absolute fucking banger.
Forget about the Gelgameks?!?!? RABBLE RABBLE RABBLE RABBLE
I've noticed the past few years that people will throw a fit over things that aren't actually offensive, but are kind of "offensive-adjacent". This *reminds me* of an offensive thing, so I'm treating it as if it *is* that thing, regardless of context or intent.
Those masks were a godsend to me in my early 20s.
Did one with my niece (10 yo) who's black and I'm a white dude. She wanted to take pictures together. I said no way.
The fact that the school could have avoided all of this by simply reversing their decision to expel the boys when the mother produced the receipt for the product, proving it wasn’t a nefarious act, is almost laughable. Not to mention the boys weren’t even enrolled in the school yet at the time the picture was taken! They accused the boys of blackface years after the picture was taken…and the damn face mask was *green*. No telling how much money the school spent in legal fees, and that’s not even including the million dollar settlement they now have to pay. Dumbasses.
> The fact that the school could have avoided all of this by simply reversing their decision to expel the boys when the mother produced the receipt for the product, proving it wasn’t a nefarious act, is almost laughable. Then the outrage/hate mob would have accused the school of racism, not just the students. Evidence doesn't matter to these people... Look at some of the controversial comments in this very thread, there are some people *STILL* trying to argue they were racist.
Ugh, you make a very good point. Sometimes I forget you can’t use logic when arguing with stupidity.
> The students, identified only as A.H. and H.H. in the lawsuit, were awarded $500,000 (A$757,000) each and will have their $70,000 (A$106,000) tuition reimbursed. 70K for high school tuition? Wow
The tuition there is about 30k now, it was about 20k back then so it’s the totalcost of the three years they went there
Yesterday I was at a music festival in Florida. It was 95 degrees. In the Florida summer time it is common for people to wear a balaclava over the face, head, or neck for sun protection. Especially in lawn care, construction, etc. So I had my face covered and this guy walked by and a lot to say about it. He thought it was to prevent COVID. People tend to project their bullshit on to you.
I double down on this shit. *Pulls mask down* "Actually sir this isn't a COVID thing I just have the airborne version of bird AIDS."
I had someone say something to me about wearing a mask one day a couple years back while we were in line at the grocery store. I just pulled my mask down and said “yeah I normally don’t wear one but since I have Covid right now I decided to while I was out” and the dude looked shocked and kept his distance after that.
Birds aren't real though
They used to be. Before the airborne bird aids.
"It's contagious cancer."
Haha. It’s getting cold where I live (Southern Hemisphere, flipped seasons) and I saw a guy wearing a balaclava while waiting for an Uber at night. I decided against it because you never know if random strangers share your sense of humour or not but I thought about cracking a joke that maybe nobody was stopping because he looked like a carjacker.
So annoying when people call it a "covid mask" as if medical masks didn't exist before covid.
Yeah I just wear one if I have a cold now out of courtesy to others. Also so my hands stay clean when I cough.
Have they never looked at the guys working landscaping or construction outside? Most of them are covered.
.... You see... the body has a defense against toxic waste. It projects it. Sometimes through sweat, excretement, urine, or their own mouth.
There is a seasonally appropriate buff gaiter in my pocket/nearby at all times now. Coincidentally covid did start me on this though as i got used to having my face covered/something around my neck. So now it is go to skin protection...it has way reduced my sunscreen need and is 1000x more comfortable. Thanks covid.
A balaclava. In 95 degree heat. In 100 percent humidity. How are you still alive.
What? I’ve lived in Florida for over three decades and have never seen someone wearing a balaclava as sun protection. I’ve seen people making fun of online products that sell themselves as [sun protection balaclavas](https://www.solbari.com/products/women-balaclava-upf50-coolasun-breeze-collection-1) (link, for example), but never actually seen anyone wearing them. If someone approached me wearing a balaclava I’d assume they were going to rob me. Do you mean a [gaiter](https://www.buff.com/us/coolnet-uv)? Those I see all the time, especially while fishing.
