This is an opinion column.
Let them speak.
Hear them.
Let the students speak.
Hear their unease. Hear their fears. Hear their pain.
Hear Black students striving to be educated in Cullman—the few that there are in a school district that is 93% white. They deserve to speak. They deserve be heard.
They deserve to stand before friends, neighbors and, most importantly, city leaders and share what they endure. To simply go to school. In Cullman.
The 11-second video that landed in so many inboxes almost two weeks ago now is just a symptom, yet another manifestation of an ugly underbelly of racism—a term I’ve written before, sadly—that has long plagued not just Cullman. Long plagued too many other places, too.
That a white student in that city—a white student that is the son of Cullman school board president Amy Carter, no less—felt comfortable enough, felt comforted enough to spew “white power” and “kill all the n—–s”, that another white student felt it cool to shoot video of the insipid rant and share it for a good Snapchat chuckle, well, it says a lot. About our children. Mainly, though, about ourselves.
About a state where leaders like Gov. Kay Ivey and members of the state education board whip themselves into a froth over a legal construct teachers can’t teach about race (though none of them were teaching it anyway) rather than address what are we not teaching our kids.
What are we not teaching them about empathy, about how to look at Black peers and see beyond the tone of their flesh, about how to look at themselves and see their own misconceptions, their own biases, their own adolescent failings?
What are we not teaching them when the only consequence of the white student’s awful actions, at least to the extent made public, is a few extra laps at basketball practice?
What are we not teaching them when the school board president has the temerity to say her son was imitating a TikTok, as if that’s an excuse? (I was raised with: Just because [name of neighborhood knucklehead] does it doesn’t mean you do it, too.)
What are we not teaching them when Black students—they just want to go to school in peace, y’all—endure racist incidents (microaggressions is what they’re called today, though they aren’t micro at all when they’re hurled at you) as early as middle school? When one tells his mother of being called a monkey by a white student, of a white student saying—as reported by my colleague Rebecca Griesbach—they could only see the Black student’s smile in the dark.
One Black tenth grader says lack of accountability by the schools, and other white students has “normalized” racial aggressions.
“No one does anything about it,” the student told Griesbach. “Like the friends that they say it to don’t stand up for nobody.”
“They don’t feel alone,” another Black student shared.
“I feel like at school, everybody’s against me,” another Black student said. “I can’t say anything. I just have to deal with, because they’re all laughing and think it’s funny.”
The Black students who were quoted, along with some of their parents, attended last week’s necessarily uncomfortable school board meeting in the lunchroom at West Elementary School in Cullman. They were not allowed to address the board, though, ostensibly because they did not sign up in time. Lame excuse, especially in these critical times. Especially when school leaders in Cullman claim to be providing “awareness” about diversity—whatever that means.
Here’s an irony for you: That toothless resolution passed by the Ivey-chaired state board of education prevents teachers from inculcating students “in political ideologies that promote one race or sex above another.”
Yet it seems—and again, Cullman is not our first reminder— some school systems and the cities in which they serve students, white students, are being inculcated with exactly that belief. Why else would they feel so comfortable, so comforted with their racial aggressions? Why else if they did not feel above students of another race?
More irony: The aforenoted resolution includes this phrase: “…move forward to create a better future together.”
On Friday, the Cullman City Schools, while still refusing to discipline the two students involved in the 11-second video, said it had engaged two mental health specialists to talk with students about “conflict, meanness and bullying” (please let at least one of them be Black) and will host “listening sessions” with students “who may have differences” to determine how to update its code of conduct,
This is a sound start.
Let them speak. Hear them. They deserve it. And more.