Detailed Receipts on the Topaz Museum crisis

TOPAZ by Kimiko Marr

>> Drawing from primary source documents, this easy to read PDF by Kimiko Marr tells the whole story <<

Notable Highlights:

The Six Points

Part 10 – The Six Points (p. 40): On September 7, 2021, the Wakasa Memorial Committee sent its first official letter to the Topaz Museum Board, listing six measures that the Board could take to “remedy the problems that the Museum’s actions have given rise to.”

The Six Points (for collaborative solution)

1. Recognition of the Wakasa Memorial Committee and its Advisory Council
2. Apology for Desecration of the Memorial Site
3. Archaeological Assessment and Release of Video and Photography
4. Partnership and Consultation with the Wakasa Memorial Committee
5. Memorial Ceremony at the Topaz site
6. Mediation between Topaz Museum and Wakasa Memorial Committee

The points are further elaborated in Marr’s TOPAZ pdf.

National Trust Endorsement

National Trust for Historic Preservation

At face value, the six points seem to be reasonable and functional measures to enable a transparent process of shared decision making. This is confirmed when the Topaz Museum Board turns to the National Trust for Historic Preservation (NTHP) for outside consultation, starting on p 56.

But first, what is the NTHP?

“Congress chartered the National Trust in 1949 as a private, nonprofit membership organization to facilitate public participation in historic preservation, and to further the purposes of federal historic preservation laws. With the strong support of over one million members and supporters nationwide, the National Trust works to protect significant places representing our diverse cultural experience by taking direct action and inspiring broad public support.”

Mediation, MOA, Collaboration

In his letter to the Topaz Museum Board on September 21, 2021, Rob Nieweg, vice president of preservation services and outreach for NTHP makes the following points (emphasis added).

• First: “In the National Trust’s experience, consulting with stakeholders and planning with experts would have reduced or avoided harm to the Wakasa Monument and its Memorial Site.”
• Second: NTHP “asks whether the Museum, as the steward of Topaz, intends to consult with the communities of stakeholders and to plan with outside subject-matter experts […] The National Trust anticipates that experienced experts and interested stakeholders would be willing to help if the Museum were to ask.”
• “Third, the National Trust for Historic Preservation supports the newly formed Wakasa Memorial Committee’s constructive six-step proposal for a collaborative solution with the Topaz Museum. To that end, the National Trust highly recommends these initial steps by the Topaz Museum:
  • Initiate a mediation process among the Topaz Museum and the Wakasa Memorial Committee, utilizing an independent, professional, and mutually acceptable mediator;
  • Through mediation, establish a binding Memorandum of Agreement between the Topaz Museum and the Wakasa Memorial Committee, particularly to formalize communication, consultation, and shared decision making; and,
  • That the Topaz Museum publicly commit to collaborate with the Wakasa Memorial Committee to jointly plan the best ways to protect, preserve, and interpret the Wakasa Monument, its Memorial Site, and the Topaz National Historic Landmark.”

Rebuild Stakeholder Trust

Nieweg further clarifies “it seems that purposeful change is necessary to rebuild trust with Survivors, Descendants, and the Japanese American community…”

Nieweg concludes:

“The National Trust for Historic Preservation urges the Topaz Museum to commit itself to the Wakasa Memorial Committee’s six-step proposal of a collaborative and transparent pathway forward.”

Rob Nieweg, VP of Preservation Services and Outreach, National Trust for Historic Preservation, 9/15/21

Topaz Museum Board: No Mediation, No MOA, No Collaboration

“Perpetrators disregarded our views, beliefs, and rights because

colonialism instills the colonizer with a notion of absolute entitlement

— a notion that denies the colonized the respect and rights afforded

other humans.” 

James Riding In

In response to the Wakasa Memorial Committee’s request for outside mediation, sent September 7, 2021, the Topaz Museum Board replied on November 3:

“Since the Topaz Museum Board is hopeful that our discussions with the WMC can result in productive outcomes, we believe that any discussion of mediation and of identification of a specific mutually acceptable mediator is premature. In the unlikely event our hopes are misplaced, we would be open at a later time to consider, together with WMC, a facilitated process to expedite a way forward.”

Indeed, the Topaz Museum Board’s hopes were “misplaced”, as evidenced by their own words on April 8, 2022:

“We cannot continue to meet with a committee that professes to work cooperatively on the one hand, and then vilifies the Museum and spews vitriol on the other.”

