Pushkin Stevie Lane, Hello, Jonathan, I thought your generation doesn't abide by telephone calls.

When my name popped up.

Did you think this is an emergency?

Is it an emergency?

It is sort of an emergency.

It's a story emergency.

Oh that is an emergency.

Yeah, okay, you need my help.

No, I actually I don't need your help.

I have a story for you today.

So you need my help listening to it?

Well, why don't you just ask me to listen to your story?

Will you please listen to my story?

I'm gonna say no, what Yes, of course, you're gonna press the play button.

I'm gonna start it right now.

Okay, there you go.

Boom from Pushkin Industries.

I'm Stevie Lane and this is Heavyweight Today's episode Jasmine right after the break.

There are moments in life that unfold like a movie, moments we replay over and over in our heads.

Hello, how are you?

I'm good?

How are you?

Jasmine has a moment like that, a pivotal scene in the story of her life, and it's a scene that takes place where many pivotal movie moments do.

At a high school dance fourteen years ago.

It isn't as pig bloody as the prom and Carrie nor as teen Wolfe as the one from Teen Wolf, but it's every bit as cinematic.

And to fully understand that night of spaghetti strap dresses and party rock anthem on gymnasium speakers, I have to zoom out and start with the setting where the dance took place, the city where Jasmine grew up, Springfield, Oregon.

There's hardly any black people, and in every class I was in, it would be just me and like one or two other girls.

Census estimates put the population of black residents in Springfield at around one percent.

Oregon was one of the first states to outlaw slavery, but not because they believed that black people were worthy of not being slaves, because they didn't want black people in the state at all.

They outlawed slavery in order to keep black folks.

From being there.

So there's just this ignorance and this like odd energy.

There by odd energy, Jasmine is talking about the unapologetic racism she experienced all the time from a very young age, Like when Jasmine was seven and told by her friend that her friend's dad wouldn't like Jasmine because he quote didn't like black people.

Or when in a high school drama class, everyone was instructed to write each other nice notes, Jasmine reads me one, I love your positive attitude, and I believe it's an exception to your ethnicity.

You are a credit to your race.

Or when Jasmine was in a school play and had a stage kiss with her scene partner who was white.

And we kissed and then he goes, m tastes like black cherry, like that kind of stuff all the time, to the point that you know, you just laugh and you're like ha ha ha, but don't know why it makes you feel a certain way because everyone is laughing, like even in your close friends, because they also, like, do think it's funny?

I think we actually sometimes even participated in the jokes at our own expense, because it's like, if you can get ahead of it, then it won't hurt as bad.

How is it talked about in your family?

You know, it just wasn't.

And we always like prided ourselves on being a family that can talk about things, but race was never brought up.

Jasmine's dad is black, but they didn't have much of a relationship growing up.

She was raised by her mom, who was white.

Among her white aunts and white uncles and white cousins, Jasmine was the only person of color within her family.

I don't think I even heard anyone in my family say the word black.

It almost felt like a bad word kind of.

I just always felt so ugly, honestly, like just ugly and frizzy and not shiny.

It was a feeling that falls Jasmine all the way until senior year, all the way until homecoming.

So you know, it's September and it's time to vote for homecoming Queen, and it's like such a big deal and a marker of popularity and beauty and worth and importance.

So this was like a big deal.

Like did you remember those seniors that were king and queen in previous years?

Well, yeah, I think it was Jessica Ray and James Quinn the year before.

Yeah, like it's a thing.

Jasmine was sitting in class when the PA system came on.

Everyone was listening for who would be named homecoming royalty first, the homecoming court was announced princes and princesses.

And I'm pretty sure they saved the queen for last, and they said my name, and I was in shock, Like, not only did they announce me as homecoming queen.

But Jacob King, who was like the most popular boy all American football player, he was homecoming King.

I was like, how is it him and me?

And I remember being like, oh my god, Like did they mess up?

The homecoming queen was usually someone popular and cool, two things Jasmine says that she wasn't in high school.

She was a self proclaimed theater nerd from a conservative Christian household who was never invited to a single house party or asked out on a date.

But it wasn't a mess up or a prank.

After the announcement, kids came up and congratulated her.

Maybe Jasmine had been wrong about how her classmates saw her.

