White people are FREAKING OUT about “critical race theory”
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Oklahoma's anti-critical race theory law violates free speech rights, ACLU suit says
By Tyler Kingkade and Antonia Hylton
7-8 minutes
OKLAHOMA CITY — A coalition of civil rights groups sued the state of Oklahoma on Tuesday over a law limiting instruction about race and gender in public schools. It is the first federal lawsuit to challenge a state statute implemented to prevent the teaching of critical race theory.
The suit, backed by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, argues that HB 1775, which took effect in May, violates students’ and teachers’ free speech rights and denies people of color, LGBTQ students and girls the chance to learn their history.
The Oklahoma law bans teaching that anyone is “inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously,” or that they should feel “discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress” because of their race or sex. Under rules imposed by the state, teachers or administrators found in violation of the law can lose their licenses, and schools can lose accreditation.
For more on this story, watch “MTP Reports” on NBC News NOW at 9 p.m. ET Thursday or streaming on Peacock beginning Friday.
The lawsuit asks a federal judge to immediately halt enforcement of the law and declare it unconstitutional under the First and Fourteenth amendments.
“HB 1775 is a direct affront to the constitutional rights of teachers and students across Oklahoma by restricting conversations around race and gender at all levels of education,” said Megan Lambert, the legal director of the ACLU of Oklahoma.
Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. He has said previously that the law would ensure that no taxpayer money would be used “to define and divide young Oklahomans about their race or sex.”
Over the past year, conservative activists have accused public and private schools of teaching critical race theory, an academic concept examining the way institutions perpetuate racism that is typically taught in graduate schools. School district leaders across the country have said they do not teach critical race theory, but conservative activists have added the label to any discussions about race that they consider too progressive.
Oklahoma is one of five Republican-controlled states to have passed laws limiting how schools teach race and gender this year. Other states, including Alabama, Georgia and Florida, have limited discussions of race in schools through decrees by education officials, while states such as Texas approved measures requiring schools to present contrasting viewpoints on contentious issues.
Legislators in Oklahoma defended HB 1775 when it passed in the spring as a measure that would prevent teachers from making white students feel personally responsible for past racism. They also said it would protect students of color from racial stereotyping. The law’s backers said they intended to prohibit classroom conversations about concepts like “systemic racism” and “intersectionality” to prevent “indoctrination” of students.
“The law ensures that all history is taught in schools without shaming the children of today into blaming themselves for problems of the past, as radical leftists would prefer,” state Rep. Kevin West, a Republican and chief sponsor of HB 1775, said in reaction to the lawsuit.
Genevieve Bonadies Torres, a attorney with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said the group has received reports of Oklahoma schools striking classic literature that deals with racial conflict from the curriculum in response to the law, including “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee, “A Raisin in the Sun,” a play by Lorraine Hansberry, and “Their Eyes Were Watching God” by Zora Neale Hurston. Districts have also instructed teachers to stop using terms like “diversity” and “white privilege” in class, according to the lawsuit.
“I felt like it was a shot at teachers like me who really want to see Black and brown kids really do something with their lives,” said Anthony Crawford, a high school English teacher in Oklahoma City. “Because they need this part of history. They need to understand what happened to their people.”
Anthony Crawford teaching at Millwood High School in Oklahoma City.NBC News
Donovan Chaney, 17, a high school senior in Crawford’s class, who is Black, said he sees the law as “the way to censor our next generation, so they don’t know all the horrible things that went on before they were born.”
The suit was filed on behalf of the University of Oklahoma chapter of the American Association of University Professors, the state chapter of the NAACP, the activist group American Indian Movement-Indian Territory and high school teacher Regan Killackey. Also among the plaintiffs are the Black Emergency Response Team, a group formed by University of Oklahoma students to combat racism after Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity members were captured on video in 2015 singing a song about lynching that included the N-word.
The fraternity racism scandal prompted the University of Oklahoma to take several steps to improve the campus climate, including requiring all first-year students to take part in a Freshman Diversity Experience, a one-day diversity training. The university said that because of the new law, it will now allow students to opt out of the program, as well as sexual harassment training.
“Not having these trainings and not giving incoming freshmen these tools has had a tangible impact on our clients, who say that they feel less safe on campus knowing that not only have people not been trained on these important and complicated and difficult questions, but they don’t feel supported by the university, either,” said Emerson Sykes, a staff attorney with the ACLU.
Oklahoma’s law is particularly egregious, the suit says, because it limits discussion of dark periods of the state’s history by preventing students and teachers from asking uncomfortable questions. The suit lists several moments that are difficult for educators to cover: the 1889 Land Runs, in which settlers raced to claim land in Oklahoma’s Indian Territory; the 1921 Tulsa Massacre, when a white mob attacked a community known as Black Wall Street, killing hundreds of people and destroying homes and businesses; and the state’s constitutional provision that required racially segregated schools until the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed them in 1954.