Despite their own clearly demonstrated need and the urging by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the Topaz Museum Board has refused to engage in mediation. No Memorandum of Agreement can be formalized, thus eliminating the possibility of stakeholder collaboration.

Basically, the Topaz Museum Board chooses to avoid any process that would require sharing decision-making power with its primary stakeholder/source community.

It’s the epitome of a colonial power relationship, characterized by:

• Violence: of taking without consent
• Extraction: of community resources for consolidation of private power
• Position: Who speaks, and who is silenced, in the narration of (Japanese American) history

The “End Around”: Community Outreach as PR Sham

Instead of entering into mediation as a good faith step towards rebuilding broken trust, the Topaz Board exercises colonial entitlement by attempting an “end-around” to marginalize the Wakasa Memorial Committee.

By seeking “advice and feedback from the greater Japanese American community” via the PR farce/ethical violation that is the Topaz “Community Outreach” Project, Topaz Museum Board tries, arrogantly and in vain, to summarily dismiss stakeholder concerns via their unilateral and oxymoronic declaration:

“What’s happened in the past is not relevant to how we’re going to move forward.”

Topaz “Community Outreach” Project leader, at “community outreach” meetings held on July 30 in Emeryville and August 13 in San Francisco

Ethically speaking, what does it mean when an archaeologist hired by a white-run museum tells an aggrieved racial group that the recently inflicted colonial violence is not relevant to the “community outreach” project?

"If you stick a knife in my back 9 in and pull it out 6 in, there's no progress. If you pull it all the way out, that's not progress. The progress is healing the wound that the blow made. They won’t even admit the knife is there" Malcolm X pic.twitter.com/BUAVtuejSb

— COMMON (@common) February 6, 2019

History Repeats Itself, unless…

Despite the institutional sloganeering of “Never Again,” Topaz Museum Board is operating with the same one-sided, colonial racial logic that made the camps possible in the first place.

But this is 2022, not 1942, and as more and more light is shined on this racially structured abuse of power (e.g. among state legislators, in mainstream media, professional networks such as American Alliance of Museums and Society for American Archaeology, national funding sources, and so on—i.e. in places where ethical standards matter), things are going to reflect badly on the Topaz Museum Board, if they continue to persist in their supremacist hubris.

A museum, even if privately held, operates as a public trust. There is no “moving forward” without restoring that broken trust, unless that movement is into state or federal receivership.

Links:

Petition for Transparency and Shared Stewardship

WMC Town Hall scheduled for September 9 @ 5p PT / 8p E

Why is ‘The Asian’ so white? Receipts for Today’s NY Times Article

NY Times Article

This came out in today’s NY Times: Asian Art Museum to Remove Bust of Patron. That’s Just a Start, by Carol Pogash.

The Times’ article takes the Asian Art Museum’s bust of Nazi sympathizer Avery Brundage as a point of departure to explore the museum’s checkered past in light of their director’s recently initiated #BLM PR campaign. The museum was originally founded around white supremacist Brundage’s largely unprovenanced collection.

 

 

A Compelling Response

Please see “Hoodless and Institutionalized” by artist Chiraag Bhakta, aka Pardon My Hindi.  Bhakta’s work has been featured on this blog twice previously.

Correction to the Times:  Brundage Tortilla Art (2012)

We’d like to offer one correction:  In the Times, Director Jay Xu claims to only have become aware of Brundage’s white supremacist history as recently as 2016.  However, longtime subscribers to this blog might recall that back in 2012, we created edible tortilla art featuring a graphic of Brundage as severed Buddha head (left) that was distributed to museum-goers along with the informational flyer below.

Flyers were distributed discreetly to AAMSF visitors throughout a Matcha event in 2012

We also blogged in 2015 about how Brundage’s racist roots can be traced back to his presidency of an Aryan fraternity in his college days. 

Who was Avery Brundage?

Receipts for the White Gaze

Since one of us is quoted several times in the article, we’d like to provide a few receipts.

“Historically, at this institution, there’s been a white gaze defining what ‘Asia’ means,” said Scott Tsuchitani, an Asian-American artist.

Mr. Tsuchitani, the artist, objected to the racial impact of the culture of the museum. He said that over many years, the museum has exhibited “a pattern of repeatedly exoticizing, hypersexualizing, playing dress up with Asian cultures.”

