On Thursday, May 12, 2022, the mother of a middle-school student in Jacksonville, Fla., filed a letter of intent to sue the Duval County Florida School District for failing to address incidents of racism, violence and bullying inflicted on her son by students and teachers. Multiple students have allegedly signed written documents testifying to regular use of the N-word, and a teacher telling a student that “Black people are beneath white people.”
One day later, and 1,200 miles away, middle-schoolers in Portland, Maine, staged a walkout after students complained of teachers and other students regularly using the N-word and other racist language. In that case, multiple students corroborated accounts of a teacher describing a black student as a monkey.
Later that same day, in a suburb of Dallas, a 9-year-old white boy was captured on a ring security camera, brandishing a whip and angrily banging on the front door of a Black family while demanding that their daughter be brought out to him. When the parents of the girl went to the boy’s house to seek an apology and mediate the situation with his parents, they were greeted by the boy’s father, brandishing a gun.
All of those incidents occurred in the 48 hours before an 18-year-old gunman opened fire in a grocery store in Buffalo, N.Y., with the intent of killing as many Black people as possible.
We hoped that a targeted, clearly racist attack on Black people would at least momentarily stop the hateful violence and rhetoric being thrown at people of color, LGBTQ people and other marginalized communities, especially in our schools. We hoped that parents would respond to the disturbing imagery being streamed into their living room from Buffalo and Laguna Woods, Calif., by taking the opportunity to talk to their kids about hate, racism, violence, homophobia, transphobia, antisemitism and bullying.But in the week since the Buffalo massacre, more racist, homophobic and transphobic attacks have been reported in schools in California, Texas, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, Georgia, North Carolina and Michigan.
In a single 10-day period, each of the 10 most populous states in the country had documented incidents of hate in their schools. These states collectively represent more than 50% of all people in the United States and a diverse array of social, economic, political and geographic identities. And yet in just 10 days, they all shared in the experience of hate within their schools.
As if this weren’t bad enough, in the middle of those 10 days, an 18-year-old terrorist engaged in a meticulously planned and targeted mass execution of Black people who were guilty of nothing more than living in a predominantly Black neighborhood and going to the grocery store.
Hate is endemic in the United States. It knows no boundaries, even among our children.
We should probably clarify, the 18-year-old shooter in Buffalo is not a child. And despite the mistakes (or unconscious bias) of our colleagues at the Associated Press and other news outlets that have labeled him as a child or kid or teen, he should not be treated as such. He is an adult domestic terrorist. However, at 18, he has only been an adult for a short time and only recently left high school. Which begs the questions, at such a young age, where did he learn to harbor such hate? And how did we, as a society, fail to help him unlearn it?
Answering these questions is difficult but is almost certainly connected to the students and teachers mentioned above spouting hateful rhetoric. But it is also connected to groups of parents who have sprung up across the country claiming that schools shouldn’t be teaching about race, racism or other ideas that might cause our children to feel uncomfortable or embarrassed.
These types of curricular constraints are simply wrong, as they ignore the reality that some chapters in U.S. history are uncomfortable and embarrassing. If we do not allow ourselves to be exposed to these moments in history, how can we possibly learn from them? If we do not present the realities of racism in our nation today, we risk becoming complicit in allowing hate to fester into the next generation.
Kids can be exposed to hateful messages from countless sources. It may be from close relatives, neighbors, friends, classmates who repeat their own parents’ messages of hate, or even strangers who come into our homes via television and the internet. It doesn’t matter where they are getting it from, we must counter it together, every time it arises, and in every setting, but especially in schools where this is an obligation to try to make some realistic sense of the world.
And thanks to Republican leadership, it’s getting increasingly difficult for even well-intentioned teachers to provide meaningful education to combat hate in our schools. Seventeen states controlled by the GOP have now adopted some form of policy that limits teachers’ ability to even discuss, let alone teach about the history and present conditions of racism, homophobia and other forms of hatred in the United States. The consequence of this is that children in those states might grow to be adults and not even know that the civil rights movement existed or be able to recognize what a Ku Klux Klan hood symbolizes.
Meanwhile, the existence of “whites only” drinking fountains and the entire twisted social order that gave rise to them are still within the living memory of a great many Americans. It’s not that distant. It’s not theoretical. It happened. And people who encouraged it still walk among us. Washing that history away is an intentional lie to our children. And now some states are forcing schools to engage in that lie.
The events of the past 10 days clearly demonstrate that the forces who want to claim racism isn’t present in society are at best uninformed, or at worst, flatly lying as a means of manipulating our schools and politics.
We must provide schools that are safe for our children to learn in. Parents are essential to both safety and education, but we cannot be with our children at all times or in all circumstances. Let’s work together to create schools where all children can know that if hate comes into the classroom, teachers and classmates will have the knowledge and tools they need to engage in a meaningful conversation that leaves everyone feeling safe, supported and ready to learn.