Watauga Watch: “It’s happening all over North Carolina let alone the rest of the nation — the Trumpist movement to take over school boards and hound out “cultural diversity” or diversity of any kind (among other things). It’s happening in Watauga County, which is why the School Board primary on May 17 is so crucial (early voting starts on Thursday of this week).
What follows is borrowed from PamsPicks.net (with permission), an extensive write-up of the issues now boiling inside public education and information on the insurgent right-wing candidates running against the school board incumbents in Watauga. PamsPicks uses lots of embedded links, and I haven’t checked all of them to see that they’re working, but you can always go to the link above if having trouble.
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“Where they burn books, at the end they also burn people”
― Heinrich Heine
Welcome to this year’s School Board Culture Wars, where radicalized adults have whipped themselves into a frenzy first over their children’s being required to mask in classrooms during a pandemic and onward now into an assault on LGBTQ+, communities of color, local teachers, school administrators, and anyone else they view as “the other.”
The “non-others” believe they can only define and uplift their own human value by defining and destroying the human value of others. They promote deadly conspiracy theories and sling arrows at anything science-based. They’ve declared wholesale war on public schools. They use social media and fear-mongering to push for laws to ban books that run counter to their righteous view of the world and want to censor teachers or fire them if they dare to push back.
The “non-others” call those who will not walk their straight line and adhere to their world view “woke” as if being culturally “asleep” is far superior (or at least more convenient to their cause). They are co-opted and riled up by dark money, rich donors, and advocacy groups like No Left Turn. They shake with fear and anger about indoctrination from classic books like “To Kill A Mockingbird,” “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,”and “Of Mice and Men” — in fact any and all books about the stories and lives of “the others.”
“We have culture war battles over school closures, mask mandates, education about race and LGBTQ issues. You’ve got discussions around masks, age-appropriate books, transgender bathrooms, and it drives out discussions about hiring teachers, attracting talent, expending capital investments on infrastructure. We’re distracted from the real issues going on.”
We’ve been here before.
In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan freaked out because they believed recent immigrants to the United states were threatening “traditional American values” by their very presence. It opposed labor unions, immigration, and foreign entanglements such as the League of Nations. But the KKK was especially hostile to blacks, Catholics, and Jewish people.
The Klan exerted significant influence and policed their communities, including local schools:
“They might object to a theater showing “immoral” pictures or warn an alleged wife beater to desist or pressure a school committee to crack down on a ‘liberal’ teacher or ban a particular book. Those who joined the Loyalty Leagues and Defense Societies used that position to bully immigrants or censure liberal ministers or get rid of teachers or ban books or movies.”
The John Birch Society followed suit in the 1950s, deciding that if they couldn’t win on the national level to rid the world of so-called Communists, they would go grassroots, including by disrupting school board meetings.
So now here we are again. School board outbursts ending in chaos and threats. School board members in Virginia receiving death threats and protesters in San Diego County pushing their way into a school board meeting and declaring themselves the newly-elected board. Last Fall, nine titles were removed from the libraries of four high schools in Utah’s Canyons School District. Just last year, the Texas Senate voted to remove the requirement in a competing House bill for public school teachers to teach that the Ku Klux Klan is “morally wrong.”
In fact, the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom identified 330 incidents of book censorship last fall alone, mostly books about LGBTQ people and race and racism.”