Growing up, most of us had been taught to evaluate others based on their internal worth, and not what they look like on the exterior. While this appears to be a simple lesson that even small children can easily grasp, the administration of Westside High School in Omaha, Neb., seems to be having a more difficult time with it.

Four students from this high school have been suspended for promoting a white student for an African American award. The applicant himself, Trevor Richards, was suspended for two days. While this might seem like a harsh punishment in itself, here is the real catch: Richards is a native African. He moved to the United States from South Africa in 1997.

The award in question was in remembrance of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and was entitled the “Distinguished African American Student Award,” which is annually presented to one student elected by the faculty.

Now, it is rather obvious that the purpose of giving out such an award for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day would be to honor black heritage and recognize past struggles of people of this ethnicity. However, the fact remains that the award was for an African American student, and Richards is about as African as one can be.

A small group of students from Richards’ high school displayed posters with his picture encouraging votes for him throughout the school. These students were attempting to make a point that scholastic awards should not be granted solely and completely on the basis of one’s skin color.

Apparently, this upset a small group of students, as well as school administration, which described the posters as “inappropriate and insensitive.”

The spokeswoman for the Westside Community Schools said that the posters “were insensitive to some members of our school community.”

This all leads me to ask: If a 100-percent-African student vying for an African American student award can be considered offensive and insensitive, what do the words “insensitive” and “offensive” even mean?

If nothing else, this Omaha community could have taken advantage of the Richards incident as an opportunity to demonstrate that people from certain regions of the world, although they may share many cultural traits, do not always look the same. Instead, the administration of the Westside High School chose to perpetuate the erroneous stereotype that to be African is to be black.

So what if the school wanted to choose a black student for the award? That is fine. It is true that while Trevor Richards is probably more African than the rest of the students competing for the award, his past experiences have probably been different than a student with darker skin. The teachers simply needed to vote for a different student. However, for the school to go as far as to punish Richards and his friends is entirely inexcusable.

Principal John Crook stated that students upset over the award should have expressed their concerns to him instead of disturbing the tone of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.

That’s funny.

I thought the “tone” of this national holiday included such themes as acceptance and looking past a person’s skin color to his or her history, heritage and character.

In all optimism, I expect that the Westside High School community can learn from this incident and view its reaction as it truly is: absolutely absurd. If nothing else, it has apparently brought some rather deeply rooted racial issues to the forefront for discussion. It is my only hope that students, faculty, and community members do not adopt a view of race similar to that of their school’s administration. I fear it would undo much of what several of our past civil-rights leaders, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. himself, sacrificed so much to achieve.

Nicole Marklein ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in political science.