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A Poplar Bluff High School alum wants to apologize to some 2021
graduates of her old high school for inadvertently spreading
misinformation about them on social media.

She thought she was calling out members of the school’s student
council for flashing a hand gesture associated with white
supremacy in a group photo they posted on Instagram. Only,
that’s not what they were doing in the shot.

In the photo, the students were mimicking a hand gesture made
popular by Michael Jordan after he and his Chicago Bulls twice
won the NBA national title three years in a row — a three-peat.

Like Jordan, the students are holding up three fingers, palms
turned inward. They were innocently celebrating the third
consecutive time they had won something called the Powder Buff
championships, a local whimsical volleyball tournament played by
the boys instead of the girls.

The woman regrets her faulty assumptions and the harm it’s done,
but before she learned she was wrong and took down the post from
her Facebook page, it had already been widely shared. “So I
guess the implication is that I’m partly responsible for ruining
innocent young lives for forwarding that screenshot,” the woman
said in an email to The Star Editorial Board. “If true I much
regret it.”

Let’s hope no one’s life will be ruined. And no, we’re not
naming the woman in this editorial, because the point isn’t to
redirect the anger mistakenly aimed at these young people at her.

But outside of their small southeast Missouri town, their faces
and their high school may still be linked with white supremacy
because their gesture was taken for the OK sign, palm turned
outward, that’s been associated with white supremacist groups.
Maybe one clue should have been that at least two of the smiling
seniors in the photo are students of color.

Such an accusation would be damaging for any school, but
especially for a school that was rightly criticized after a
teacher there allowed a student to come to school dressed as a
Ku Klux Klan member in a white robe and hood.

“It’s most unfortunate that so many are so quick to believe the
very worst of one another,” said Superintendent Scott Dill, who
knew when he first saw the picture that it might be
misconstrued, but was still surprised by the speed and ferocity
of the response.

“It was vicious,” Dill said. “People were brutal, commenting on
individuals, portraying it as a racist gesture.” He said school
officials, teachers and parents tried to shield the students but
that wasn’t possible.

“The students were really taken aback by the comments and when
you see someone attacking your kids like that it is hurtful,”
Dill said.

The original post has been pulled down now, but screenshots of
it and the false information that accompanied it, are almost
certainly still circulating. “Oh yeah! It’s still out there,
probably for a long time,” Dill said.

Which is a lesson for all of us, that what we think we see on
social media may not be what it looks like.

https://www.kansascity.com/opinion/editorials/article252463903.h
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