Caught up in the vortex
When I was 14 I wanted a job. A man at our church ran a restaurant in a truck stop and said he could put me to work bussing tables.
My dad took me to the restaurant for coffee with the fellow churchman. A young Black male was bussing tables.
The church friend told me he’d get that kid fired in a couple of weeks and bring me aboard.
On the way home I told my dad I didn’t want the job if it meant firing that young Black employee. My dad said, “Lord have mercy.”
I wound up bussing tables at the Montgomery Ward cafeteria in the old University Mall. They called me “Lightning,” which my work pace wasn’t.
I must already have been liberally indoctrinated in critical race theory by some school teacher.
The Fayetteville School District was doing training of teachers and handed out a survey by which the teachers were directed to check boxes to assess themselves on two pages of questions inviting their introspection on their sensitivity to white privilege.
White privilege is the ragingly evident truth that historically it’s been better in America to be white than Black or other. It accepts that white advantages have been passed down naturally and are manifest still.
Let’s say I’d been born
Black instead of white in Little Rock in December 1953.
It is likely that I would have received a lesser public education considering that the local white people were inclined to go on rampages against children of my color joining them in their bigger, better schools.
It is likely I would not have had the same economic and social connections by which I got an apprentice-type job while in high school writing sports articles for a local daily newspaper. It’s likely, then, that all of you conservative white readers out there would not be receiving today’s encouragement to be less resentful and defensive—as if you’re afraid you’re losing it—when somebody mentions white privilege.
It’s not today’s white person’s fault that there has been white privilege. It is, however, a white person’s failing not to seek to become better sensitized to that.
It is absolutely shameful to declare that we’re not going to allow any encouragement of white sensitivity in the glorious insularity of our little racism-plagued province.
A series of events led to a rightwing group getting a copy of the aforementioned questionnaire and reacting angrily. The group sent the questionnaire to Fox News, which pounced, of course. It reported that the state had leaned disapprovingly on the Fayetteville school district for the evil of inviting teacher introspection on race.
Under fire, the superintendent assured the state that no teacher would be compelled to do anything based on the questionnaire and that nothing further would be done.
Then, of course, Fox gave Gov. Sarah Sanders the opening she naturally took to punch her talking-point button and declare that this kind of liberal indoctrination and teaching of critical race theory would not be tolerated while she was governor.
She was saying she would not permit in her state any discussion of white privilege or any work on becoming more sensitive to it.
She was saying that asking teachers to be introspective was indoctrinating kids and teaching what she and the right-wingers call critical race theory and rail against.
“We’ve already reached out to the district to ensure no teacher is forced to sign this pledge,” Sanders told Fox. “We’re making sure it doesn’t happen again. We will teach kids how to think, not what to think.”
In other words: Down here we’ll permit them not to think about racial disadvantage.
The superintendent told Fox that the questionnaires weren’t collected and were handed out merely for individual introspection. There was no “pledge” sought.
Handing out a questionnaire to teachers at a training conference is not indoctrinating a single child. There is no child involved in the transaction.
I would agree that a teacher should not, in becoming more sensitized, start telling younger children that they have racial privilege. But nothing on that document suggests such a thing.
Its references are to teachers’ understanding of the different situations and needs of all the little faces looking forward from their stations every school morning.
By high school, the higher-achieving kids can probably handle ragingly evident truth about white advantages. Or they will have by then the ability to engage in that thing for which teenagers are known—talking back to grownups.
I first learned of this questionnaire from Sanders’ Twitter feed when she bragged about what she’d told Fox about what she wouldn’t tolerate in Fayetteville.
We live these days in an insular right-wing news vortex—from mad white conservatives to Fox to Sanders and back around.
Let’s see if a gentle breeze of reason can survive in that vortex.