Yearbooks' dark secrets
AROUND this time of year, students at high schools across America interview one another, take pictures, write obtuse valedictories about themselves and bind it together into a glossy memento.
What results is the high school yearbook, a major boon to journalists. It is noticeable how, whenever a serial killer or would-be presidential assassin gets picked up, the papers will carry a 20-year-old snap of a spotty adolescent smiling from beneath a mortar board.
Whatever the student has penned under his photograph is also a potential goldmine. More often than not, reporters will scour the entry and find something like: 'My ambition is to use my valuable education to reach my full potential in life and contribute to making the world a better place. I also have a sneaking desire to use a Chinese semi-automatic to kill as many bourgeois, God-fearing hypocrites as possible.' The most recent example was the yearbook entry of one Timothy McVeigh, arrested for the Oklahoma bombing. Strangely, the teenager's terrible centre parting and unremarkable comments gave little clue as to his future vocation.
Yearbooks again found themselves in the news last week. Three incidents suggest teenagers have discovered the delights of using their yearbook to slip in cryptic messages which, when decoded, translate into racial slurs. This revelation has sent the communities involved into paroxysms of guilt over whether racism will ever be swept from the playground.
In the middle class haven of Greenwich, Connecticut five boys were suspended for allegedly concocting a complicated code whereby letters from each of their entries, when put together, spelt 'Kill all niggers'. No one had noticed until the boys were caught boasting about it.
The fallout was such that some of the small minority of blacks at the school demanded a transfer, its head of security was told to stay home for his own safety since his son was one of the culprits, guilt-ridden fellow pupils bared their souls to radio shows, and the suspended boys agreed to spend 150 hours of the summer break being ferried around by community workers to meet all kinds of 'black people'.
Down the highway in White Plains, New York, the 17-year-old son of a high school's board president found himself in the spotlight because he included the word 'crematorium' in his yearbook entry. Since he had previously been found with pictures in his locker of Hitler, Charles Manson, Gandhi and John Gotti, the logical conclusion arrived at by school authorities was that the word was an anti-Semitic reference to the Holocaust, and he was ordered to apologise.
Meanwhile in Pontiac, Michigan, two schoolboys were suspended because of yearbook phrases which, when spelt backwards, made another racist slur.
The fact these events should engender an overwrought debate about racism seems to say more about America than the acts themselves. As one Greenwich student interviewed in The New York Times pointed out, go into the canteen any lunchtime and you will find the whites sitting together in one group, with the blacks over the other side, and the Asians and Hispanics on their own tables too. That's a fact of life - however you encrypt it.