When Stitt signed HB 1775 in May, he said that educators “can and should teach this history without labeling a young child an ‘oppressor’” and that the law would not prevent that.
Tyler Kingkade reported from Los Angeles; Antonia Hylton reported from Oklahoma City.
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Oklahoma's anti-critical race theory law violates free speech rights, ACLU suit says
By Tyler Kingkade and Antonia Hylton
7-8 minutes
OKLAHOMA CITY — A coalition of civil rights groups sued the state of Oklahoma on Tuesday over a law limiting instruction about race and gender in public schools. It is the first federal lawsuit to challenge a state statute implemented to prevent the teaching of critical race theory.
The suit, backed by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, argues that HB 1775, which took effect in May, violates students’ and teachers’ free speech rights and denies people of color, LGBTQ students and girls the chance to learn their history.
The Oklahoma law bans teaching that anyone is “inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously,” or that they should feel “discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress” because of their race or sex. Under rules imposed by the state, teachers or administrators found in violation of the law can lose their licenses, and schools can lose accreditation.
For more on this story, watch “MTP Reports” on NBC News NOW at 9 p.m. ET Thursday or streaming on Peacock beginning Friday.
The lawsuit asks a federal judge to immediately halt enforcement of the law and declare it unconstitutional under the First and Fourteenth amendments.
“HB 1775 is a direct affront to the constitutional rights of teachers and students across Oklahoma by restricting conversations around race and gender at all levels of education,” said Megan Lambert, the legal director of the ACLU of Oklahoma.
Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. He has said previously that the law would ensure that no taxpayer money would be used “to define and divide young Oklahomans about their race or sex.”
Over the past year, conservative activists have accused public and private schools of teaching critical race theory, an academic concept examining the way institutions perpetuate racism that is typically taught in graduate schools. School district leaders across the country have said they do not teach critical race theory, but conservative activists have added the label to any discussions about race that they consider too progressive.
Oklahoma is one of five Republican-controlled states to have passed laws limiting how schools teach race and gender this year. Other states, including Alabama, Georgia and Florida, have limited discussions of race in schools through decrees by education officials, while states such as Texas approved measures requiring schools to present contrasting viewpoints on contentious issues.
Legislators in Oklahoma defended HB 1775 when it passed in the spring as a measure that would prevent teachers from making white students feel personally responsible for past racism. They also said it would protect students of color from racial stereotyping. The law’s backers said they intended to prohibit classroom conversations about concepts like “systemic racism” and “intersectionality” to prevent “indoctrination” of students.
“The law ensures that all history is taught in schools without shaming the children of today into blaming themselves for problems of the past, as radical leftists would prefer,” state Rep. Kevin West, a Republican and chief sponsor of HB 1775, said in reaction to the lawsuit.
Genevieve Bonadies Torres, a attorney with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said the group has received reports of Oklahoma schools striking classic literature that deals with racial conflict from the curriculum in response to the law, including “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee, “A Raisin in the Sun,” a play by Lorraine Hansberry, and “Their Eyes Were Watching God” by Zora Neale Hurston. Districts have also instructed teachers to stop using terms like “diversity” and “white privilege” in class, according to the lawsuit.
“I felt like it was a shot at teachers like me who really want to see Black and brown kids really do something with their lives,” said Anthony Crawford, a high school English teacher in Oklahoma City. “Because they need this part of history. They need to understand what happened to their people.”
Anthony Crawford teaching at Millwood High School in Oklahoma City.NBC News
Donovan Chaney, 17, a high school senior in Crawford’s class, who is Black, said he sees the law as “the way to censor our next generation, so they don’t know all the horrible things that went on before they were born.”
The suit was filed on behalf of the University of Oklahoma chapter of the American Association of University Professors, the state chapter of the NAACP, the activist group American Indian Movement-Indian Territory and high school teacher Regan Killackey. Also among the plaintiffs are the Black Emergency Response Team, a group formed by University of Oklahoma students to combat racism after Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity members were captured on video in 2015 singing a song about lynching that included the N-word.
The fraternity racism scandal prompted the University of Oklahoma to take several steps to improve the campus climate, including requiring all first-year students to take part in a Freshman Diversity Experience, a one-day diversity training. The university said that because of the new law, it will now allow students to opt out of the program, as well as sexual harassment training.
“Not having these trainings and not giving incoming freshmen these tools has had a tangible impact on our clients, who say that they feel less safe on campus knowing that not only have people not been trained on these important and complicated and difficult questions, but they don’t feel supported by the university, either,” said Emerson Sykes, a staff attorney with the ACLU.