The rest of the day, Jasmine walked through the hallways as though floating through a dream.

A few days later, Jasmine's queendom was announced at the homecoming football game.

There on the field, Jasmine received a sash and a bouquet.

The Springfield Times came to take her picture.

But the thing Jasmine was most excited for was the homecoming dance.

The night of the dance, Jasmine's mom helped her with her hair and makeup.

She met up at a friend's house beforehand to have dinner Martin Ellie's and mac and cheese and get ready.

Jasmine wore her coolest outfit, a short, black strapless dress with lime green feather earrings, lime green half leggings, and lime green fingerless gloves.

And in case you're thinking geez, that's a lot of lime green, I'd like to remind you that this was high school in twenty eleven.

My favorite outfit was a lime green skirt with a lime green tank top.

I had a lime green cell phone and lime green floaty flip flops.

Lime Green was cool, okay, and Jasmine looked cool on her way to the dance.

What were your expectations for the night.

What did you think was going to happen?

I thought that they would call my name and it would be my movie moment, Like everyone would clap and shout and a spotlight would hit the center of the room and I would make my way toward Jacob King and maybe he would even whisper in my ear I've always been in love with you.

And then you know, everyone would slowly like dance around us and it would be like, Wow, you've always been so beautiful and.

Cool, Jasmon, you really had big expectations.

I really did.

I mean, I grew up watching like a Cinderella story and what a girl wants and that's how they all end.

You know.

Yeah, I thought it would change everything.

In fact, it did not.

And here is the moment that's been plaguing Jasmine for years.

I don't know if they cut the music or if they.

Just turned it down.

And they announced and now it's time for our homecoming dance.

My heart's beating so fast, you know, my stomach is like about to fall out of my butt.

I'm so excited.

And then they go.

Our homecoming King Jacob.

And everyone's like, whooh, crappy.

And our homecoming Clean Whitney.

Whitney, and it was really like a record scratch.

Like in my head, I was like, wait what.

Whitney was one of the few other black girls in Jasmine's grade.

And I thought I mishard and I but I was kind of frozen, and I'm just looking around and it's like the room is spinning and I'm feeling crazy and I'm like, oh my god, oh that just happened.

Overcome humiliated, Jasmine ran out of the gym to the courtyard or she collapsed at a table and cried.

When eventually she dried her eyes and returned to the dance, no one said anything to her about it, so she just did what everyone else was doing.

She danced, she talked to friends, she went home.

I don't know, I don't know what happened.

And this is what Jasmine has wondered ever since.

Why Whitney's name was called instead of hers.

Over the years, she's developed two possible theories.

First, was one black girl mistaken for another.

That's what Jasmine's best friend from high school, Danika, has always thought.

Danika is also biracial, and remembers the moment the wrong name was called to her.

It didn't seem that crazy that at their high school one black girl might be confused for another.

I think that we were all a little bit interchangeable, she tells me.

But then there's Jasmine's second theory, and even worse possibility.

Could it be?

Jasmine wonders that the announcement had been rigged.

Whitney as an athlete, she was well liked, and she was their senior class president.

In other words, Whitney was the popular black girl.

She was part of the tight knit group of popular girls in Jasmine's grade.

Like she was considered, like she was a pretty black girl and always straightened her hair.

Like I used to remember thinking, when does suck girl sleep?

Because she is in every single honors class and she's always wearing makeup and she streams her hair every day.

There's no way she gets more than three hours of sleep at night.

Like it just blew my mind.

In many ways, Whitney was the more obvious choice for homecoming queen, which is why it felt to Jasmine like some secret decision had been made, Like if we're going to have a black homecoming queen, it's going to be the popular black girl, not you.

After all, it didn't feel like a mistake.

In my memory, no one was looking at me like wait, what, Like it felt like everyone in the room wasn't on something I wasn't in on, like there had been a consensus reached that on the day it would be a.

Whitney and not me, because no one else seemed shocked.

But Jasmine never found out what happened that night or why was it a mix up?

Or like is the why that there could only be one black girl at the top?

Is the why that they hated me?

For some reason.

It's like, even in this moment and throughout this conversation, I've oscillated between Okay, yeah, no, of course it was totally an accident and fuck that, no it wasn't, and both of those feel intense, And so it's like.

Where where to land?

