They Came for the Schools One Town's Fight Over Race and Identity, and the New War for America's Classrooms

"

Black is a senior reporter for NBC, the host of the Peabody Award-winning podcast South Lake and the author of They Came for the Schools.

The respectable upper middle class middle aged suburban moms in They Came for the Schools might not seem like they have anything in common with the angry young in-cell Nazis who marched on Charlottesville but in fact both groups are at their core far-right political movements that are motivated by anti-blackness and have recently shifted focus of their hate towards trans people.

And so the parents I document in South Lake Texas who were kind of service stand-ins for the conservative suburban moms who've gone to war with their school boards in the last few years under the banner of Moms for Liberty, anti-critical race theory, anti-DEI.

So parents heard that message from Chris Rufo on Fox News on Tucker Carlson and on their Facebook pages and started showing up at school board meetings.

And so when you start teaching kids that, you know, for hundreds of years, America did these horrible things in the name of racism that they enslaved. People were enslaved because they were black. You know, when you teach kids really what happened during Jim Crow or in some of or the reason why some of these suburbs were created in the first place, that conflicts with the image that these parents are really invested in their kids learning, which is America is the greatest country in the world and has always been good and just.

"

Mike's excellent new book, They Came for the Schools, One Town's Fight Over Race and Identity and the New War for Americans Classrooms is out now. I suggest you check it out.

"

The schools are where America tries to tell, teach the next generation what this country is about, what's right and wrong.

And so of course when these fights over race and identity and belonging take off in national politics, the schools are the place where they are the most intense. I wrote this book so that if you're a teacher or a parent in a community where you've seen angry neighbors come to school board meetings complaining about critical race theory or woke gender identity, or trying to ban library books that, you could get a sense or understanding of why that's happening.

And the way we I do that in the book is by telling the story of one town where that fight has been really intense.

There's in 2021, as you were seeing backlash to pandemic safety restrictions and the protests of racial justice, Black Lives Matter, there were parents showing up at school board meetings concerned about DEI programs. But then what happened is the Steve Bannon's of the world and Chris Ruffo and Donald Trump saw that as an opportunity, and for the last three years, Americans have been fed a really scary story about public schools that have been taken over by this shadowy liberal cabal whose mission is to indoctrinate and teach white children to hate themselves, to get kids to change their genders. It's kind of this straw man, very scary image, and folks some parents really have taken in that message and have worked to try to push those things out of the schools, even though they're those things aren't really happening.

This is what's happening now is maybe unprecedented in its scale and how much is connected to national politics, but this this type of thing has happened repeatedly throughout our history, and I think knowing that and recognizing that helps us understand where this is all going and and how we fit into that story.