Oklahoma’s law is particularly egregious, the suit says, because it limits discussion of dark periods of the state’s history by preventing students and teachers from asking uncomfortable questions. The suit lists several moments that are difficult for educators to cover: the 1889 Land Runs, in which settlers raced to claim land in Oklahoma’s Indian Territory; the 1921 Tulsa Massacre, when a white mob attacked a community known as Black Wall Street, killing hundreds of people and destroying homes and businesses; and the state’s constitutional provision that required racially segregated schools until the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed them in 1954.
When Stitt signed HB 1775 in May, he said that educators “can and should teach this history without labeling a young child an ‘oppressor’” and that the law would not prevent that.
Tyler Kingkade reported from Los Angeles; Antonia Hylton reported from Oklahoma City.
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How Republicans Are Weaponizing Critical Race Theory Ahead of Midterms
Stephanie Saul
10-13 minutes
Energizing Conservative Voters, One School Board Election at a Time
Republicans hope that concerns about critical race theory can help them in the midterm elections. The issue has torn apart one Wisconsin suburb.
Credit...Morry Gash/Associated Press
Oct. 21, 2021, 11:56 a.m. ET
Little more than a year ago, Scarlett Johnson was a stay-at-home mother, devoted to chauffeuring her children to school and supervising their homework.
That was before the school system in her affluent Milwaukee suburb posted a video about privilege and race that “jarred me to my core,” she said.
“There was this pyramid — where are you on the scale of being a racist,” Ms. Johnson said. “I couldn’t understand why this was recommended to parents and stakeholders.”
The video solidified Ms. Johnson’s concerns, she said, that the district, Mequon-Thiensville, was “prioritizing race and identity” and introducing critical race theory, an academic framework used in higher education that views racism as ingrained in law and other modern institutions.
Since then, Ms. Johnson’s life has taken a dramatic turn — a “180,” she calls it. She became an activist, orchestrating a recall of her local school board. Then, she become a board candidate herself.
Republicans in Wisconsin have embraced her. She’s appeared on panels and podcasts, and attracted help from representatives of two well-funded conservative groups. When Rebecca Kleefisch, the former Republican lieutenant governor, announced her campaign for governor, Ms. Johnson joined her on stage.
Ms. Kleefisch’s campaign has since helped organize door-to-door outreach for Ms. Johnson and three other school board candidates.
Ms. Johnson’s rapid transformation into a sought-after activist illustrates how Republicans are using fears of critical race theory to drive school board recalls and energize conservatives, hoping to lay groundwork for the 2022 midterm elections.
“Midterm elections everywhere, but particularly in Wisconsin, are pretty dependent on voter turnout as opposed to persuasion,” said Sachin Chheda, a Democratic political consultant based in Milwaukee. “This is one of the issues that could do it.”
Image
Credit...Carlos Javier Ortiz for The New York Times
Ballotpedia, a nonpartisan political encyclopedia, said it had tracked 80 school board recall efforts against 207 board members in 2021 — the highest number since it began tracking in 2010.
Education leaders, including the National School Boards Association, deny that there is any critical race theory being taught in K-12 schools.
“Critical race theory is not taught in our district, period,” said Wendy Francour, a school board member in Ms. Johnson’s district now facing recall.
Teachers unions and some educators say that some of the efforts being labeled critical race theory by critics are simply efforts to teach history and civics.
“We should call this controversy what it is — a scare campaign cooked up by G.O.P. operatives” and others to “limit our students’ education and understanding of historical and current events,” said Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers.
But Republicans says critical race theory has invaded classrooms and erroneously casts all white people as oppressors and all Black people as victims. The issue has become a major rallying point for Republicans from Florida to Idaho, where state lawmakers have moved to ban it.
In July, Glenn Youngkin, the Republican nominee for governor of Virginia, promised to abolish critical race theory on “day one” in office. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis, facing re-election next year, said recently, “I want to make sure people are not supporting critical race theory.” And in Arizona, Blake Masters, a Republican hoping to unseat Senator Mark Kelly in 2022, has repeatedly slammed critical race theory as “anti-white racism.”
In some places, the tone of school board opponents has become angry and threatening, so much so that the National School Boards Association went so far as to ask President Biden for federal law enforcement protection.
Few places will be more closely watched in the midterm elections than Wisconsin, a swing state that Mr. Biden won by just over 20,600 votes and where Republicans would like to retain control of the Senate seat currently held by Ron Johnson, as well as to defeat Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat.
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To succeed, Republicans must solidify support in suburban Milwaukee, an area of historical strength for the party. Recently, though, Democrats have made inroads in Ozaukee County, and particularly its largest city, Mequon, a mostly white enclave north of Milwaukee. President Trump won the city with only 50.2 percent of the vote — a poor showing that contributed to his Wisconsin defeat in 2020.
Now, with midterms on the horizon, prospective statewide candidates — including Ms. Kleefisch, Senator Johnson and the relative political newcomer Kevin Nicholson — have emphasized their opposition to critical race theory.
