In Tennessee, school board fights are getting seriously heavy over what white parents are saying is "critical race theory" when it's not, but it's not stopping those parents from expunging all education about race and replacing it with white saviorism for a new generation of Karens and Keiths.
Robin Steenman, an Air Force veteran and white mother of three, is fed up with the way public schools in her community of Franklin, Tennessee are teaching kids about race.
She believes that the reading materials and teachers' manuals are biased, specifically the lessons taught to second graders about civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. Kids leave class believing that white people are oppressors and minorities are victims, Steenman claims.
While her only school-age child attends private school, Steenman nevertheless wants the public system, Williamson County Schools, to change its approach. She and a group of local women calling themselves “Moms for Liberty” recently asked the Tennessee Department of Education in a complaint letter to force the district to scrap that material and overhaul its curriculum.
Their protests have made Williamson County the first test of a new Tennessee law that bans the teaching of ideas linked to “critical race theory,” an academic framework that examines how racism has shaped American society.
The clash in Franklin, a Nashville suburb of 83,000 people, is part of a larger culture war over race and education that’s roiling other U.S. communities, and which has gained traction as a political force nationwide.
It has split parents and spooked some educators. Tennessee is pursuing plans to strip teaching licenses from instructors and cut state funding to schools that persistently teach taboo material.
A spokesperson for the Tennessee Department of Education, the agency responsible for overseeing districts’ compliance with the law, would not comment on the status of Steenman’s complaint letter.
Williamson County Schools has denied that the civil rights material violates state law. The district's superintendent Jason Golden and 11 of the 12 district board members declined to be interviewed by Reuters.
School board member Eliot Mitchell told Reuters that Moms for Liberty's complaint was "misguided," and that teaching about racism in America's past does not equate to teaching "that one particular race is intrinsically racist."
Still, the district said it is reviewing the curriculum at the request of a community member whose identity it did not disclose. That review is scheduled to be completed by November.
Another local group of parents believes some of their neighbors want schools to avoid hard truths about the history of American race relations, including in Williamson County. The area is home to former slave plantations now open to tourists. Franklin’s public square, where a Confederate monument stands, was the site of an antebellum slave market and the 1888 lynching of a Black man by the Ku Klux Klan.
Some have pushed the district to address what they say is a long-standing pattern of racial insensitivity toward minority students in this 82% white county, including field trips to historical sites they claim have glorified the Confederacy and soft-peddled the evils of human bondage.
“Overall, it’s a beautiful community,” said Tizgel High, a Black mother of three. “But these battles, they get tiresome. You’re sort of constantly fighting for your humanity.”
Schools spokesperson Carol Birdsong said the district “continues to work to create a safe, welcoming environment for all students.”
In the past year, at least eight Republican-controlled states, including Tennessee, have passed laws restricting how the concept of race can be taught. The issue has become prominent in some off-year elections, including this year’s Virginia governor’s race, and it’s poised to be a major theme in the 2022 U.S. midterm contests.
White parents saw the Black Lives Matter protests. They voted Republican so they'd never have to see them, or think about why they happened again. They don't want to confront the truth, so they are criminalizing it, and forcing schools to whitewash history, to present it as "white heroes saved Black folk from slavery during the Civil War" and that they've been watching over us ever since.
And Black America should be grateful for it, and just shut the hell up about it.
Surprise, we're not.
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