USA Today Editor Apologizes For Publishing Blackface Photo In College Yearbook
USA Today Editor Apologizes For Publishing Blackface Photo In College Yearbook
After a scandal erupted around Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia this month over a racist photograph in his 1984 medical school yearbook, reporters at USA Today set out on an ambitious review of hundreds of college yearbooks from that time.
That search of yearbooks from 120 colleges in the 1970s and ’80s found that racist imagery like the black-and-white photograph on Mr. Northam’s yearbook page — one student dressed as a Ku Klux Klan member and another in blackface — appeared on full, blatant display in dozens of the glossy publications. White students dressed up like black celebrities, smearing on shoe polish to resemble Michael Jackson, or wore Nazi uniforms to parties. In an article published on Wednesday, USA Today identified at least 200 instances of racist and derogatory images and material in yearbooks across the United States.
One example was in the 1988-89 yearbook at Arizona State University. The yearbook was edited by a 21-year-old named Nicole Carroll, who is now USA Today’s own editor in chief.
On that page, a photo showed two white male students covered in black paint smiling at the Alpha Kappa Psi fraternity’s Halloween party. On the left, a shirtless man with boxing gloves over his shoulders was dressed as Mike Tyson, while the other student, wearing a wig and a bikini top, was Robin Givens.
Weeks before Halloween in 1988, Ms. Givens, an actress and model, filed for divorce from Mr. Tyson, who was at the height of his boxing career. She called her marriage a “continuous horror story” and accused him of “unprovoked rages and destruction” and threatening to kill her family.
The yearbook caption, which omitted the students’ names, read, “The business fraternity members went all out for the ball.”
Ms. Carroll, who is white, also designed that page of the yearbook. When the photograph was discovered, she “immediately recused herself from involvement in this coverage,” the newspaper said.
The newspaper published its investigation on Wednesday along with a column by Ms. Carroll, who said she was shocked by the discovery and did not remember the photograph. She declined to comment further on Thursday, saying that she did not “have anything more to add than I wrote in my column.”
“I am sorry for the hurt I caused back then and the hurt it will cause today,” Ms. Carroll, who graduated with a bachelor’s degree in journalism in 1991, wrote in the column. “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.”
She added, “Today’s 51-year-old me of course understands and is crushed by this mistake.”
Ms. Carroll, who became the newspaper’s editor in February 2018 after nearly 20 years at its sister publication The Arizona Republic, said she had dedicated much of her journalism career to increasing diversity in newsrooms and covering diverse communities.
“As journalists, we must hold ourselves accountable as we do others, and it is important to call myself out for this poor judgment,” she wrote.
A spokesman for Alpha Kappa Psi said that the fraternity was “sorry for the pain this photo causes” and that “we must own all of our history.” Arizona State University also apologized for the photograph.
“The photo in this student publication is a sad reminder that this kind of insensitivity was all too common in past decades,” the university said in a statement on Thursday. “Things are changing for the better, for which we at A.S.U. are grateful, but that doesn’t take away the possibility that the picture caused or will cause pain. For that we are sorry.”
Blackface has endured in American popular culture for more than 185 years, emerging in the early 1830s at minstrel shows and blackface performances in perverse portrayals of slaves by white people. Blackface survived the Civil War, the emancipation, both world wars and through the civil rights era. Even in recent decades, as shown by Mr. Northam’s yearbook and the USA Today review, the shameful pastime persists in American life.
The pages of the 1988-89 Arizona State University yearbook underscored the continued struggle by people of color in the United States at the time to gain equal footing with their white peers. A local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had opened on campus only the summer before, the yearbook noted.
“The ideal situation would be not to need special clubs, opportunities and scholarships for minority students to get ahead,” a founding member of the student N.A.A.C.P. group was quoted as saying in an article on Page 240. “We will continue to fight until the day that (minorities) are judged by their mental ability and skill, rather than their race.”
Blackface Photo Discovered In ASU Yearbook Edited By USA Today Editor
Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam's yearbook/Screenshot
USA Today editor Nicole Carroll has revealed that she, too, has a blackface scandal in her past when she was a yearbook editor at Arizona State University.
“It was recently brought to my attention that I was involved in publishing such a [blackface] photo when I was in college,” she wrote in her own paper Wednesday.
“The 1988-89 yearbook I edited at Arizona State University included a photo of two people at a Halloween party dressed as Mike Tyson and Robin Givens….It is horrible, and of course the photo should not have been published,” she wrote.
“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,” Carroll, who was just named editor-in-chief of the newspaper in 2018, continued.
“Today’s 51-year-old me of course understands and is crushed by this mistake…I want to apologize publicly. As journalists, we must hold ourselves accountable as we do others, and it is important to call myself out for this poor judgment.”
The editor’s admission follows a string of scandals in Virginia that has generated discussion across America about race.
The yearbook photos were discovered by her own newspaper in a new examination/investigation of 900 yearbooks.
Read Carroll’s full apology via a USA Today OP-ED here.
Fstoppers Takes A First Look At The Luminar Photo Editor With New Features And Bug Fixes
Today, Luminar 3 has been updated to version 3.02, and the company, after glitches in version 3, is moving toward being a solid Adobe Lightroom competitor.
The Skylum people have been very aggressive across their software releases and have been successful with both Luminar, a photo editor and cataloger, and Aurora, an HDR application. Both applications run on Windows and Macintosh computers and can run as plug-ins inside Adobe and other applications.
Here's some of what's updated in this latest release.
Windows users will specifically see:
Mac users will also get:
The Aurora integration is most welcome, although it's only on the Mac side at present. It was odd that Luminar did not support integration between its two biggest selling applications in the first Luminar 3 release.
The really good features are still in this latest Luminar. Along with all the regular editing tools, The AI Sky Enhancer is very impressive.
I've also been impressed with the Sun ray renderer, which gives realistic results.
I tried Luminar 3.02 on my Mac and it seemed well behaved. I know Skylum is really high on their cataloging/library functions, but it still doesn't compare to Lightroom. Worse, if you want to use Luminar as only an editor, you can't without setting up a catalog first.
Many pro and semi-pro photographers will want to control their own workflow, and not be forced into working the way an app designer insists you work.
Another gripe is that when you launch Luminar, the "Looks" feature is a default, taking too much of your screen space. Personally, I like to do my own editing, not use canned pre-sets, so I don't like to see that forced on me. Yes, I can turn it off, but it should be on a software switch so I can launch without seeing it.
On1 and other editors have figured this out. Luminar hasn't yet, but I'm hoping they will.
I like the Skylum products. For editing images, Luminar is a first-class application. Still, there are quirks in even this latest version, and I'm hoping that Skylum will listen to users and eliminate some of the restrictions placed on the way Luminar works.
Adobe needs serious competition. Luminar is not there yet in terms of library functions, but is headed generally in the right direction.
This is a free update for Luminar 3 owners. Mixed-computer households can share the same product key for Mac and PC, which can be activated on five devices, which is very generous.
If you are buying Luminar outright, it is $69.00 but there are frequent promotional offers that can lower the price. It's still very reasonable, and will appeal to photographers that don't want to be on a subscription plan.
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