Senator Johnson, who has not announced whether he will seek re-election, has talked about the importance of local elections as a prelude to next year’s midterms. He recently urged constituents: “Take back our school boards, our county boards, our city councils.”
Traditionally, school board elections in Wisconsin have been nonpartisan, but a political action committee associated with Ms. Kleefisch — Rebecca Kleefisch PAC — recently contributed to about 30 school board candidates around the state, including one elected last spring in Mequon.
“The fact that this is being politically driven is heartbreaking,” said Chris Schultz, a retired teacher in Mequon and one of the four board members facing recall.
Ms. Schultz relinquished her Republican Party membership when she joined the board. “I believe school boards need to be nonpolitical,” she said. “Our student welfare cannot be a political football.”
Now, she thinks, that’s over. “The Republican Party has kind of decided that they want to not just have their say on the school board but determine the direction of school districts,” she said.
Image
Credit...John Hart/Wisconsin State Journal, via Associated Press
Against this political backdrop, Ms. Johnson, who calls herself a lifelong conservative, is waging her own battle in the district that serves 3,700 students. Ms. Johnson, 47, has five children, ranging in age from 10 to 22. Her two oldest children graduated from Mequon-Thiensville’s vaunted Homestead High School. Complaining about a decline in the system’s quality, she said she chose to send her younger children to private schools.
Ms. Johnson first got interested in school board politics in August 2020, after a decision to delay in-person classes because of an increase in Covid cases. Angered over the delay, Ms. Johnson protested with more than 100 people outside school district headquarters.
“Virtual learning is not possible for the majority of parents that work,” Ms. Johnson told a Fox News reporter.
The next day, protesters gathered outside the business of Akram Khan, a school board member who runs a private tutoring center.
“There was this narrative that I, as a board member, elected to close the schools down because it would directly benefit my pocketbook, which is the farthest thing from the truth,” Mr. Khan said.
He shut down his business temporarily as a result of the protests and is now facing recall.
Things got worse. Protesters showed up outside the home of the district superintendent; relationships among neighbors began to fray. School board meetings, formerly dull affairs, dragged on for hours, with comments taking on a nasty and divisive tone.
“We’ve been called Marxist flunkies,” said Ms. Francour. “We have police attending the meetings now.”
Image
Credit...Carlos Javier Ortiz for The New York Times
Image
Credit...Carlos Javier Ortiz for The New York Times
Anger grew over masks, test scores and the hourlong video the school system posted about race, one of two that Ms. Francour said were offered because parents had asked what to tell their children about George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis.
Led by two consultants, the optional online seminar for parents included a discussion of the spectrum of racism — from lynching to indifference to abolitionism — and tips on how to become “anti-racist” through acts such as speaking up against bias and socializing with people of color. It ended with news clips about George Floyd’s murder.
Ms. Johnson, who grew up poor in Milwaukee, the daughter of a Puerto Rican teen mother and a father who had brushes with the law, said the video ran counter to her belief that people are not limited by their background or skin color.
“For me the sky was the limit,” Ms. Johnson said in July on Fact Check, a podcast hosted by Bill Feehan, a staunch Trump supporter and the La Crosse County Republican Party chairman.
The Wisconsin Democratic Party recently provided The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel with deleted tweets by Ms. Johnson expressing nonchalance about the threat of white supremacy and accusing Planned Parenthood of racism.
Spurred partly by the video, Ms. Johnson began leading an effort, Recall MTSD.com, to recall four of seven board members. Petitions were available at local businesses, including a shooting range owned by a Republican activist, Cheryle Rebholz.
While the recall group insists theirs is a grass-roots effort, representatives of two conservative nonprofit organizations turned up to help.
Image
Credit...Morry Gash/Associated Press
One of them, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, is funded by the Bradley Foundation, known for promoting school choice and challenging election rules across the country.
The organization stepped in to help Ms. Johnson’s group by threatening legal action against the city of Mequon when it tried to remove banners, placed on public property, that promoted the recall.
Another volunteer with a high profile in conservative circles was Matt Batzel, an Ozaukee County resident and executive director of American Majority, a national group that trains political candidates.
Mr. Batzel’s organization once published a primer on how to “flip” your school board, citing its role overturning a liberal board in Kenosha, Wis.
Mequon’s recall election is Nov. 2. One candidate is Ms. Rebholz, the shooting range owner, who wrote an essay arguing that, “If the Biden-Harris team wins in November, Americans won’t be safe.”
Meanwhile, Ms. Johnson is branching out.
She serves as a state leader for No Left Turn in Education, an anti-critical race theory organization, and has recently been named to a campaign advisory board for Ms. Kleefisch.
She spoke at a Milwaukee event last month. The topic: “What is Critical Race Theory and How to Fight It.”