It's been fourteen years since homecoming, but Jasmine thinks about it often, like once a week for the last seven hundred and twenty eight weeks, not that anyone's counting.

Jasmine is an actor and success full one, with major roles in Yellowjackets and The Leftovers.

In twenty twenty four, she was included in Forbes thirty Under thirty list for Hollywood and Entertainment.

She has a partner, a beloved cat and dog, and a news podcast for the queer community.

By every metric, she's living a full and happy life.

And yet it's a moment she returns to I just want to know why, Jasmine says, the popular girls ran the homecoming committee.

They might have the answer, and Jasmine is still Facebook friends with a few and can reach out.

Sounds easy, right, No it doesn't.

I'm still scared of these girls, you know what I mean?

Like, yeah, the thought of that makes me feel nauseous.

But that's what I'm here for, to walk up to the cool kids at their lunch table, so Jasmine doesn't have to after the break.

The popular girls popular girls.

When I google the names Jasmine gives me, I find photos of them from high school.

There are a lot of high ponytails and straight toothed smiles.

There are a lot of sports action shots midspike and volleyball, or dribbling down the basketball court.

There's a lot of eyeliner.

These are girls who knew how to dress and would never be caught dead in head to toe lime green, which yeah, fine, I'll admit it was never that cool.

And the names they just sound like the names of popular girls.

Ashley Bailey, Stephanie, Ali, Caitlin with a Y, Cassidy with a K.

But the thing about the popular kids, their power is weakened with time outside of high school, a decade even beyond college, which they get much less intimidating.

Or this is what I'm telling myself as I clear my throat and make the calls.

Hi.

I'm calling for Ali, Hi, Stephanie, Hi, Cassidy.

My name is I'm trying to reach Keaitland, who the story is actually about homecoming.

Story I'm working on about homecoming.

I'm sure this is sort of a strange message, Rucy, You're having a good day.

Take care bye.

Most of my messages aren't returned.

The couple of women who do call me back say they remember Jasmine winning and the announcement at the game, but not the incident at the dance.

So I phone Jacob King, the homecoming King.

He's at work and says he can talk later, but then texts me minutes after backing out.

I text asking if he remembers the mix up and see the three dots typing, then the three dots stop, ha ha, you were typing, and then stop typing.

I write the three dots reap here, and this time he hit send.

I don't have a memory of that, and then, like everyone else, he stops answering me.

Doesn't that point to something like, what are you defensive of?

If there's nothing to be defensive of.

It's true, and maybe they all have something to hide, but maybe they just don't like the implication that a racist mistake was made.

Right, Yeah, if only someone would just like talk the talk.

And one popular girl does Bailey and Bailey talks the talk to me about a key piece of information.

The popular girls I've been calling they weren't actually part of planning homecoming, as Jasmine had thought.

That job fell to one person, the senior class president, aka Whitney, the very same Whitney who was pronounced queen at the dance that she apparently planned.

And not only that, it turns out Whitney was a princess on the homecoming court, the homecoming queen runner up, a lady in waiting who dethrones the queen.

Was this an act of regicide, or at least the high school version of it?

At this point, it looks like the only person who might have the answers Jasmine's looking for is Whitney.

Jasmine says, asking Whitney feels scary, even scarier in some ways than asking the other popular girls.

Because Whitney was a popular black girl, Jasmine, if only in her own mind, often felt pitted against her, comparing herself to Whitney coming up short, which the whole homecoming debacle only reinforced.

But recently, sitting at home late one night, Jasmine googled Whitney's name.

What popped up was an article from the Guardian that Whitney wrote in twenty twenty eight years after high school, and the subject of the article Whitney wrote was what it was like growing up black in Springfield.

The racist jobs at school, the comments about her hair, the jokes she made at her own expense, and how confusing it was to navigate alone.

There were parts that felt lifted out of Jasmine's own life, Like Jasmine Whitney's family didn't talk about race, Like Jasmine, Whitney had a white mom and a black dad who wasn't home.

From the article, Jasmine learned that Whitney's father was incarcerated for most of her childhood.

And that she would visit him weekly and was dealing with this very heavy, very adult thing.

I had these stories about her and these assumptions.

Meanwhile she was fighting her own battles.

How sad that we never and I never knew that, and that we never connected on that.

