Member-only story
RACE / RACISM
Black Parents Drowned Out at School Boards; Twitter’s Photo Crops Reveal Bias Toward Whiteness
Catch up on the latest race and racism news you might have missed.
The stories in this week’s collection of race and racism news have really got me thinking about perspectives — namely, which perspectives are highlighted, and which are shunted to the shadows. Our first item has Black parents struggling to make critical race theory critics see how racism continues to impact their children. In the next, publishers of textbooks for Christian schools are apparently trying to confuse civil rights movements for equality as battles for Black supremacy. Meanwhile, Twitter’s algorithms crop out the people it — and ultimately, society — views as less important to the big picture.
Black parents fight to be heard over anti-critical race theory noise at school board meetings
The hyperventilating panic over critical race theory (which is almost never about actual critical race theory and more about schools’ efforts to expand lessons beyond Eurocentric perspectives) has filtered down to local school boards. Masses of misinformed parents fill public comment sessions with accusations that pledges to embrace diversity or lessons about the brutality of slavery are in fact efforts to indoctrinate children or make White students feel guilty about historical inequalities. Meanwhile, Black parents who testify about the ways structural and interpersonal racism has impacted their child at school, or to express support for diverse perspectives in curriculum, are being drowned out. In this Newsweek story, reporter Danya Hajjaji describes how a Black father in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. spoke at a school board meeting about his child being called the n-word on the school bus. He also brought up a Facebook video post in which a local parent appeared with “anti-CRT” activist Tatiana Ibrahim, who referred to a Black school counselor as “boy”. That was followed by White parents who asked questions like, “How do you think White children feel when they are called privileged?”