Receipts linked below:  (just a sampling)

• Exoticizing
• Hypersexualizing
• Playing “Dress-Up” with Asian Cultures
  • Maharajah
  • Yoga:  WhitePeopleDoingChanting
  • Samurai:  1, 2
• Not to mention:  Exhibiting Stolen Goods while Censoring Where They Came From

Why is ‘The Asian’ So White:  a problem of positionality

If the Asian Art Museum

• was founded by white people around the mostly unprovenanced collection of a white supremacist, and
• white people have remained in key positions of power on both board and management throughout its history, and
• in 2020, white staff outnumber Asians by roughly 2:1, Latinx by 4:1, and Blacks by 7:1,

then what steps can we expect the museum to take as it scrambles to declare support for Black Lives Matter and professes to reckon with a history so fraught with whiteness?

We as an institution have not done enough. We must take action and become the change we wish to see in the world.

While the museum has begun to denounce Brundage’s racism, it has not accounted for its own cultural capitalization of the racist’s ill-gotten collection.  If the collection at the heart of “The Asian” is a product of U.S. imperial violence in Asia, then what is the nature of the museum’s positional relationship to Asia and local Asian American communities?

If a white institution is knowingly in possession of goods stolen from Asia, then what is the obvious action that must be taken to “become the change we wish to see in the world”? Relocating the imperialist’s bust or removing his name from museum initiatives offers nothing in the way of either restitution or meaningful corrective action at a structural level.

Welcome to “The Caucasian”

The same racial logic that would capitalize on a racist’s collection of stolen goods  underwrites, for example, the transformation of the relatively innocuous “Arts of Japan: The John C. Weber Collection” into a hypersexualized “Seduction” opening, complete with performers (and staff?) in yellowface.  Over time, practices such as these have repeatedly served to center whiteness by racializing Asians as foreign Others, in effect functioning as a Caucasian Art Museum that extracts racial capital from Asian cultures and bodies.

This pattern of symbolic violence implicitly shares an underlying racial logic in common with that of the late Nazi sympathizer himself.  It will take more than public forums and incremental hires to fundamentally change an operational common sense that continues, even now, to defend its history of whiteness in the face of criticism from Asian American voices.

Talk is cheap and implicit bias trainings are limited, so here’s a proposition.  What can we learn from the dramatic transformation unfolding all around us? Rather than framing this through a lens of liberal reform, how might we apply the radical logics of abolition and decolonization to remake this institution in a way that centers the needs, voices, and perspectives of the very communities whose cultures are on display?

In closing, we return to Bhakta’s “Hoodless and Institutionalized“:

If the museum wants change, the change needs to be radical, and the structure can’t remain. To start, the current leadership needs to step down. White people in high positions in the education, curatorial, PR, and other departments need to step down. White people on the board should step down…

Must Read: “The Whitewashing of #WhitePeople Doing Yoga”

On the eve of the opening of his “Why You So Negative?” solo exhibition at Human Resources LA, artist Chiraag Bhakta offers an op-ed on the whiteness of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco’s appropriation of his artwork about the whiteness of the appropriation of yoga titled #WhitePeopleDoingYoga.

Chiraag Bhakta, “The Whitewashing of #WhitePeopleDoingYoga,” Mother Jones, October 17, 2019.

Supporting Essays
Occupying Negative Space by Anuradha Vikram
Keeping it “Real” by Vivek Boray
Our Complicity With Excess by Vijay Iyer

The installation as it appeared at the Asian Art Museum in 2014.  Photos by the author.

Watch whiteness work:  some choice pull quotes from the op-ed:

During our initial meetings at the museum, they told me to “turn down the volume” of my critique. They also insisted I remove a section of the installation—a Hindu-inspired shrine featuring photographs of a white couple as South Asian gurus. “This might be offensive to Indian people,” staffers said—white authorities telling me what Indian people might find offensive.

From the museum’s response:

According to a museum spokesperson, Bhakta was told that the phrase “white people” could be “offensive or puzzling” to some. As examples, the spokesperson pointed to “Anglo practitioners of yoga unfamiliar with the concepts of cultural appropriation/appreciation . . .”

Mindblowing how it’s completely acceptable from the museum’s (Anglo) point of view for Anglo practitioners of yoga to appropriate yoga without an awareness of the politics of cultural appropriation—and to invite such white practitioners of appropriation to perform it inside the museum as part of the museum’s public programs—and yet inappropriate for an Indian American artist to raise the issue of appropriation while at the same time wanting to appropriate his work about it.

