A Yearbook for Us

[reflective music]

Ollie: You good?

Sid: Yeah. It’s just... we worked really hard on this preview, but something about it feels off.

Alex: Yeah. Too many smiles. Not enough dogs?

Sid: Nah, it’s more like…

[sound of door opening and Ezra walking up]

Sid: These are the same faces we feature every year. And they are awesome. But they’re not the whole picture.

Ezra: Yeah, I don’t see anyone from the jazz band on here. We led an awesome flash mob the other day.

Ollie: Yeah. And I don’t see anyone from the ESL program. They had, like, a whole festival last week.

Ezra: And no art club. They literally painted a giant mural earlier this year.

Alex: Yeah, this does not look like our whole school. This looks like the most visible people at our school.

Sid: And I don’t think we meant to do that. It just happened. Since I take a lot of photos, this is kind of on me. Though I just photographed what they told me to.

Ollie: Which means it’s the system. Not one mistake. The way events get covered, the way photos get chosen. But now that we see it, we can change it.

Sid: We can do better than this.

Alex: You guys going to tell this story next?

Sid: Maybe. But first, I want to understand it.

[upbeat music]

[sound of metal locker opening]

Ollie: Here’s the deal. We’re trying to make a difference. And we want decision-makers to see why change matters. So we’re using journalism. Our cameras, our mics, and our voice to tell real stories about what’s actually happening around here, and what students can make happen when we work together to make our school work for us. We just need to figure out why systems failed to represent everyone.

[sound of metal locker closing]

Sid: Hey, Ellen.

Ellen: Hey!

Sid: Can we talk about the preview page?

Ellen: Yeah. If you don’t like the placement of your student body government photos, we can change it. I had a feeling you’d want to...

Sid: No, it’s not that. We’re missing people.

Ellen: Missing people?

Sid: We keep choosing photos from high-attendance events, so we only feature the most visible groups at those events. And whole parts of the school don’t show up to those.

Ellen: What? We’re not leaving people out. Look, this is how it’s always been done. And honestly, no one has shown me another way.

Ollie: Can you at least hear Sid out? We see a problem here, and we want to fix it.

Ellen: Well, what would you like to do?

Ollie: We investigate.

[curious music]

Sid: Whoa! This is interesting.

Ollie: Yeah, I just read that they wanted to make it impossible to ignore.

Alex: How to be a Guerrilla Girl. Okay, yeah. Now they have my attention.

Sid: Guys, you need to see this.

Alex: “We Serve Whites Only” by a group called the PESTS. Wait, is this?

[sound of fingers snapping]

Sid: Is this referencing those Jim Crow-era whites-only signs? The ones used to enforce segregation?

Ollie: Yeah, but this isn’t actually a restaurant menu. It’s...

Sid: “The following New York City galleries are 100% white.”

Alex: No, they’re using a “menu” to show who gets served. Like, like who gets represented and who doesn’t.

Ollie: Yeah, they’re using the language of segregation. Not to repeat it, but to make the harm impossible to ignore.

Sid: Exactly. They’re exposing the people who are left out of the system.

Alex: It looks like there’s a list inside of the artists that were featured in galleries, the artists of color.

Sid: To respond to galleries that might say they don’t know how to find artists of color. Once you see the numbers next to a phrase like that, you can’t unsee the pattern.

Alex: Okay, so this is a PESTS STRIP, and the PESTS were a group connected to the Guerrilla Girls, and they worked collaboratively and collected data to demonstrate that pattern to others.

Interviewer: Where do you get your data? How do you, uh. When you’re showing these posters, how do we know that those are accurate?

Guerrilla Girl: Some of them we have researched ourselves. All we have to do is take counts in things like Art Week. It’s all laid out there. Or the San Francisco Chronicle Examiner pink sections and start counting. It’s not hard. Any of the publicly sponsored big exhibitions, you can just count what the representation is.

Ollie: Sid. This is the yearbook problem. We need to count and show Ellen the numbers.

Alex: Yeah, there was obviously a system that wasn’t representing the whole community.

Sid: Much like our system in the yearbook committee, only spotlighting certain groups.

Ollie: So if PESTS can visualize that pattern--

Sid: Then we can visualize ours.

Ollie: We should make our own “PESTS STRIP” for the yearbook. That could change the whole yearbook. Like, for real?

Alex: Or at least how people think about it.

Sid: Okay. First step. Who gets seen and who keeps getting missed?

Alex: Oh, let’s do this.

Ollie: Let’s find the students the camera usually misses.

Sid: Do I even have the right to tell other people’s stories? What if I mess it up?

Ollie: You’re not speaking for them. You’re creating space so they can be seen. That’s different.

[inspiring music]

Sid: Alright. Nice.

Ellen: We didn’t know. I didn’t realize how much we were actually missing. I guess I went to events that I felt comfortable at. So that shaped everything that we showed.

Sid: Well, we know now, so let’s do this.

Ollie: Yeah. You can use anything we collected. Photos, quotes, whatever you need. We got permission from everyone. Oh, and can we add that they must look awesome, too?

Sid: Yeah. I don’t want the only two pictures of me in the yearbook to be my studio picture and that one of me falling down the stairs at the dance last semester.

Alex: Yeah, guys, this looks like our whole school.

Sid: Finally.

Ollie: Do you think the school will get it?

Alex: Yeah. Because look, I mean they’re seeing our whole community, you know. Not just certain events.

Sid: Also, moving forward. Let’s not just show new faces. Let’s get to know their story too.

Ollie: Perhaps that will be the next project. PESTS used stats and numbers to show who was being left out. When we looked at our own school, we realized the same thing was happening here. This isn’t just a yearbook; it’s a record showing who we decide belongs and who gets to be seen.