Beware the Angry Parents!

Parents should decide what their kids learn in school, shouldn’t they?

It takes little insight to recognize the explicit and implicit dangers of that proposition.  Such dangers are absurdly apparent in idiocy like the efforts to ban Toni Morrison’s profound novel Beloved because it made a white boy feel bad.   

Or consider this excerpt from an essay by child advocate Bruce Lesley:

For example, imagine an elementary school of 450 students where 15 parents oppose the teaching of evolution, 19 parents believe the earth is flat, 28 are Holocaust deniers, 22 oppose white children learning about slavery, 7 believe in racial segregation, 21 believe in the concept of a school without walls, 49 demand the use of corporal punishment, 18 want to ban Harry Potter books from the school library, 26 want to ban any books that mention the Trail of Tears, 62 believe that parents should be allowed to overrule a physician’s decision that a child with a concussion should refrain from participating in sports, 87 oppose keeping their kids out of school when they have the flu, 9 believe that a child with cancer might be contagious, 29 believe that kids who are vaccinated should be the ones who quarantine, 72 support “tracking” in all subject areas, 32 believe students should not be taught how to spell the word “isolation” and “quarantine”because they are too “scary of words,” 104 don’t like the school neighborhood boundaries, 38 don’t like the bus routes, 71 parents want a vegan-only lunchroom, 4 demand same-sex classrooms, 5 oppose textbooks and want their children only reading from the Bible, and it can go on and on. The vast majority of parents do not agree with any of these things, and yet, parental rights extremists would insist schools must accommodate them, even if they are completely false, undermine the purpose of education, threaten the safety of children, or promote discrimination.

Parental interference is not new, but the current resurgence has a new flavor and widespread contagion, courtesy of social media.  While I appreciate Lesley’s many fine examples, the main issues animating parental anger these days are diversity, inclusion, racism, Critical Race Theory, The 1619 Project and other efforts to correct what has been heretofore a partly mythological, white, Eurocentric understanding of United States history. 

Backlash against honest education about race threaten to dismantle democracy.  It is arguably as severe a threat as the climate leading to the Civil War.  The election of Republican Glenn Youngkin as Virginia’s Governor is a terrifying case in point.  Exit polls indicated the outsized influence “parental control over education” had on the election.  “Parental control over education” is proxy for strenuous objection to accurate history curricula and all other forms of so-called “wokeness.”  Youngkin blew this dogwhistle throughout the campaign and that more than accounts for his margin of victory.    One needn’t be Nostradamus to predict that this will be the GOP campaign strategy in 2022 and 2024.

And it may work, leading to GOP control of the House, Senate and White House.  Our fragile democracy cannot survive another trip around the dance floor with Trump and his seditious accomplices. 

Parental concern about race-related programming takes two forms. 

 One, which I’ll dispense with quickly, comes from those who refuse to accept truth.  They believe that the Civil War was a noble defense of the Southern homeland and culture - and only incidentally about slavery, which their fine and moral ancestors would have dealt with eventually.  It didn’t take all that bloodshed, they insist.  And anyway, as far as they know, their predecessors didn’t have slaves - and if they did, they treated them kindly and besides, as they see it, slaves had it pretty good and seemed happy enough. Look at all those images of them singing and dancing!  

Those folks are beyond redemption.

The second group is more nuanced  in their objections.  They are the swing voters who gave us Youngkin and may be the voters who give away democracy rather than have their children learn the truth about race.  They may acknowledge most facts of history and they just love Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.  They may recite the I Have a Dream speech with their children at the dinner table, but they hate all this diversity and inclusion training that makes their children feel guilty for being white. 

After all, what did their children do?  And while they’re at it, what did they themselves do?

Progressives and thoughtful educators  face a real dilemma.  It would be a moral failing to abandon anti-racist work to appease parents and politicians who distort the truth to score political points.  But is also dangerous - extremely dangerous - to feed into the GOP strategy by engaging on their terms.   

I don’t know the answers, but a few semantic changes may help to manage this dilemma, especially for educators who do this work.  

The estimable Columbia University linguist John McWhorter (a Black man) recent penned a New York Times essay arguing that “guilt” doesn’t help anything.  He cited numerous sources bolstering his case.  

In years of involvement in diversity work I knew no person who intended to instill “guilt” as an outcome.   And despite the claims of some parents, I knew no children who felt guilty - at least not for long.   Guilt is not useful because it is not actionable.  It just festers.   So a good teacher will redirect emotions to more productive realms, like responsibility and empathy.  That’s where the conversation belongs.  White children - and adults - evolve through thoughtful diversity work and can find it rewarding and liberating to understand their world in a richer, more inclusive way.   Finding empathy and exercising responsibility for fairness, equality and understanding creates empowerment, not guilt.

This is also true of “white privilege.”  Angry parents can’t identify any privilege they enjoy.  They often cite a striking lack of privilege in their own lives as compared to Black folks they know or know about.  Here too, the phrase “white privilege” diverts attention from the work to be done.  It’s a trigger phrase and, once triggered, folks are much less likely to listen to facts or reason.

“White supremacist” is also counterproductive, despite its accuracy as a descriptor of some virulent racists - or perhaps the whole of society!  But the broad use of the term is heard as accusatory, instantly shutting down any discourse with parents - or their children - who may otherwise be open to growth. 

Teachers can and should avoid these triggers, no matter how strong their anti-racist passion.

Educators, particularly educators in the progressive tradition, must have confidence that children will discover the truth when given the whole of history to interrogate.

The facts of social and economic history will inevitably reveal the broad and deep disadvantages of being Black, whether 1821, 1921 or 2021.  

Exploring “why” and “how” this came to be can enlighten without accusation or guilt. “White privilege” is the obvious corollary, but needn’t be handed out to be used as an excuse to justify turning from the important work.  Teach the 1619 curriculum without identifying it in that way.   Live a diversity, equity and inclusion mission without putting it on a billboard.

If we hope to keep parents from raging at school board meetings and electing dishonest, dog whistling politicians, educators should drop the triggers.  Our democracy may depend on it.