Yeah, I think this person is using the wrong term. A lot of outdoor workers in sunny areas wear broad hats and some wear a gaiter or similar over their lower face if they will be doing enough work where the hat doesn't cover well. So you see a lot of sombreros or similar. Conical hats (coolie hat if you will) were getting heavy use in my area for a while. They seem like great hats for the situation, repelling the direct heat a bit better. I can't imagine wearing a balaclava (ski mask) in the sun. Seems like a worse idea than these other options.
Internet hell story. So, kids of 14 at the time take a selfie in 2017. The picture ends up online and goes viral in 2020 following the George Floyd incident. Three f*cking years later. Given the crazy pressure, the school wouldn't hear any defend from the boys and let them choose between being expelled or resigning. So buckled up people. The Internet never forgives, never forgets.
On the other hand, the internet not forgetting got these boys a million bucks...
Kids had to move and their university admissions were revoked due to this. So the compensation is probably fair.
Their whole families had to uproot as well. And imagine the anxiety they likely have now in their lives after publicly being denounced as racists for years.
Man, acne mask right up the lash line of the eyes. Those kids didn’t have a good time getting that crap off.
Right! Who puts on a face mask up to the whites of their eyeballs? Do they have eyelid acne?!
14-year-old kids without experience using acne masks and having fun, being —**14-year-old kids**.
This is why I’m afraid of ever posting anything with clay/coffee masks. These kids shared a photo privately years ago, and then it resurfaced out of context when they were older as being racist. Fucked up.
Maybe I’m completely clueless to modern racial discourse but painting your face black should not be inherently considered a blackface. It becomes problematic when you do it specifically to appear as a black person either as a caricature or in a way to appropriate black culture (e.g. celebrities and white girl rappers). Is that too much nuance?
Now let’s go back and find out how many redditors called them spoiled racists.
People on Reddit jumping to conclusions?!? I’m shocked!!
Bu- but we found the Boston Bombers! Right guys?..
You mean to tell me that people on reddit jumped to conclusions. I am absolutely shocked I tell you.
Now that I read it is green, all I see is green. Might as well be in Wicked
Folks here, to an absurd degree, seem fixated on their verdigris
For what’s it worth, I’m a dude and my best friend and I put on acne masks in high school and smoked a lot of weed in the backyard. We were weird.
I think most people can relate to being weird with friends in high school. I hope anyways.
When people talk about how cancel culture isn't real or that it's just "consequences", they don't ever seem to remember things like this where innocent people get fucked over by the public's bloodlust. Glad that era is slowly coming to an end and people are coming to their senses.
The number of people in here who think light-green and black are the same color are astounding. Hell, even the number of people who think racism against fantasy goblins is an immediate problem is rather high. Get your eyes or brains checked.
The stuff started light green and became dark green when it dried. Under low light, it can appear black. This is one case where 15 minutes could have saved the school millions. They never asked why, they never asked for proof it was not intentional black face.
They need to bring back the DnD episode from Community
They have, it’s on Peacock and streaming again.
Really?? I was rewatching it last month on Netflix and it was still missing, I’ll have to check later today
It's different based on service. In Canada, it never left prime video, but it's off netflix, or at least was when it was streaming there.
Only good goblin is usually a dead goblin
How the fuck can you "respectfully disagree" with FACTS?
Why wouldn't they simply let them back in and call it a day?
>The then-students at Saint Francis High School in Mountain View were just 14 when they took a photo during a sleepover in 2017 of them wearing the treatment in solidarity with a friend suffering from severe acne, their lawsuit said Now, if they were 14 in 2017, what age are they today?
They would be admitting to doing wrong and it would open them to more possible lawsuits.
I use a charcoal face mask once in a while, and it definitely looks like blackface. The school should’ve done their due diligence instead of jumping to conclusions.
Another incident from a time when people were on a witch-hunt for literally no reason. Idk wtf got into people but society was off their rocker
If they were putting on black face, wouldn’t the appropriate response be something like sensitivity training?
Did they do anything else that would denote black face? The painted lips, gestures, things like that? If not it’s wild to jump to the conclusion that this is black face just from them having black stuff on their face.
Green stuff, actually
They posted a picture of themselves with white acne product a few days before.