Should a racist act from high school be erased?

Sometimes - well, often - a reader's question ends up going in a direction I hadn't anticipated. 

"My heart is heavy," a reader from Virginia I'm calling "Frank" wrote to me several months ago. "From the deep recesses of my memory, I recalled a photo of my high school yearbook of someone in blackface."

Frank, who now lives several states away from where he attended high school almost 40 years ago, no longer owns a copy of his yearbook so he could not confirm his recollection. He donated his copy to the high school library after he found out that it was missing a copy from his graduation year. But he got in touch with a classmate who confirmed that "sadly it was true." It's important to note that the person in the photo isn't Frank, but another female classmate.

My initial thought upon reading the beginning of Frank's email was that he was going to ask me if he should report the photo to someone. Perhaps he was torn about whom to report it to since the female classmate is not an elected official nor in a position of power. Nevertheless, he writes, he is "angry and sad."

But Frank's question went a different direction. He wants to know if he should travel several states away to visit his old high school, ask to see the yearbook, and then "vandalize the page by tearing it out of the book."

Frank wants to protect his schoolmate from judgment about her past racist behavior by destroying evidence that it happened. But he realizes that simply destroying this one issue doesn't totally fix things because there are probably a couple of hundred other copies out there. Ripping the one page out doesn't destroy all the evidence.

"I could call the school district, but what would that do?" he asks.

Frank wants to know if it is more ethical to keep his mouth shut and hope the photo is not found for years in the future or if he should "quietly contact the school and ask them to cover the photo with an adhesive label." He fears that bringing up the issue at all will only bring harm.

Frank should not travel hundreds of miles to destroy a page in a yearbook in an effort to keep a photo in which a high school classmate was engaged in racist cultural appropriation from being discovered by others. If Frank's major concern is that the high school classmate might face repercussions if the photo is discovered, then at the very least the right thing for him to do is to contact that classmate to remind her of the photo's existence. She can then decide how to deal with that action she took years ago.

Simply destroying the photo doesn't erase the action that occurred. There is more damage to be done by making any effort to cover up racist acts. Frank's classmate should take responsibility for her past actions.

But so, too, should the school administrators and yearbook advisor for failing to have the judgment to remove the photo before it appeared and to use the episode as an opportunity to teach students why racism in all of its forms is abhorrent. Frank would do well to give the school the opportunity to do that now. But erasing it completely only serves to confirm George Santyana's warning that "Those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it." 

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com. 

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin. 

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