Detail of #WhitePeopleDoingYoga installation at Asian Art Museum in 2014

Bhakta puts it in context:

Let’s break this shit down: Here were white elites exerting power over Brown critique that was explicitly about white elites exerting power over Brown culture. […] People across the operation, from the marketing department to the education team to the curatorial staff, continued to sterilize my perspective, tiptoeing around me to make themselves feel more comfortable and spare the museum further controversy. Brown critique had to be sanitized for white consumption.

And the mystery:  who is “this unseen figure in the forest“?

Throughout my meetings with curators and educators, there was one person whose name they kept mentioning as an authority calling the shots—the chief curator, also white, an unseen figure in the forest who seemed to be deliberately keeping a distance.

It’s almost as if this shot-calling “collector of South Asia” is completely unaware of his own coloniality of being, almost as if this issue isn’t part of “our daily conversation, among staffers and just inside our own brains … issues of Orientalism, of context, of how much information to provide and what kind, of what kinds of intentional and unintentional interpretive views we might be putting on things,” as he was quoted by the Chronicle’s Kenneth Baker in response to our own intervention a full decade ago.

Now a collector’s item!

One can’t help but admire Bhakta’s fortitude in engaging not only with curatorial coloniality but also the white fragility of our favorite museum marketing chief, who argued that the words “white people” on the merch—already purchased by the museum store from Bhakta—were “offensive” and “out of context”—unlike the isolated word “Asian” emblazoned on the museum’s very own tote bag.

Oh, the cognitive dissonance of white epistemicide!  The “Asian” never stops to consider what Asian Americans find offensive (because, y’know, the subaltern still cannot speak), and when we ever so artfully try to tell them, well . . .  (I’m already warning students to brace themselves for Hallowe’en) . . .

White people watching #WhitePeopleDoingChanting at a 2014 gala celebrating the Asian Art Museum’s “Yoga: The Art of Transformation” exhibition.

Bhakta concludes:

That was it: My experience with the Asian Art Museum was an exercise in watching white people work out their identity on the back of mine. The platform they seemed to give me, it turned out, wasn’t actually for me—it was for them, a way to fashion my Brownness into something they could wear. White supremacy works that way, for all “minorities”; it censors any critique contained in nonwhite expression and commodifies and tokenizes whatever’s left, forcing people like me into the posture of the model minority.

But I’m the negative one, right?

Learn more about Chiraag Bhakta’s work on PardonMyHindi.com. His solo show, “Why You So Negative?,” opened 10/18 and runs through October 27 at Human Resources in Los Angeles, at 410 Cottage Home Street, HumanResourcesLA.com. 

White at the Museum

The Problem with Miss Saigon

Via Racialicious
The Ordway Still Doesn’t Get Sexism and Racism (The Problem with Miss Saigon)

By Mai Neng Moua

Racism didn’t end with the March on Washington and Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.  The Ordway would never open a show about the “romance” between Thomas Jefferson and his slave mistress Sally Hemmings.  The Ordway would never dream of mounting a play about the “romance” between a Jewish prostitute and a Nazi camp guard during World War II.  It would never open a show with actors and actresses in blackface performing a minstrel show.  The Ordway would find such shows racist and sexist.  The backlash in all those cases would be, justly, brutal.  Miss Saigon is exactly that with an Asian visage.  It’s not beautiful, it’s not romantic, and it’s not tragic in the tradition of Shakespearean drama.  Miss Saigon is racist and sexist.  The Asian community will continue to speak out about Miss Saigon because institutions such as the Ordway still don’t get it.

Read more

Obama’s Speech, Stop & Frisk, and the Ideology of Color-Blindness

Excellent piece on Obama’s surprise speech on the Zimmerman acquittal by Aura Bogado at Colorlines today:

The short speech stands out as one of the few times that the president has talked explicitly about race and the problem of racism. But Obama’s remarks are also notable for what he did not address, and what so rarely gets addressed when we discuss racism today: white America’s responsibility for it.

How can we expect to make progress around structural racism without talking about what structures it?  In her introduction to White Privilege, Paula Rothenberg writes:

White privilege is the other side of racism.  Unless we name it, we are in danger of wallowing in guilt or moral outrage with no idea how to move beyond them.  It is often easier to deplore racism and its effects than to take responsibility for the privileges some of us receive as a result of it.  By choosing to look at white privilege, we gain an understanding of who benefits from racism and how they do so.  Once we understand how white privilege operates, we can begin to take steps to dismantle it on both a personal and institutional level.

