F
ive junior boys readied themselves in front of the entire Blue Valley Northwest student body and began dancing the hora, singing Hava Nagila, and then lifting one of the other boys up – as if they were dancing at a Bar/Bat Mitzvah or a wedding. All of this was part of a skit that the group performed in order to rev up some school spirit for an upcoming basketball game against Blue Valley North. But when students and faculty at BV North saw a video of the skit, they didn’t find it nearly as entertaining. The skit – intended to encourage school spirit – was received as derogatory and stereotypical.
“At first, I just heard bits and pieces of the story,” Kristi Dixon, diversity trainer for the Blue Valley school district, said. “My concern was very high and I knew that I would have to do more research and find more information about what exactly happened.”
Not everybody took this skit offensively.
“I don’t believe that those boys meant to cause the reaction that they did,” junior Liran Ziegelman, Jewish Student Union president, said. “It was simply a spirit week skit.”
But the line between fun and offensive is not the same for any two people.
“There is a definite gray area,” Dixon said. “It is an individual line that isn’t the same for any two people.”
Because no two people have the same line, understanding what the receiver believes to be offensive is important.
“[The line] is in the eye of the beholder,” guidance counselor Kevin Halfmann said. “Whether it hurts the receiver or not is what matters. Don’t say something that could be taken as offensive if you don’t know the person well enough to know how they will react.”
For many students, that line lies within the underlying attitude of the joke.
“The line between a joke and an offensive comment is extremely thin, but it stands where the emotions behind the ‘joke’ are real,” senior Diversity Council president Swini Tummala said. “It’s funny when someone jokes about a race, but when it is said with genuine hate, that’s when it’s serious and that’s when it gets out of hand.”
A person’s intentions are not always clear. It can be difficult to tell the difference between an ignorant remark and a true intolerance.
“[A person’s intentions] depend on a lot of things,” Dixon said. “On the person and on the setting. I think that, personally, I try to see it as ignorance because otherwise it is incredibly painful.”
Ignorance is the case for many students, but not all.
“There are definitely some things that are said simply because of a lack of understanding,” Tummala said. “At the same time, I think people know reality and make ignorant comments anyway for the sole purpose of being funny.”
When Ziegelman was a freshman she felt this ignorance first hand.
“A guy in my computer apps class asked me if I wanted to step into his Easy Bake Auschwitz,” she said. “Everyone else laughed and I actually went home and cried because I was so shocked and hurt by that.”
Yet after experiencing something like this, the skit at BV Northwest didn’t come as much of a surprise to her.
“I wasn’t really shocked that something like this would happen,” Ziegelman said. “I wasn’t impressed with this behavior, but I don’t think it’s as offensive as people make it out to be. However, stereotyping any school is wrong and I don’t believe that religion should be used in order to make Northwest seem better than North.”
Although schools stereotype each other, the entire district has been stereotyped as having a lack of understanding outside Johnson County.
“Lack of awareness in high school contributes to a lot of negative stereotypes about Blue Valley,” Dixon said. “I have known many kind-hearted, nice but naive students who haven’t been told or had to understand cultural acceptance. And unfortunately once they are outside the zip code they learn things the hard way – by offending someone, which is a very painful lesson.”