The right always complains about liberal snowflakes,
claiming that folks on the left are overly
sensitive, easily triggered, entitled and
intolerant towards other viewpoints. And yet,
the latest news coming from the battlefront in
the anti-critical race theory wars proves that
folks on the right are the ultimate
snowflakes.
Perhaps the most extreme example of the anti-woke mob
lives in Montgomery County, Texas, where
trustees of the Conroe
Independent School District want to ban race-mixing posters that allegedly have
left a white child feeling some type of way.
Specifically, the school board is cracking down on all
posters that depict racial inclusivity,
diversity and Pride in a district whose
student body is 60%
children of color. A trustee claimed a white child was traumatized and had
to switch classrooms after seeing a poster
showing children of different colors holding
hands. And as the Conroe Independent School
District wants you to know, they want to do
away with such “symbols of personal
ideologies.”
Rather than supplying the schools with smelling salts and
fainting couches to help fragile white
children cope with the trauma of viewing
pictures of interracial hand-holding, Conroe
has decided to eliminate the source of the
problem altogether. Just get rid of the
melanin. Because after all, imagine what could
happen if a white child is willing to shake
the hand of a Black child. That could lead
them down a slippery slope to friendship,
empathy, understanding, cooperation, peace,
justice, equality, reparations — or worse.
From the outset, all of this anti-CRT hysteria was about
banning material that made white children feel
uncomfortable about being white. In a country built on settler colonialism, kidnapping,
forced labor and genocide, this is a tall
order. And the country that once prohibited
enslaved Black people from reading and writing
now wants to criminalize teaching that
history, and for the same reason — white
power.
History was never meant to falsely shield children from
discomfort. A solid grasp of history provides
us with a sense of identity, an understanding
of how the world operated then and how it
operates now and an appreciation of how the
past has shaped the present.
White parents are telling on themselves when they claim
their children are made to feel racially
uncomfortable, just as their parents and
grandparents caused mayhem in the streets to
keep Black children from integrating their
white schools and creating discomfort by
dating their children. We know because we’ve
seen the
photos, and many who were there are still alive today. We see
you, Papaw, Aunt Minnie and Uncle Cooter Lee,
and we know what y’all did to Black people
back in the day in those photos.
Rather than white children complaining about posters with
multicolored hands, at issue is that white
parents are not ready, willing or able to
prepare their children for the multicultural
world in which they live. However, they do
want to protect whiteness, in an America where a
minority of children are white. In Texas, where white Anglos are a minority and Latinos
outnumber white folks, a history of voter
suppression and racial
gerrymandering allows an extreme and unhinged white minority to run
things and pretend Black and brown folks are
nowhere to be found.
This is not about protecting the kids. The states who
claim to protect the children from the
discomfort of learning about white privilege
are forcing these children to give birth to
their rapist’s baby. Greg Abbott, the sadistic
and sociopathic governor of Texas, cares so much about the children
that he has erected razor-wire
death traps and floating buoys along the Rio Grande to
slice up and potentially drown migrant children. And let us
not forget Houston
public schools, where the state recently announced that school libraries
are shutting down in the poorest communities
and being repurposed as punishment centers for
“disruptive” Black and Latinx
kids.
In Arkansas — where white folks acted the fool back in
1957 when the first Black students entered
Little Rock’s Central
High School — AP
African American history courses have been canceled because white folks believe
learning about Black people is
“indoctrination.” But at least Gov. Sarah
Huckabee Sanders gutted those pesky child
labor laws so that kids now have a chance to work at the meat
processing plant or the construction
site.
And in Florida — “where woke goes to
die” and Gov. Ron DeSantis has used his chocolate “pudding fingers” to sign all types of anti-Black,
anti-diversity-inclusion-and-equity and
anti-LGBTQ laws — the state Department of
Education will allow PragerU to provide “curriculum” in the classroom. A
right-wing extremist propaganda mill that is
not a university, PragerU will supply content
to Florida public schools as what they call “a
free alternative to the dominant left-wing
ideology in culture, media, and education.” In
other words, PragerU offers right-wing
indoctrination and pure toxic garbage.
Florida children will learn that
climate change is a hoax, that there is no such thing as gender-affirming care,
that Frederick Douglass wasn’t mad at the Founding
Fathers and said slavery
was a compromise to make America better, and that the Black Lives Matter movement led to more
crime.
One PragerU cartoon depicts the colonizer Christopher
Columbus telling two white children that the enslavement of
indigenous people was “better than being
killed,” and in any case, some of the
Indigenous people he encountered were “vicious
and warring cannibals.” In other words, white
parents — I mean children — don’t you dare
feel uncomfortable about the past. Here are
some whitewashed, made-up stories to teach
your children, guilt-free and white as snow.
White MAGA America, you are raising a bunch of snowflakes.
This is ironic given that you love to throw
that word around liberals, progressives and
left-of-center folks. You are telling on
yourselves, and we see you.
This commentary is also posted on The
Grio