Stephanie Saul covers national politics. Since joining The Times in 2005, she has also written about the pharmaceutical industry, education and the illicit foreign money fueling Manhattan’s real estate boom. @stefsaul
How Republicans Are Weaponizing Critical Race Theory Ahead of Midterms
Stephanie Saul
10-13 minutes
Energizing Conservative Voters, One School Board Election at a Time
Republicans hope that concerns about critical race theory can help them in the midterm elections. The issue has torn apart one Wisconsin suburb.
Credit...Morry Gash/Associated Press
Oct. 21, 2021, 11:56 a.m. ET
Little more than a year ago, Scarlett Johnson was a stay-at-home mother, devoted to chauffeuring her children to school and supervising their homework.
That was before the school system in her affluent Milwaukee suburb posted a video about privilege and race that “jarred me to my core,” she said.
“There was this pyramid — where are you on the scale of being a racist,” Ms. Johnson said. “I couldn’t understand why this was recommended to parents and stakeholders.”
The video solidified Ms. Johnson’s concerns, she said, that the district, Mequon-Thiensville, was “prioritizing race and identity” and introducing critical race theory, an academic framework used in higher education that views racism as ingrained in law and other modern institutions.
Since then, Ms. Johnson’s life has taken a dramatic turn — a “180,” she calls it. She became an activist, orchestrating a recall of her local school board. Then, she become a board candidate herself.
Republicans in Wisconsin have embraced her. She’s appeared on panels and podcasts, and attracted help from representatives of two well-funded conservative groups. When Rebecca Kleefisch, the former Republican lieutenant governor, announced her campaign for governor, Ms. Johnson joined her on stage.
Ms. Kleefisch’s campaign has since helped organize door-to-door outreach for Ms. Johnson and three other school board candidates.
Ms. Johnson’s rapid transformation into a sought-after activist illustrates how Republicans are using fears of critical race theory to drive school board recalls and energize conservatives, hoping to lay groundwork for the 2022 midterm elections.
“Midterm elections everywhere, but particularly in Wisconsin, are pretty dependent on voter turnout as opposed to persuasion,” said Sachin Chheda, a Democratic political consultant based in Milwaukee. “This is one of the issues that could do it.”
Image
Credit...Carlos Javier Ortiz for The New York Times
Ballotpedia, a nonpartisan political encyclopedia, said it had tracked 80 school board recall efforts against 207 board members in 2021 — the highest number since it began tracking in 2010.
Education leaders, including the National School Boards Association, deny that there is any critical race theory being taught in K-12 schools.
“Critical race theory is not taught in our district, period,” said Wendy Francour, a school board member in Ms. Johnson’s district now facing recall.
Teachers unions and some educators say that some of the efforts being labeled critical race theory by critics are simply efforts to teach history and civics.
“We should call this controversy what it is — a scare campaign cooked up by G.O.P. operatives” and others to “limit our students’ education and understanding of historical and current events,” said Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers.
But Republicans says critical race theory has invaded classrooms and erroneously casts all white people as oppressors and all Black people as victims. The issue has become a major rallying point for Republicans from Florida to Idaho, where state lawmakers have moved to ban it.
In July, Glenn Youngkin, the Republican nominee for governor of Virginia, promised to abolish critical race theory on “day one” in office. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis, facing re-election next year, said recently, “I want to make sure people are not supporting critical race theory.” And in Arizona, Blake Masters, a Republican hoping to unseat Senator Mark Kelly in 2022, has repeatedly slammed critical race theory as “anti-white racism.”
In some places, the tone of school board opponents has become angry and threatening, so much so that the National School Boards Association went so far as to ask President Biden for federal law enforcement protection.
Few places will be more closely watched in the midterm elections than Wisconsin, a swing state that Mr. Biden won by just over 20,600 votes and where Republicans would like to retain control of the Senate seat currently held by Ron Johnson, as well as to defeat Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat.
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To succeed, Republicans must solidify support in suburban Milwaukee, an area of historical strength for the party. Recently, though, Democrats have made inroads in Ozaukee County, and particularly its largest city, Mequon, a mostly white enclave north of Milwaukee. President Trump won the city with only 50.2 percent of the vote — a poor showing that contributed to his Wisconsin defeat in 2020.
Now, with midterms on the horizon, prospective statewide candidates — including Ms. Kleefisch, Senator Johnson and the relative political newcomer Kevin Nicholson — have emphasized their opposition to critical race theory.
Senator Johnson, who has not announced whether he will seek re-election, has talked about the importance of local elections as a prelude to next year’s midterms. He recently urged constituents: “Take back our school boards, our county boards, our city councils.”
Traditionally, school board elections in Wisconsin have been nonpartisan, but a political action committee associated with Ms. Kleefisch — Rebecca Kleefisch PAC — recently contributed to about 30 school board candidates around the state, including one elected last spring in Mequon.
