No, The Black Student Body President Who Posed As An Entitled White Boy Isn’t ‘Racist’

I think we can all agree that teenagers make bad decisions. Maya Peterson, Lawrenceville School’s first black, female student body president was forced to resign after she made fun of some white classmates on social media and her white classmates found it none too funny. They also may have reported a photo of her smoking weed. Considering the entire world has a history of white boys making fun of black, lesbian girls and also smoking weed, I fail to see what all the outrage is about. Buzzfeed has the story:

One day last March, Lawrenceville School Student Body President Maya Peterson donned L.L. Bean boots and a Yale University sweater to pose for an Instagram photo depicting what she described as a typical ”Lawrenceville boi”: white, Republican, and cockily holding a hockey stick.

Peterson, who graduated in June, added hashtags like ”#romney2016,” ”#confederate,” and ”#peakedinhighschool” before posting. It was a joke, she said, inspired by classmates who complained to the school’s dean of students about Peterson’s own senior photo, in which she and 10 friends, all black, raised their fists in a ”Black Power” salute. But not everyone thought it was funny.

”You’re the student body president, and you’re mocking and blatantly insulting a large group of the school’s male population,” one student commented on the photo.

”Yes, I am making a mockery of the right-wing, confederate-flag hanging, openly misogynistic Lawrentians,” Peterson responded. ”If that’s a large portion of the school’s male population, then I think the issue is not with my bringing attention to it in a lighthearted way, but rather why no one has brought attention to it before”¦”

I’m making my feelings about third blatantly clear, I sort of love Maya. But here’s the thing, when you are an elected official you can’t do things like make fun of your peers, even though what you are lambasting is pretty much the stone cold truth. And you have to play by the rules and not be so inflammatory and pretty much be on role model duty 24/7. While white guys are totally allowed to act like douchebags and still retain positions of power. I wish it wasn’t that way, but this is how the world works. I hope Maya goes on to do great, huge things in this world because she is obviously too smart not to, in the Buzzfeed article she stated:

”I’m not saying what I did was right,” she said. ”But it wasn’t racist. I was just calling those guys exactly what they are. And Lawrenceville is the type of place where those kids are idolized.”

(Image: Facebook)