School District Rejected ‘White Supremacist’ Thor Mural for Not Being Inclusive Enough

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.

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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.

Students were asked if the senior class surveyed students about their thoughts on the mural and then reminded them that, “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 email rejected the mural, though that wasn’t said explicitly. {snip}

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

“(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.

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Ava said they were told that “without context, our image could be taken the wrong way,” including being seen as an example of white supremacy. Tara noted they were warned to be “mindful that the image, despite it not being problematic is something that could grow to be controversial” in the future.

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“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.

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