“The fact that this is being politically driven is heartbreaking,” said Chris Schultz, a retired teacher in Mequon and one of the four board members facing recall.
Ms. Schultz relinquished her Republican Party membership when she joined the board. “I believe school boards need to be nonpolitical,” she said. “Our student welfare cannot be a political football.”
Now, she thinks, that’s over. “The Republican Party has kind of decided that they want to not just have their say on the school board but determine the direction of school districts,” she said.
Image
Credit...John Hart/Wisconsin State Journal, via Associated Press
Against this political backdrop, Ms. Johnson, who calls herself a lifelong conservative, is waging her own battle in the district that serves 3,700 students. Ms. Johnson, 47, has five children, ranging in age from 10 to 22. Her two oldest children graduated from Mequon-Thiensville’s vaunted Homestead High School. Complaining about a decline in the system’s quality, she said she chose to send her younger children to private schools.
Ms. Johnson first got interested in school board politics in August 2020, after a decision to delay in-person classes because of an increase in Covid cases. Angered over the delay, Ms. Johnson protested with more than 100 people outside school district headquarters.
“Virtual learning is not possible for the majority of parents that work,” Ms. Johnson told a Fox News reporter.
The next day, protesters gathered outside the business of Akram Khan, a school board member who runs a private tutoring center.
“There was this narrative that I, as a board member, elected to close the schools down because it would directly benefit my pocketbook, which is the farthest thing from the truth,” Mr. Khan said.
He shut down his business temporarily as a result of the protests and is now facing recall.
Things got worse. Protesters showed up outside the home of the district superintendent; relationships among neighbors began to fray. School board meetings, formerly dull affairs, dragged on for hours, with comments taking on a nasty and divisive tone.
“We’ve been called Marxist flunkies,” said Ms. Francour. “We have police attending the meetings now.”
Image
Credit...Carlos Javier Ortiz for The New York Times
Image
Credit...Carlos Javier Ortiz for The New York Times
Anger grew over masks, test scores and the hourlong video the school system posted about race, one of two that Ms. Francour said were offered because parents had asked what to tell their children about George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis.
Led by two consultants, the optional online seminar for parents included a discussion of the spectrum of racism — from lynching to indifference to abolitionism — and tips on how to become “anti-racist” through acts such as speaking up against bias and socializing with people of color. It ended with news clips about George Floyd’s murder.
Ms. Johnson, who grew up poor in Milwaukee, the daughter of a Puerto Rican teen mother and a father who had brushes with the law, said the video ran counter to her belief that people are not limited by their background or skin color.
“For me the sky was the limit,” Ms. Johnson said in July on Fact Check, a podcast hosted by Bill Feehan, a staunch Trump supporter and the La Crosse County Republican Party chairman.
The Wisconsin Democratic Party recently provided The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel with deleted tweets by Ms. Johnson expressing nonchalance about the threat of white supremacy and accusing Planned Parenthood of racism.
Spurred partly by the video, Ms. Johnson began leading an effort, Recall MTSD.com, to recall four of seven board members. Petitions were available at local businesses, including a shooting range owned by a Republican activist, Cheryle Rebholz.
While the recall group insists theirs is a grass-roots effort, representatives of two conservative nonprofit organizations turned up to help.
Image
Credit...Morry Gash/Associated Press
One of them, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, is funded by the Bradley Foundation, known for promoting school choice and challenging election rules across the country.
The organization stepped in to help Ms. Johnson’s group by threatening legal action against the city of Mequon when it tried to remove banners, placed on public property, that promoted the recall.
Another volunteer with a high profile in conservative circles was Matt Batzel, an Ozaukee County resident and executive director of American Majority, a national group that trains political candidates.
Mr. Batzel’s organization once published a primer on how to “flip” your school board, citing its role overturning a liberal board in Kenosha, Wis.
Mequon’s recall election is Nov. 2. One candidate is Ms. Rebholz, the shooting range owner, who wrote an essay arguing that, “If the Biden-Harris team wins in November, Americans won’t be safe.”
Meanwhile, Ms. Johnson is branching out.
She serves as a state leader for No Left Turn in Education, an anti-critical race theory organization, and has recently been named to a campaign advisory board for Ms. Kleefisch.
She spoke at a Milwaukee event last month. The topic: “What is Critical Race Theory and How to Fight It.”
Stephanie Saul covers national politics. Since joining The Times in 2005, she has also written about the pharmaceutical industry, education and the illicit foreign money fueling Manhattan’s real estate boom. @stefsaul
Black parents need to fight back on this. They are trying to label anything that has to do with slavery, and black/minority history as critical race theory. Anything that may make a white person feel uncomfortable is labeled as CRT. They need to be called out on what exactly they are prohibiting. Not the generic "anything that teaches hate or makes us (white people) feel guilty." I asked one white person who's against it "what if I want my child to learn the details about slavery and not just brush over the subject. Why should what you want your child to learn take precedent over what I want my child to learn?" I then got a bunch of Juelzing and "Well you should teach your child that at home." Like what we see happening in Texas, they are trying to white wash history.
