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The right-wing conservative outrage over critical race theory is being used to reinstitute a white washing of the lies (or omissions) in American history that have always made many white Americans uncomfortable with how they have treated others–particularly African-Americans.
In June, Matthew Hawn, a high school teacher and baseball coach in Blountville, Tennessee, was fired by the county board of education.
The process had escalated in steps: Earlier in the year, Hawn assigned an essay by Ta-Nehisi Coates—“The First White President”—in his Contemporary Issues class, and a student’s father objected. In a complaint filed in February, the parent took issue with the piece’s “somewhat angry, and hateful opinion towards President Trump,” as well as specific words in the essay that he didn’t feel “should be introduced to our children by a high school teacher.” In response, Hawn was issued an “official letter of reprimand.”
In March, shortly after he was reprimanded, Hawn showed his class a video of the poet Kyla Jenée Lacey reciting her poem “White Privilege,” which brought him back before the school board. In May, he was served with dismissal charges. In that document, then–Director of Schools David Cox wrote that he found the poem unsuitable for high school students—not because of its subject matter but because Lacey used “inappropriate” words like “fuck,” “hell,” “shit,” and the n-word.
But the hand-wringing over language and age appropriateness was largely a pretext. To Cox and the other members of the board, Coach Hawn’s ultimate failure was one of bias: He had failed in “offering and discussing appropriate materials which provided a more conservative perspective on the same subject matter.”
Hawn’s story isn’t exactly new—conservative school boards and outraged parents have long flexed outsize power in the American classroom—but the timing of his case has garnered national attention. Tennessee, like five other states, now has a law on the books barring what conservatives decry as “critical race theory” from its schools, a remarkably swift crystallization of the backlash to our most recent reckoning with systemic racism (and one that attempts that classic inversion—that to talk about racism is the real racism).
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