Jasmine wonders, outside of the context of high school and popular groups and homecoming and Springfield, maybe they can.

Maybe Jasmine can ask her what happened that night, addressing her not as the girl she'd felt pitted against, but as a woman with a shared past.

After the break Whitney.

When I reach out to Whitney, I tell her about this homecoming project, how Jasmine has questions about that night.

I expect that, like the other popular girls, she won't want to talk, but she wants to help Jasmine, so she agrees.

Whitney now lives in Portland, Oregon, where she works as a creative producer, and it just so happens that in about a week Jasmine will be home for a visit.

So we meet up at a small Airbnb I booked for the reunion.

Hi, Bhi.

Whitney and Jasmine hug and greeting, Ah, you look great.

They get settled on two chairs facing each other.

Whitney has her feet up on her seat, Jasmine is smiling.

This is crazy.

I feel like last time we saw each other was high school, probably graduation day.

Yeah, there was a ten year reunion, but Jasmine didn't go.

Neither did Whitney, even though she was supposed to organize it.

Apparently that's the job of the senior class president, which, if you ask me, falls a little outside the term for an elected high school official.

I promised an open bar.

I ran on that.

You promised, who was going to pay for that.

Yeah, that's a great question, but like seventeen, you don't think about that.

But then Whitney spent the next ten years thinking about it, stressing about disappointing people if she couldn't deliver.

Someone tweeted me five years later and said we didn't forget.

I was like, I'm gonna bar that's really funny.

Yeah, they both seem a little nervous, and so at first, Jasmine tries to make Whitney feel comfortable.

She tells Whitney how much she liked her article.

They trade horror stories from high school.

Sophomore year, two of my friends came into my math class and we're like, so, we've decided we're going to initiate you as our black friend.

It's going to rap you in toilet paper and roll you down a hill.

What.

Yes, it's crazy, crazy.

And I'm sure it hurt.

But I also there wasn't even space to allow ourselves to be hurt because it was so constant.

And for Whitney, it wasn't just the racism.

Whitney says she from a poor family.

She grew up picking up food boxes, getting her Thanksgiving meals from the school.

Whitney had to work hard to fit into that tight knit group of middle class white girls.

When she was going to school every day without breakfast.

Whitney says she acted like a happy, go lucky kid, when in fact, from a really young age, she was in survival mode.

Like I remember being in third grade being like I can't even imagine high school because I'll probably die before then, Like there's no way I'm actually ever going to make it there.

Eventually, Jasmine brings up homecoming.

I want to get into the stuff.

And Whitney, without hesitation, is game.

I'm sad, let's do.

It, Like I've just wanted to know your version of what happened.

Yeah, so just to like go back, like I remember the football game where it was like now it's so like we all knew you had already won, I thought.

At that point, yeah right, yeah.

And then the night of the dance, I don't remember a lot except I was really stressed because I was planning it.

As class president, Whitney was in charge of everything, picking out the crowns, selling the tickets, buying the decorations, setting up the gym, all largely by herself.

So when Whitney thinks about homecoming, what she remembers, is how stressed out she was leading up to the dance, But the night of the dance itself.

I want to be honest, I don't really remember the night like at all, Like not even I remember like getting everything like set up, trying to make sure everything was like in place, like the people working who are going to take the tickets, but the actual like that moment.

The moment Jasmine remembers so clearly Whitney's name being announced instead.

Of her own, I don't remember it.

If Homecoming was a pivotal scene in the movie of Jasmine's life, once she's played over and over until the tape has worn thin.

For Whitney, it's been taped over, but she says she's sure that if she was announced as Homecoming Queen, she never would have gone up and accepted the crown or joined Jacob King for a dance.

If they called my name, I would have been horrified because I wanted everything to like just like go well, so like I would have been absolutely horrified, and I would have went somewhere and been like, hey, like that was wrong name.

Can we like reset?

Is there a chance that you would have been so?

Like this night has to go smoothly that if you were called, you would just be like, Okay, I'm just gonna dan like you know what I mean, Like keep it moving.

No, what happened to the crown?

Did they put it on your head?

No?

Because I didn't win.

I already knew I didn't win, So like I wasn't like up there like yet that crown on me?

Yeah, Jasmine has been waiting fourteen years to ask what happened that night and getting such a non answer is a letdown.

