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
Parents.
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.
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.
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Don’t minimize and normalize this shit. My teenager curses like a sailor but she would be horrified to say a racial slur like that. A swear word and bigotry are not the same thing
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There is a huge difference between a curse word and a slur.
Yep, agreed, but these are teenagers. I did not have much foresight as a teenager, either.
Right, the point is to let them be themselves & correct behaviors that society has decided are useless. Gotta give them the freedom to choose so that you can correct it, same as younger kids.
Dumb as I was at that age, I can’t imagine agreeing to do something like that or making friends with anyone who would.
Because we are not the same type of people they are? They just didn’t care as much.
Exactly! They’re racist little bags of shit.
Yup, if you grow up in the middle of nowhere Oklahoma, there isn’t a lot of racial diversity. So this isn’t something they likely have run into in any meaningful sense, so they wouldn’t understand just how hurtful it can be.
Teenagers today do. I guarantee there are thousands of kids in that school who know better and would never do this. Being young doesn’t make you racist
No, but it does make some less educated. Not everyone is online a lot. Plenty of people just hang out with their friends without learning anything. It’s very possible they haven’t learned why that is so wrong.
Well with the internet I’m sure they now will have an entire life of dealing with those consequences.
Yeah, teenagers are often pretty fucking stupid.
Members of the football team? And that sport usually has the best and brightest of high school students. I’m shocked, I tell you.
at my school at least football kids aren’t really the brightest. They’re just average folks but stronger and with less free time.
I think the above comment was sarcastic
oh… thanks.
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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.
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.
Schools usually punish the person who gets bullied while protecting the bully so of course they don’t know how to handle this.
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 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.
Maybe they want to run to be GOP officials, this is a prerequisite
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.
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.
