After the Santa Fe shooting, the students, staff, and first responders were invited to attend Game 5 of the Rockets Western Conference Finals. A group of nine female students was also asked to sing. Before they sang, they all observed a moment of silence for the victims of the shooting.
A lot of people took photos, and one seems to spark some major controversy.
The photo shows several of the girls holding hands; the only one in the group who isn’t holding hands happens to be black. People immediately started to say that it was because of her race that the white girls didn’t want to hold her hand.
There were comments like:
“Who the white girls?? Yeah, they did have one job and refused to hold the black chicks hand…their racisms showing BIG TIME.”
Another person tweeted:
“Y’all see 2nd girl from the right smirking while not holding her hand.. yeah OK”
A third person said:
“But why is nobody holding the black girl’s hand?”
Finally, the girl’s mother saw the comments, and she had had enough.
She was ready to set the record straight. She said:
“The ‘black girl’ is my daughter. It’s people like you that keep the race crap stirred up. You just look for ways to make things about race. These girls are her friends. You have no idea what you are talking about so you just need to shut up.”
She also told people to stop looking for negative things where there aren’t any.
She added:
“My daughter didn’t want to cry before she had to sing and holding hands would have caused her to start crying that’s the story nothing about race.”
It didn’t help, though, and in fact, it just made things worse. Some people actually had the nerve to ask the woman to prove that the girl was her daughter. Lynda and her husband are white. Lynda said that she had a birth certificate, but she wasn’t about to share it. Instead, she shared a photo of herself and her husband alongside Nicole at the band’s senior night celebration.
She said:
“I have a birth certificate which you will not be seeing. This is us at senior parent night for the band.”
If that wasn’t enough, the teen and her mom spoke in an interview to clear things up, too.
The senior, Nicole Janice, said:
“It’s very disappointing that people are going to take a race issue out of a picture with nine grieving girls in it. I grieve in my own different way. I don’t like to be touched. When we had that moment of silence, I didn’t want to grab anyone’s hands because I didn’t want to break down before we sang [the National Anthem].”
Her mother also explained how shocked her daughter was to see the comments that people were putting on the photo and how they were making a big deal out of nothing.
“When Nicole came out of her room Saturday morning, she was upset that they had turned this into a race thing because she knew what was real. To make something so simple into a race issue was just absolutely ludicrous.”
Racism works both ways. While it can be problematic, it isn’t always the problem. These girls had been through enough, and the last thing they needed was someone bringing them down even more. At least Lynda and Nicole are both happy to set the record straight and tell people the truth about the photo.
It was later revealed that the photo had been photoshopped and the larger image showed a lot of other students who weren’t holding hands either.
Perhaps the best remark came from Lynda during the Twitter conversation. When one person said:
“I wonder how you explain racism to her in all your privilege?”
Lynda replied by saying:
“I let her read these posts. Y’all are doing a damn good job.”
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#SantaFeStrong pic.twitter.com/j5ALaQ8N4L
— NBA (@NBA) May 25, 2018
