School district rejected ‘white supremacist’ Thor mural for not being inclusive enough

From North West News

The senior class at Mountain View High School in Vancouver, Wash. was excited about their senior gift: a mural of their unofficial mascot Thor. But just when they thought the project was green lit, students exclusively told “The Jason Rantz Show” on KTTH that the school district’s equity office was concerned because the mural represents white supremacy and wasn’t gender or racially inclusive enough.

Tara and Ava are two senior council members for the school’s student government. They said student leaders put a lot of thought into the senior class gift to the school and settled on a mural because the school was recently renovated and the walls were still mostly barren.

“We were really excited to have the mural up, we thought by Spring Break,” Tara said,  “But then we had to go through the district a few times to make sure that the image that we were permanently putting up on the walls was something that they could agree with to represent our school.”

Thor is not technically an official part of the school’s logo or team name; they’re called the “Thunder.” But there’s a Thor statue in the main entrance and imagery around the mascot include Thor’s hammer. The AI-generated mural shows the Norse god Thor standing on a mountain with light bolts flowing from his hammer, held over his head.

An Evergreen Public Schools district administrator sent an email to the students involved in designing the mural.

The email rejected the mural, though that wasn’t said explicitly. It said the district would like “to see some other options of the mural from the artist” so that they could review the new concept and ask the student body to vote on it. “We are a system that strives for inclusive representation and our Title IX and Gender Inclusive Schools commitments obligate us to create a neutral and diverse representation of the ‘Thunder’.” The staff member also offered an “idea” to “remove the person (Thor), enlarge the hammer and rotate it so that it’s hammering the center of the mountain.”

Tara said she knew something was wrong when she and other elected senior class council members met with district staff, including the equity advancement specialist.

“(Equity department officials) had an issue with the image not being racially and gender inclusive, as well as upholding an image of pure colonization, white power, white supremacy and even going as far as to say that it was alluding to racist anti-black imagery in the south,” Tara said she was told at the meeting.

“Realistically, as a student, if I’m walking down the hallway, and I see this image up on the wall, that’s not going to be the first thing that comes to my mind. The first thing is going to be like, ‘This is my school mascot on the wall. And it looks pretty cool,’” Ava explained.

Tara said the meeting was a “very uncomfortable position for a bunch of high school students to be put in. . . We were just essentially told that we will maybe understand their perspective when we’re in our 40s and have more life experiences (like) they do,”

Tara couldn’t help but observe the administrators feigning offense at the Thor mascot were white.

District officials did not respond to multiple requests for comments. But it’s Tara and Ava’s understanding that the original mural is now axed, and they will have to make changes. One of the proposed changes, they argued, was ludicrous.

Tara said staff pulled “a bunch of AI-generated images” of people of color and females to add to the mural but they “had nothing to do with school. It was very obvious that if we put something like that up, it would be very obvious the entire student body and anyone that knows anything about Mountain View that it was just to fulfill a diversity quota,”

They believe the district will try to ignore this entirely moving forward and put up their own version of a mural when the time is right.

The school adminstrators need to know that alternative Thors are available, here, and here