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"Grosse Pointe South is an excellent school. . .
Don't paint the entire community because of this stupidity."
That tweet Tuesday morning by a parent named David Dawson is among many reactions to a racist Instagram photo taken off-campus and posted last weekend by a student . That teen and five others are suspended from the high school for five days for conduct code violations.
A schoolmate, senior Lauren Pankin, speaks out in a post at The Tower Pulse -- a student-run online news site where she's supervising editor. It's a digital arm of The Tower, a weekly paper at the suburban high school.
Lauren Pankin: "If this elephant in the room isn’t addressed, it will grow large enough to smother us all." (Facebook photos)
"This post is proof that we need to redouble our efforts . . . [to understand] these important lessons of tolerance and inclusion," writes the journalist, a contributing writer at Grosse Pointe Magazine (a community bimonthly where she has a full-page article in the latest issue). She was an apprentice in the Detroit Free Press newsroom for six weeks last summer.
The hot-button photo, which can be seen with our first post on the issue, shows two girls and a boy with the N-word written in Sharpie pen ink on their midriffs.
Pankin calls for more student-to-student dialog on the sensitive topic:
Although, as a white woman, I by no means fully comprehend the experience to be discriminated against based on my skin color, I do . . . believe it is important to try to understand what it is like to shoulder constant prejudice. . . .
This conversation needs to be held in the hallways, over a lunch at Hydrangea, at the family dinner table. . . .
So let’s get talking. And writing. And reflecting on what it means to be unified against racism in all its forms.
Tia Fowlkes: "“I was shocked that someone who I thought was my friend would do something like this."
Principal Moussa Hamka praises her article in a tweet as "Excellent student coverage and timely response. . . Well done!"
The student editor also describes how the offensive photo went public:
The N-word was not being used in any way except as a tasteless, ignorant and harmful “joke.” A joke I didn’t find funny, and a joke Tia Fowlkes ’16 called disgusting and horrifying.
As the first person to comment on the original Instagram post questioning the students’ actions, Fowlkes said she later tweeted a screenshot of the post to spread awareness of this racism. The original tweet now has over 1,500 favorites and has been retweeted over 1,100 times.
[Update: Those figures now exceed 2,100 favorites and 1,700 retweets.]
“I was shocked that someone who I thought was my friend would do something like this, so I decided to confront her about it,” Fowlkes said. “I told her it wasn’t funny, and instead, she tried defending herself, acting like it wasn’t an act of racism. So I decided to put it out there to know since she thought it was so funny.”
Fowlkes, a new member of South’s African-American diversity club, BASE [Black Awareness Society for Education], said many students view BASE and comparable organizations as a joke. [She feels] the only way to improve race relations is to increase awareness.
While Fowlkes said the students involved should be punished, she said she hopes this is ultimately less of an accusation moment and more of an educational experience.
For her part, The Tower Pulse writer suggests that "the students pictured in the photo should contribute to the black community they mocked through volunteering in the majority African-American city of Detroit, working in adult literacy programs, soup kitchens or myriad other charities."
They should read black authors like Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde and Toni Morrison.
They should listen to black music, from B.B. King to Beyoncé. They should join the NAACP, visit the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History and tour the African-American gallery at the Detroit Institute of Arts.
Teenagers make mistakes, but it is crucial for them and for us to learn from them. I’m sure many people will be upset with me for writing about this because they believe mentioning it will aggravate the situation, especially since Grosse Pointe always grapples with its perception as a racist town.
But I fear that if this elephant in the room isn’t addressed, it will grow large enough to smother us all.
Related story today:
Grosse Pointe South High School Suspends Students for N-Word on Instagram Photo
