My, my, my. Catholic schools sure have changed. I distinctly remember Sister Mary Linebacker wielding her yardstick as deftly as King Arthur did with Excalibur.
Sadly, woke-ism has seeped into just about every institution at least in North America and Western Europe.
Case in point would be the case of three teen-aged boys who goofed on one of the trio, who it turns out was suffering from a rather nasty case of acne.
Well, maybe “goofed” isn’t the right word. Whatever word falls between “solidarity” and teen-aged boys acting like teen-aged boys would better fit.
Looking a damn sight closer to trying camo-up their faces instead of Minstrel performers, the three were branded by their rather expensive Catholic high school as racists for the three taking a selfie of themselves wearing a dark-green acne facial medication.
As reported by Jacob Sullum of Reason.com;
During a sleepover in August 2017, three 14-year-old boys, two of whom were about to start attending St. Francis High School in Mountain View, California, took a picture of themselves wearing dark green acne masks. One of the boys, who was hosting the other two, had severe acne, and his friends applied the masks in an act of playful solidarity. They took the picture because they thought they looked “silly.”
Three years later, after another teenager obtained the picture and posted it online, the two St. Francis students were falsely accused of posing in blackface and forced to leave the school under the threat of expulsion. This week a California jury awarded the boys, identified as A.H. and H.H. in their lawsuit against the school, $1 million in damages, plus a tuition reimbursement of about $70,000.
“A photograph of this innocent event was plucked from obscurity and grossly mischaracterized during the height of nationwide social unrest,” the boys’ familes said when they filed their lawsuit in 2021. The photo came to light in June 2020, a month after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd. “St. Francis became involved in a number of racial scandals,” NBC News reports, “including one where recent graduates of the school posted a meme about Floyd’s death on Instagram.” Because of that context, A.H. and H.H. argued, St. Francis officials rushed to judgment, tarring the students as racist and disrupting their lives without giving them a chance to explain the photo.