Want to Know More About Critical Race Theory? Look at Virginia’s Schools—For More Than 75 Years | Washington Monthly
Want to Know More About Critical Race Theory? Look at Virginia’s Schools—For More Than 75 Years
Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin was raised on official, state-taught racism. I should know. So was I.
Garrett EppsOctober 25, 2021
Politics
Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin gestures during a rally in Glen Allen, Va., Saturday, October 23, 2021. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)
Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin has decided that next month’s off-year election is a referendum on something called critical race theory. CRT, he says, is a sinister force working to divide Americans by injecting race issues into education. “To judge one another based on the content of our character, not the color of our skin,” he told a rally in Ashburn, Virginia, last month, “means we’re going to ban critical race theory.”
It is fashionable these days for progressives like myself to sneer at the hue and cry against critical race theory in the schools. But let’s get real: Some textbooks taught to Virginia children have contained virulent antiwhite propaganda.
Consider this passage from a Virginia public school textbook: “From the first recorded landing of Negroes at Jamestown in 1619 until the end of the colonial period, Virginia opposed a mixed population of the two races,” it says. “Above all the Colony was determined to preserve the racial purity of the whites. This determination is the foundation upon which Virginia’s handling of the racial issue rests, and has always rested.”
Can we at least agree that such divisive rhetoric should not be allowed in schools? It can have bad effects. I know, because the passage above, along with a lot of other racist bilge, was taught to me in 1961 in a state-mandated elementary school course in “Virginia History”; the textbook from which that quote comes, A Hornbook of Virginia History, edited by J. R. V. Daniel, was published in 1949 by the Virginia State Library for use in schools.
Youngkin and I are (as we don’t say in the South) “paisan’”—I grew up in Richmond, and he is from Norfolk. He is younger than I, but similar state-sponsored textbooks were used at different grade levels until 1972—the year Youngkin would have entered school—and longer in some places. The bad effects are still being felt—and indeed, some of the rage against CRT comes from people who as children absorbed, from textbooks or teachers, the Commonwealth’s official creed of racism.
The original “crits”—the first to see everything in American history through the lens of race—were southern whites themselves, who were proud to espouse the superiority of the white race and made sure that no schoolbook or teacher was permitted to question it.
Now, let’s listen to Youngkin a bit more. Roger Sollenberger of The Daily Beast recently compiled a few of Youngkin’s remarks on the perfidy of the crit. As he wrote:
“’We’ve got to get critical race theory out of the schools,’ Youngkin told the right-wing talk show host Hugh Hewitt in May, 10 days after clinching the GOP nomination. The following month, Youngkin vowed to the far-right personality Mark Anthony Gigliotti, ‘I’m going to tell you, as governor, we will not teach critical race theory in our schools.’ He has more recently pledged to ‘ban’ CRT from Virginia schools on ‘day one,’ should he win the election next month. In July, he told Hewitt that Virginia was watching ‘this critical race theory move its way into all schools across Virginia.’ And in August, he told Fox News that critical race theory had ‘moved into our school system, and we have to remove it.’”
One Youngkin supporter told The Washington Post that CRT is “just such a focus on race. My children weren’t raised that way. I wasn’t raised that way. We have friends of every religion, creed. They’re well-traveled. They just don’t view the world through that lens. And I think it is so unfortunate, and sad, and so divisive for anybody to put that lens in front of them.”
That brings up two points: First, politicians (and even some newspeople) are using the term critical race theory the way Vizzini in The Princess Bride used the word inconceivable. They seem to think it means something like “Trotskyites,” whose malice Stalinists blamed for every shortcoming of the Five-Year Plan. (For those who want to know what it actually means, Reginald Oh provides a useful introduction here.) It does not even mean “every use of the concept of race in history classes that might make an older white person uncomfortable,” which appears to be what Youngkin means by it. In fact, its use in politics was originatedby a right-wing “journalist” looking for a handy weapon to attack any attempts to combat racism in education and the workplace.
In 30 years as a legal academic, I got to know CRT and its proponents well. I have read many papers and attended many academic panels where their views are presented. I found some electrifying and others to be over-the-counter sleep aids. CRT is an academic movement, born in law schools, with all the virtues and limitations that name implies. It has a lot to offer, and it generates some very interesting disagreements among people who take the trouble to learn what it is. What it is not is a disease or a conspiracy hovering behind any teacher or book that suggests that racism is a problem in the 21st century.