Bogado points out the contradiction between Obama’s earnest words on race and his endorsement of NYPD’s “stop-and-frisk” commissioner Ray Kelly to head the Department of Homeland Security.  As Colorlines covered last week:

But Obama told Univision on Wednesday that “Kelly has obviously done an extraordinary job in New York,” and that the police commissioner is “one of the best there is” — an “outstanding leader in New York.”

Here’s what some of that “extraordinary job” looks like, based on data from the ACLU.  Is this how “we bolster and reinforce our African American boys,” to quote our President?

[Links to more on Stop-and-Frisk:  NYCLU, HuffPost, Racism Still Exists]

Presidential Color-Blindness?

Sadly, when President Obama speaks to the importance of individual soul searching, he invokes the ideology of color-blindness, both when he advocates not having a national conversation on race (“I haven’t seen that be particularly productive when politicians try to organize conversations,”) and even more so when he references MLK on “judging people as much as I can, based on not the color of their skin, but the content of their character.”

That same King quote was invoked by a caller when Makani Themba was a guest on KPFA’s Flashpoints last week, and we really liked how she responded, making important distinctions not only between color-blindness and privilege-blindness, but also race and racism, and most importantly about racism as a structural and not just individual problem.

“I think that’s an interesting point.  I think one of the things people do is confuse color-blindness with privilege blindness.  And I think that it’s important to treat people based on their humanity.  But basically we have a system where people are calling it color blind when it’s really blind to privilege.  It’s blind to bias, it’s blind to racism.

“And there’s a difference between race and racism.  I love being a black woman.  I think it’s a cool thing, and I wouldn’t trade it for the world.  And I think there’s a difference:  I want people to see me, because I’m actually pretty fly. Y’know, I have no problem with that.  I want them to see my skin.  I want them to know who I am.  I want them to know about my culture.  Let’s not confuse race and racism. […]

“I think it’s important that we recognize that racism is a system.  It doesn’t matter the color of the person who perpetrates it.  You can be in the system perpetrating it.  In fact, almost all of us perpetrate it just a little bit unless we’re pretty incredible people.  There’s some piece of the system that we’re holding up, and we have to work really hard to step out of it.

“So when you have a structural analysis, and that’s what I think of when I think of going deep, then you understand that even that sister in the welfare office can be engaged in internalized racism, and it’s not the same as what Obama does when he’s dropping bombs on brown people across the waters that we’re not supposed to care (about).  But all of it is connected, so hopefully we can see those connections.”— Makani Themba, The Praxis Project, interview July 15 on KPFA’s Flashpoints, (31:04-33:00)

Listen to the entire Makani Themba interview archived at KPFA for one more week.

As for the continued silence around whiteness and the role it plays in maintaining systemic inequality, here’s Paula Rothenberg once more:

But rather than providing reasons to avoid talking about whiteness and white privilege, these concerns actually underscore our need to do so.  Discomfort of this kind is a sure sign that we need to continue the conversation.  If education is about learning to see the world in new ways, it is bound, at times, to leave us feeling confused or angry or challenged.  And this is a good thing.  Instead of seeking to avoid such feelings, we should probably welcome a degree of discomfort in our lives and feel short-changed if it is not present.

All of which speaks to the powerful role conscious artists are poised to play in shifting the narrative around racial inequality.  To paraphrase Mark Brest van Kampen at “The Artist in Public Life” symposium at SF Art Institute a couple weeks ago:  Art stops normal life, and in that moment is possibility for people to see things in new ways.  It makes tangible something that people are not normally aware of.  In that moment is the possibility for growth, change, and mutation.  Calling all mutants!

What is Whiteness: Zimmerman, Asiana, and “What is Asia?” at the Asian Art Museum

In 1988, Gayatri Spivak asked, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”  Sadly, a full quarter century later, the answer at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco is still, “Just barely.” For the Proximities 1 exhibition, the Asian Art Museum hired a white male curator with admittedly no background in Asian art to curate a show of contemporary work by local artists with a central theme of “What is Asia?”  This white curator in turn put together a show where six of the seven artists are white,  a number of whom—like Ruth Benedict—have never even been to Asia. What is “Asia”?  And who gets to answer?

