USA Today investigation of old racist yearbook photos finds one published by its own editor
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This year’s Black History Month has been marked with controversy and frequent reminders of America’s fraught relationship with race. Perhaps none has evoked such a powerful reaction as the incidents of white politicians in Virginia who, it was discoverUSA Today investigation of old racist yearbook photos finds one published by its own editor
This year’s Black History Month has been marked with controversy and frequent reminders of America’s fraught relationship with race. Perhaps none has evoked such a powerful reaction as the incidents of white politicians in Virginia who, it was discovered, had dressed in blackface in college back in the 1980s. As a result, there have been numerous conversations about the offensiveness of blackface, and also about the trend among blackface-wearing college students to put photos of themselves in school yearbooks. To see how widespread this issue really is, reporters at USA Today pored through hundreds of old yearbooks. The newspaper assigned 78 reporters to review more than 900 yearbooks spanning the 1970s and 1980s. As a part of their investigation, the reporters discovered more than 200 of these photos, including one from Arizona State University’s yearbook in 1989. It is that one, as the Washington Post notes, that hit very close to home. That is because the editor of the yearbook and designer of the page containing the blackface photo was none other than Nicole Carroll, USA Today’s current editor-in-chief. The photo “reportedly depicts two white students in black makeup dressed up as boxer Mike Tyson and actress Robin Givens.” Carroll had this to say about the incident: “I am sorry for the hurt I caused back then and the hurt it will cause today,” Carroll wrote in a column published Wednesday. “Clearly the 21-year-old me who oversaw the book and that page didn’t understand how offensive the photo was. I wish I had. Today’s 51-year-old me of course understands and is crushed by this mistake." Interestingly, while reporters were looking in the yearbooks for blackface photos of politicians and other high-profile leaders, Carroll was the most prominent leader to be discovered in the process. However, it is noteworthy that most of the racist photos ran without captions—meaning that the participants were impossible to identify. So it’s likely that the story isn’t that our politicians weren’t dressing in blackface in the 1970s and 1980s; it’s that they just haven’t been caught yet. Carroll, who has been in her role at USA Today since March 2018, noted the importance of apologizing publicly and holding herself accountable. “As journalists, we must hold ourselves accountable as we do others, and it is important to call myself out for this poor judgment.” She also says that she would like to grow from this experience. Carroll may be one of the first high-profile people who are not politicians to make recent headlines for her involvement in a blackface yearbook photo, but she won’t be the last. USA Today’s investigation discovered hundreds of photos of white students sporting blackface, wearing KKK robes and Nazi symbols, and mocking Native Americans. And this is a thing that routinely occurs on college campuses to this day. This is a conversation that we as a country desperately need to have. While we should have no tolerance for blackface, we can also acknowledge that each of these cases is different. Carroll wasn’t actually involved in wearing blackface (that we know of), but she definitely participated in perpetuating it. Her participation in a culture of white supremacy is one that should challenge us to talk honestly—not just about individual incidents of blackface, but also about our history of racial abuse and oppression, the impact on black people and all people of color, and how we move toward healing. We won’t get beyond our past until we acknowledge the ways it keeps showing up in the present. Read more