The second point is that even if critical race theory were exerting some massive influence on K–12 education in America (it isn’t), and even if critical race theory had as its aim the instilling of shame in white students (it doesn’t), none of its efforts would compare in scope and determination with the systematic and successful 75-year campaign by Virginia and other southern states to control what was taught to students, and what students, Black and white, were allowed to read and think about race and racism. When we consider Virginia parents complaining that they “weren’t raised that way,” this history needs to be considered.
In fact, a rigorous program of ideological conformity has been a part of southern culture since the 1831 Nat Turner rebellion in Virginia. On the excuse of preventing more slave revolts, not only were antebellum schools and universities purged of antislavery teachers and books, the very mails were censored to ensure that no antislavery publications reached Dixie. The historian Clement Eaton christenedthis process of ideological purification “the intellectual blockade,” and it survived intact at least until Appomattox.
The blockade briefly fell after the Civil War, but, as the historian Fred Arthur Bailey of Abilene Christian University wrote 20 years ago in “Textbooks of the Lost Cause,” the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy, newly energized by the triumph of Jim Crow, began a successful campaign during the 1890s to require the teaching of “state histories” written by neo-Confederates. These textbooks explained that slavery was a benign system, that secession was legal and justified, that the Confederacy’s Lost Cause was noble, and that Confederate leaders were American patriots.
But eternal vigilance is the price of racial conformity. In 1948, a few weeks after President Harry Truman announced a modest federal civil rights program, southern leaders began to worry anew whether schoolchildren were learning the proper attitudes toward race and the South. In Richmond, legislators created the Virginia History and Textbook Commission. That commission was dominated by segregationist politicians—most prominently including state Senator Garland Gray. (Gray, a Southside planter, a few years later would chair another state commission, this one studying Brown v. Board of Education. That “Gray Commission” would recommend a voucher plan under which no white student would be required to attend a school with Black children.)
The Textbook Commission ordered (and extensively edited, rewrote, and censored) its own set of textbooks, whose use was required in schools. These textbooks, only slightly revised in 1964, were only “withdrawn” by the State Board of Education in 1972; even after that, as the William & Mary history professor Carol Sheriff explained in 2012, some school systems defiantly continued their use.
One of the three, Virginia’s History and Geography, explained that the Lost Cause was inspired by state’s rights and pure altruism: “Virginians love the United States and did not want to leave it. But Virginians wanted people in every state to have their rights.” After the war, it said, “Robert E. Lee, because of his greatness, his bravery, and his love for Virginia, would always be a hero.” Another, Virginia: History, Government, Geography, explained that slavery “made it possible for the Negroes to come to America and make contacts with civilized life.” They were lucky to live “far away from the spears and war clubs of enemy tribes” in Africa. Plantation life was “happy and prosperous.” True, there was a teeny, tiny bit of whipping, but “whipping was also the usual method of correcting children,” and anyway, “all slaves were given medical care.”
A third, Cavalier Commonwealth: History and Government of Virginia, explained that Virginia’s slave masters “regarded themselves as benefactors of a backward race,” and “indeed in some respects they obviously were.” Slaves were given “plentiful food . . . warm cabins, leisure and free health care.”
Finally, the book I quoted at the outset, A Hornbook of Virginia History, told students: “The debt the Negro race owes to Virginia and the South has never been less recognized than it is today. Virginia took a backward race of savages, part cannibal, civilized it, developed many of its best qualities.”
Please remember: These textbooks were prepared by a state commission using tax dollars and taught in public schools in courses students were required by lawto attend—Black students as well as white. Parents worried about how textbooks will affect white students need to cope with the fact that three generations of Black students were subjected to these books.
The issue is not whether Youngkin read these books as a student; it is that he and I both grew up white and privileged in a society profoundly shaped by this shameful state-imposed racial ideology. Many of my teachers—and undoubtedly many of those who taught Youngkin at his tony prep school, Norfolk Academy—believed implicitly in these myths, spoke of them often, and would not tolerate dissent from them.
In other words, we were “raised that way.” And the moral stature of the Youngkins of the world to invoke Martin Luther King as a way to shut down racial dialogue is, shall we say, slight.
In fact, the entire hue and cry against CRT is not about ending division; it is about preserving it. It is not about racial reconciliation; it is about inspiring racial panic, of the kind that swept the South in the 1830s, the 1890s, and the 1950s. That this phony scare is active in states outside the South is a sign of the success the conservative movement has achieved in exporting the religious, political, and racial values of the South to states in the heartland. It is no longer only in the old Confederacy that questioning of the racial order is seen as next to treason.
Glenn Youngkin is simply the latest in a line of mountebanks willing to stir race hatred and fear to gain power.
He knows how it is done; like me, he learned it in school.
I didn't know Scarborough had it in him.
shyts being going on a lot longer than bidens election though
shyts being going on a lot longer than bidens election though