“Does an artist or viewer have to be Asian or Asian American to consider the subject?” — Glen Helfand, guest curator, Asian Art Museum

“At the level of racial representation…  whites are not of a certain race, they’re just the human race.” — Richard Dyer, The Matter of Whiteness

“I don’t think this is a show about race.” — curator Helfand, interview at Bad at Sports

“Basically we have a system where people are calling it color blind when it’s really blind to privilege.  It’s blind to bias, it’s blind to racism.” — Makani Themba, The Praxis Project, heard today on KPFA’s Flashpoints

“It is not simply that White is a normate.  It is a preference.  It is also the case that in each arena, decision makers are acting inequitably and that their decisions have a cumulative impact.  These practices of racial inequality are clearly unfair.  They reveal that acting in ways that are unfair is part of a cultural norm.” — Imani Perry, More Beautiful and More Terrible

Proximities 1‘s “concept of ‘Asia'” revives the 18th century quest for paradise called Orientalism, a racial ideology of absolute difference in the false binary between here and there.

Answer:  Consider the whiteness of Proximities 1 against 2010 Census Data:

• The Bay Area is home to the third largest Asian population in the United States.
• Six of the Top 10 Cities with the Highest Percentage of Asians in the U.S. are in the Bay Area (Daly City, Fremont, Sunnyvale rank #1, 2, 3, respectively in the continental US).
• More than one third of the population of San Francisco identifies as Asian.  (Note: one third of Sanford, Florida, where Zimmerman was tried, is black).
• Whites are a minority in San Francisco.

Final Question:  Why is “Asia” at The Asian always Over There? Or: Why this could never happen at MOAD or the Mexican Museum This summer we’ve seen a lot of art by local Asian-identified artists at Bay Area museums.  Oakland-based Hung Liu recently had a major retrospective at the Oakland Museum and currently has a show at the San Jose Museum of Art.  SJMA is also showing “New Stories from the Edge of Asia,” which consists entirely of the work of Asian American artists.  In 2008-9, the de Young hosted a major survey of work by Asian American artists spanning 1900-1970. Why is art by Asians living in the U.S. always at museums other than The Asian? Why is “Asia” at The Asian always already “somewhere else” other than here? In contrast to the Museum of African Diaspora and the Mexican Museum, the Asian Art Museum makes no acknowledgement of centuries of transnational migration in its mission statement.  Contrast this with the “Migrating Identities” show currently at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. How does The Asian’s narrative disavowal of the history of Asians in America contribute to the pernicious ‘perpetual foreigner’ stereotype that reared its ugly head last week?

Half Staff for Trayvon?

Taken 7/13/13 11:54pm San Francisco

George Zimmerman was acquitted of the murder of Trayvon Martin tonight, by a jury where five of the six jurors were white, and none were black.   (Not unlike the racial dynamics of the Asian Art Museum’s current Proximities 1 exhibition, which considers the question “What is Asia?” with a roster of seven local artists, six of whom are white.)  Because what Richard Dyer pointed out almost twenty years ago remains a dominant perception today, in our so-called ‘post-racial color-blind’ culture:  white people are just people, but raced people can only speak for their race.

As the Nation magazine reports in “White Supremacy Acquits George Zimmerman,” a black man is killed by law enforcement or security guard every 28 hours (the frequency is only increasing:  last year it was 36 hours).

Totally Biased: Anything to say to a White Guy?

Via Colorlines:  W. Kamau Bell hits the streets of NY to ask folks, “Is there anything you have to say to a white guy?”

Watch Kamau on his new second season of “Totally Biased” on FX, Thu 11pm.

Got Racism? Students Dress Up As Mexican Stereotypes At OC High School

From CBS-LA (video), via Think Mexican

During Senior Spirit Day at Canyon High School in Anaheim Hills, boys dressed up as gardeners and gang members, and one girl dressed as a pregnant woman, pushing a baby stroller.

Other students dressed in “Border Patrol” T-shirts and were photographed “arresting” their fellow students dressed as gang members.

An alum filed a complaint.  Instead of turning this into a teachable moment, the administration simply canceled the event entirely.  More

Anaheim Hills, hmm…  that’s about 15 miles from

Anaheim Police brutality protest at Disneyland after two fatal police shootings, resulting in the deaths of Manuel Diaz and Joel Acevedo. Photo: Creative Commons/Amber Stephens (via Colorlines, 8/3/12)