But if Jasmine is disappointed, she isn't showing it.

As they keep talking, though, Whitney reminds Jasmine of another key player from that night, someone who was at the center of everything.

And by everything, I mean the dance floor.

Do you remember who announced the names?

Like?

Was it the DJ?

I don't, I don't remember.

I feel like it was the DJ.

One of Whitney's many party planning responsibilities was hiring the DJ, a man named DJ Sip.

She was his point person for the whole event, and Whitney thinks that because she was runner up, her name would have been on the list of students on the homecoming court given to DJ Sip at the dance.

So when it came time to announce the queen.

I feel like he just saw my name and got confused.

Like we had been like talking right for like weeks.

I helped set him up, and I wonder if he just like saw my name and was like, oh, like just read mine first.

In other words, Whitney is saying she thinks it was just an accident, and an innocent one, not a racist one.

Jasmine is skeptical.

But even the mistake, I'm like, Okay, this man DJ Sip, like I'm imagining it was a white DJ.

No, it wasn't it, DJ Sip.

Look, we grew up in Springfield.

You're certainly could be a white guy.

Was like a big black guy.

And anyway, Whitney says, DJ Sip wouldn't have even known that Jasmine is black.

He'd never met her before.

She'd have been nothing more than a name on a slip of paper.

Okay, he really did just read.

Our names wrong?

And is that how you feel?

Right now?

You're like, like, do you like just to ask the blue question, like, do you believe that that's what happened?

Yeah?

I have no reason not to believe, Whitney.

Whitney jumps in to say plainly what she's been trying to say politely.

I didn't do shit.

So just to be clear, I didn't do shit, and like I know, like I didn't do anything maliciously.

I don't think anyone would do anything maliciously.

Yeah, I don't believe.

I feel that I will never relinquish the possibility that there was foubl play, like there will forever be a part of me that's like some because at the end of the day, we did grow up with these people who like called us racist names and like said all kinds of shit we can't even remember.

So I one hundred percent believe it is a possibility that someone did do something racist, whether it was to hurt me or not, like that just is possible.

Outside it's gone from us to dark.

It's time to go, and we say our goodbyes.

In the days after the conversation, I do reach out to DJ Sip to see if he made a DJ slip, but DJ Sip tells me he has no recollection of that specific homecoming.

He does tons of school gigs every year.

He does say that as Whitney remembered, the names are usually provided to him on a piece of paper.

He doesn't think he'd read the wrong name, though he can't be sure.

I also finally get a hold of a teacher who is there, who remembers the mix up.

She says, contrary to how Jasmine remembered it, everyone seemed shocked, Whitney in particular.

She also thinks that, yes, the names of all the students on the court were written on a piece of paper, but whether it was the DJ's innocent misread or someone's not so innocent misright, we can't say for certain.

I'm not sure where it leaves us.

We still don't have a definitive answer, and in the absence of that, what we have is two women who shared many similar experiences in the same town where they both grew up, with two opposite takeaways from the night of homecoming, one who knows that it must be about race, and the other who thinks that in this particular scenario, it just wasn't.

So.

A few weeks later, I reach out to Jasmine to see what she took away from the conversation with Whitney.

I don't know.

I don't know, toggling between what Whitney is trying to suggest to her and what she knows that feels like a familiar place for her to be.

Jasmine tells me about a number of auditions she's been on lately, big opportunities.

And my manager and my team are so excited, and I'm like, guys, they're going to cast a white girl.

I've been right every time.

But my manager is like so tired of me saying that, and she's like, you're speaking that into existence, Like you need to come into these opportunities in spaces like open and give it your all and like prove to them that you're the one.

Jasmine says she can see her manager's point.

Assuming it's about race and going in with that defeatist attitude, it isn't helping her.

But at the same time, auditioning over and over for roles she has no chance of getting, it's frustrating and demoralizing.

Especially in that industry where it's just like projection, rejection, rejection, rejection.

I want to be rejected because my acting wasn't strong enough or my vibe wasn't right, not.

Because they're like, well, we decided to go with a white girl.

And it's completely crazy making because Jasmine can never know if a rejection is because of her performance or her skin color.

It's like with the Homecoming story, Jasmine will never know if it was DJ SIP or something way worse.

