It seems like a lot of Oakwood residents took offense to Kate Geiselman’s column, which was published in the Washington Post earlier today.
For starters, she never says that Oakwood is a ‘bad’ place, or that the city rears ‘bad’ kids. What she does say is that Oakwood children are entitled because they have “unchecked privileges.”
I believe that while entitlement is an issue in Oakwood, the bigger issue that she touched on was “sheltering,” which I believe leads to a community-wide lack of accountability that surfaced in the Turner family’s handling of this situation.
I have grown up in Oakwood and have gone through the Oakwood School System, and as someone who is relatively educated on the topic at hand, I feel as if I should share my point of view.
As someone who was an aspiring journalist in high school, I was a reporter for the Oakwood High School newspaper, “The Dome.” I was molded by some influential teachers and older student staff members (you know who you are). And over my four years I learned, more than anything, how to stand up for myself and my staff (as I was Editor-In-Chief my senior year).
What I mean by this was that we had to fight for everything. We fought for our paper (the school refused to fund our publication, so to be able to print we made our own money), we fought for our respect (faculty and administration didn’t always treat us as the capable students their banners said we were), and we fought for our rights (mainly in conjunction with the First Amendment).
We were a paper under prior review, which meant that the principal had to approve of our paper before we sent it to print.
I cannot count, nor do I care to remember, how many times we had articles shot down. And while we struggled with simple things like grammar, and occasionally misprints, those were never the reasons why.
Articles were axed because they could dent the reputation of the school, the district, or potentially the community. They were articles that we made sure were well-reported, well-written, and objectively sound before they were sent upstairs to the principal. And they were shot down because our administration was scared to let our community know the truth.
During my senior year, I wrote a well-written, objective piece on longtime community member Jim Uphoff’s trial. He was being charged with possession of child pornography, after his house was raided months earlier. Uphoff lived just five houses down from the high school, on an adjacent street, and his backyard neighbored the practice fields where Oakwood athletes from ages 7-18 honed their skills.
He was an elderly man, a former president of the Oakwood Board of Education, and a respected member of the community.
So when we took this article (which barely scratched the surface of what I wanted to delve into with this issue, as a result of the fear that the piece would be pulled) upstairs to our principal, we got an expected, definite no. We tried changing it, softening it, multiple times. Absolutely not.
The student body, to whom we distributed our publication, should not be reading about these things. They will bring the paper home to their parents, who will call other parents, who will call the school system and complain about their children reading these things. Oh, what a mess it would make.
What a mess it would make, if the students who walked past Jim Uphoff’s house every day to get home from school, knew these things. That would have been a mess.
So we didn’t print it. Not only were we advised not to (by our teacher’s boss, the principal), but we also simply had too much at risk to pick fights. Our class, our newspaper, could be axed without repercussion if administration thought we were a big enough threat. They owed us nothing.
And chances are, most of the community already knew about Uphoff. And I’m sure that taking all of those phone calls would have made for a rough couple of days for the principal.
But this is an example of what leads to a lack of accountability in a small town like Oakwood.
By censoring things like school newspapers because they could damage the reputation of the school or community, Oakwood administration supported (and still supports) the sheltering of its children.
The administration, who controls the teachers (who in turn influence the children and parents of the Oakwood community), supports the management of Oakwood’s shiny reputation more than the opportunity to allow their community to look objectively in the mirror.
This creates a culture of perceived flawlessness, one that permeates subconsciously to everyone in the community. Oakwood’s children are not necessarily taught to dismiss the truth, because their leaders, those in the positions of power, do that for them.
But it creates a culture that lacks accountability, for oneself and for one’s community, and this culture has been reflected by the way in which the Turner family handled this situation.
As Geiselman mentioned, Turner blames alcohol and bad timing for what happened that night. Instead of apologizing, admitting guilt, and taking accountability for his proven actions, Turner’s counsel stubbornly drew the trial out. Instead of taking accountability, they performed the greatest sin: they re-victimized the victim.
And the letter sent by Turner’s father reflects that same lack of accountability.
So while many Oakwood residents may think that Geiselman is calling the entire community one thing, or she’s saying that every Oakwood child is like Brock Turner, that is simply not the truth. She is hinting at the cultural basis for the reasoning behind the lack of accountability present in this instance.
At least, that’s what I took from it.
If you live in Oakwood, or go to school in Oakwood, you are not Brock Turner. The school administration is not Brock Turner. The community is not Brock Turner. We are not Brock Turner.
And to be clear, our principal deciding not to pull my article about Jim Uphoff in 2013 (or any of our articles) probably would not have stopped Brock Turner from committing rape.
But the message that it sends, which ultimately influences the culture in which one is raised (because it takes a village to raise a child), will impact the way in which one acts when the chips are down.
And in this case, it showed.
