Smearing one’s face with dark-colored medication is a widely-used method of treating acne, the teen skin scourge.
That’s what three students at a Mountain View, California, Catholic high school did, and they took selfies which circulated on the internet and social media played “telephone” with.
In a grand flourish of political correctness, the school kicked them out for wearing “blackface.” Never mind that’s not what it was, or that “dark green” isn’t “black.” The principal decided what mattered was the “optics.”
Thanks to a jury, the teens are now $1 million richer (read story here).
I suspect that amount won’t stick; juries tend to be generous, and what they give, judges often cut down to size.
But I have little doubt the verdict will hold up. The teens didn’t get a shred of due process. They were treated unfairly and arbitrarily. To the school administrators, the damage to their educations from being falsely accused of racism counts for nothing. Even if inadvertently, they made the school look bad, and that’s all that matters.
Get out your checkbook, if you’re gonna run a school that way.
It’s not the first time in world history that someone went nuts over “optics.” In 2014, I posted in this blog about a Utah language school owner who fired an instructor for teaching students about homophones. If you don’t know what a “homophone” is, neither did he. Nor did he bother to look it up in a dictionary. (Read that posting here.)
As both these cases point out, you’ve gotta be damn careful nowadays. Just because you think something is innocent doesn’t mean ignoramuses will see it that way. A college speech professor once told me, “What’s important is not what you think you said, but what someone else thinks you said,” or words to that effect. That was long ago, before political correctness became a lethal threat to job security and social acceptance.
(I was thinking about this the other day; specifically, it’s probably time to retire the word “niggardly” from our vocabularies; even though it’s totally innocent, there’s just too many illiterate people out there.)
So how do you avoid a situation like this?
Well, watch the selfies, for one thing. Think about whether they may be self-defeating (e.g., falling off a cliff while taking one). Number two, if you spread yourself over the internet, use a pseudonym that can’t be traced to you, like I do on this blog. Third, avoid places where ignoramuses congregate (certain businesses, social groups, political parties, etc.), and go to a public school not a parochial one.
That’s because Catholic schools are more uptight, and therefore more prone to be judgemental. The Blues Brothers told me so.