Whitney believes it was an accident, and so it's like she's asking Jasmine to see it outside of racial lines, Like she's saying, can't this just be a mistake, the kind of mistake that could happen to anybody, And Jasmine wants to believe so, but it goes against everything she's ever learned.

At a certain point, you have to make a choice, and I want to make that choice.

It's just really hard.

I mean it's hard.

It's hard because, like I think from everything I've learned about your childhood and everything growing up, like there probably were a lot of cases where like you were right to make those assumptions, like because it was the worst case scenario.

You know what I mean.

But I'm tired, been a little sad.

Yeah, And I do think that this way of viewing the world is harming me, like in various aspects of my life.

It's like, I don't know, it's like a meeting the world with like a knife out.

After their conversation, I'd reached out to Whitney too.

I asked her why she doesn't draw the same conclusions from that night that Jasmine does.

Whitney didn't want to speculate on Jasmine's experience, but she did offer this about her own life.

After high school, Whitney went away to college somewhere that was way more racially diverse than Springfield.

She found herself around more people of color than she'd ever been around before, and it gave her a new sense of self confidence.

It was the first time, she says, that she felt beautiful.

She took classes on race and inequality, spent semesters discussing and unpacking her own childhood.

Then after graduating, she worked for many years and documentary film at a job where her voice was valued for being black.

Jasmine's experience after high school was quite different.

She didn't go to college, went straight to auditioning and hustling for acting roles, and because she's beautiful and talented, that worked out.

But success also brought her to Hollywood, a place where it took until two thousand and two for a black woman to win an Oscar for Best Actress, not exactly an environment known for valuing diversity.

In some ways, it would have been better if Whitney could have told Jasmine, yes, it was some malicious swap hearing that might have hurt, but at least it would have made sense.

It's far scarier to imagine what Whitney is proposing that it was just a mistake.

You know, like if I let that go and it was just an accident and things just happened.

Whoa who who am I You know what I mean?

I mean, I think you're the homecoming queen.

That feels really nice.

That idea of just accepting that it seems like that might be.

True about homecoming.

Here's what I think.

We don't know what happened, but we do know what didn't happen.

No one came up to Jasmine after to say sorry.

No one even came up to her to say, hey, that was weird, right.

No one went to look for Jasmine or corrected the mistake, And in my conversations these last few months, most people didn't even remember it.

So one black girl was substituted for another, and that went largely uncommented on and unapologized for because no one seemed to think it was a big enough deal.

Jasmine had wanted to know why the mix up happened, but just as important is why it was never righted.

There was never any acknowledgment, which is why it's hurt for so long.

You want to know my first thought, Yeah, I had to take pictures in a little crown that might actually help it feel you know what I mean.

I never got that crown.

I know I didn't get it.

I didn't just not.

From under the table, I pull out a crown.

It's shiny and gold and covered with crystals lime green of course.

Oh my god, that's beautiful.

Why am I crying?

That's so sweet.

Jasmine places the crown on her head.

Wow, this feels awesome.

I finally got my crown.

This is definitely doing something.

It's a hot day, but Jasmine says she wants to go for a long walk, feel the sun, and spend an hour with herself.

We say our goodbyes.

When she walks out the door onto the busy New York City street, she's still wearing her crown.

Now that the furnitures rip, turn into it's good will home.

Now that's the last monstrant is scheming with the.

Damage to frob take this moment to DESO.

If we message, if.

We trash.

We felt around for fo.

To thanks that accidentally.

This episode of Heavyweight was produced by me Stevie Lane, along with Jonathan Goldstein and Phoebe Flanagan.

Our senior producer is Khalila Holt.

Editorial guidance from Emily Condon.

Special thanks to Robin Simeon, Zach Saint Louis Neil drumming, Chris Neary and Hanne Goldman.

I'm Amonger mixed the episode with original music by Christine Fellows, John K.

Sampson and Bobby Lord.

Additional scoring by Blue Dot Sessions, Boxwood Orchestra, Distance and Lolotone.

Our theme song is by the Week of Thems, courtesy of Epitaph Records.

Follow us on Instagram at Heavyweight Podcast or email us at Heavyweight at pushkin dot FM.

Jonathan will be back in two weeks to host a brand new episode, so stay tuned and time perl.

We repainted