Do you think this would have gotten me in trouble?

Add’l background: I am almost 30 now. I grew up, and while I believe everyone has existing prejudices from their life experience, I still judge people most on their character and not on their skin. I’ve always laughed a bit when spiteful and hateful people getting their just deserts and that was my mindset for drawing it.

I’ve found that in general, there are certain images you’re better off avoiding. A Klansman and burning cross is one of them. You just don’t go there. Let’s say this was ten years ago or so. Yeah, you would have gotten in trouble. Possibly fired.

Not in the best taste, clearly, but, don’t beat yourself up about it anymore. Everyone does something rather tasteless and/or stupid when they are young. Besides, this is also a great lesson in ‘assumption’, IF anyone had seen it and actually ASKED you to explain, they would have had a better understanding of your motives. Let it go….if that is ALL you ever did as a younger person, count yourself lucky. lol

There are certain things that people find offensive no matter what you think of it. It was a place of work and yes would have been frowned on much more than the scribble.
It would have been at supervisors discretion based on their views and feedback from others that could have had you out the door.
Glad you thought enough to scribble it out.

A good example of “think before you speak, scribble after you write!”

Sounds like trouble from start to finish.

Not knowing the personalities of your coworkers at that time, I think you would have created a minor uproar, and either someone else would have scribbled out the drawing, or the calendar would have been replaced. I think someone would have interpreted it as a statement that whoever drew the picture thought someone thought someone else was racist, and that would have led to ill feelings.

But you probably recognized all of that at the time, and that’s why you scribbled it out. Sometimes you realize before the fact something’s not a good idea, and sometimes you realize it midstream, and turn back, which is what you did. It’s like typing a long detailed answer to a question on Fluther and not posting it.

I think you were smart to second guess your impulse. A public (or semi-public) place is no place for something that could easily be misinterpreted as hate speech.

I think you should draw it again and post here.

Oh the stories of my youthful shenannigans could be a best seller. lol

Lets see…baking cakes and running out of frosting and using raw cake batter as frosting, then selling them with a friend for Cocaine money back in the 70’s. We set up a ” Cakes by the handicapped’ sign and lied about working with the developmentally disabled for our ‘bake sale.’ Sold a lot of those cakes, and snorted a lot of coke. lol

Then there was the time we put a snake in a nuns convertable at the beach, I always hoped those nuns didn’t drive off one of the coastal cliffs and that snake remained hidden until it’s discovery.

This was right up there with ‘flashing’ cars on the same cliffs.

Then there was the episode of ‘borrowing’ a canoe and dropping acid and running the rapids at midnight on a moonless night….should I go on?

I think you would likely have been fired, but it was a long time ago, there’s no sense stressing about it now. I hope you would have the good sense to not do something like that again.

Probably. But so what? You’re going to die someday anyway. How much more trouble do you expect beyond that?

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s wonderful essay Self Reliance answers your question far better than I can.

This is one of those things that without actually experiencing the aftermath one can only guess what the consequences would have been. I would say a slight reprimand from a superior.