Last week, the Department of Education declined to investigate claims by the Moms for Lying to Your Kids — oh wait, sorry ... Moms for Liberty — that Williamson County Schools are teaching inappropriate anti-racist materials to kids.
The important thing to know is that the Department of Education didn’t laugh them out of the room on principal, but rather declined because the grievance wasn’t filed correctly. Moms for Lying to Your Kids can redo their paperwork and get the hearing they want.
I read through their incorrect complaint. It’s pretty hilarious. This is the crux of their complaints:
For nine weeks, WW focuses repeatedly and daily on the very dark and divisive slivers of American history. Without highlighting the positive achievements, like unity and the overall improvement of our country, students fail to learn and appreciate the continual progress in America and its accomplishments towards forming a more perfect union.
The narrow and slanted obsession on historical mistakes reveals a heavily biased agenda, one that makes children hate their country, each other, and/or themselves. This outcome has been proven with multiple parent testimonies of the negative change in behavior or outlook by their children. The relentless nature of how these divisive stories are taught, the lack of historical context and difference in perspective, and the manipulative pedagogy all work together to amplify and sow feelings of resentment, shame of one’s skin color, and/or fear.
Y’all, this approach is so wild to me. Yes, on the one hand, we could teach kids the truth about what happens in America and how we fall short of our ideals and how we need everyone pitching in to meet those ideals. Or on the other hand, we could just lie to kids and hope that if we lie deep and hard enough, they won’t hate us when they learn the truth. Hell, maybe they won’t even believe the truth.
In the history of lying to kids, has this ever worked? Have children ever not felt betrayed when they grew up and learned they’ve been lied to?
Anyway, providing historical context is one of my favorite things, so here’s some historical context for you and for the children.
In 1957, Nashville public schools began to desegregate. Roughly a dozen Black first-graders went to previously all-white schools in North Nashville and East Nashville. Nashville was under a court order to desegregate and also under tremendous pressure from racists to not desegregate. So, as is the way of this city I love, they half-assed it. Nashville schools would desegregate one grade at a time. In 1957, first grade. In 1958, first and second grades. In 1959, first, second and third grades. And so on until very slowly, over time, Nashville’s public schools would be desegregated. The history here is a lot more complicated. Many people who grew up in Nashville didn’t actually experience integrated schooling until busing in the 1970s. The important takeaway was that, starting in the 1960s, white Nashville parents might have to send their public school kids to school with Black kids. Starting in the 1970s, that changed from “might” to “would.”
Meanwhile, to our south, in 1950 the population of Williamson County was about 24,000 people. In 1960, it was about 25,000 people. And in 1970, it was 34,000 people. That's a jump of almost 36 percent. The jump from 1970 to 1980 was even greater — 70 percent, up to 58,000 people. All-Black schools in Williamson County didn’t close until the mid-1960s. And now, Black people make up just 4 percent of the population in Williamson County.
To put it bluntly, white people moved to Williamson County, in part, to put their kids in “good schools” — and part of what made those "good schools" is that they didn’t, and still don’t, have very many Black kids in them.
So these Williamson County Moms for Liberty are white moms whose kids go to majority-white schools that have the size and shape they do because of white people fleeing integrated public schools. Haha — no wonder they don’t want their kids learning about the civil rights movement. It’s not that the kids are going to feel bad about themselves. It’s that they might start to have questions about their parents and their parents' motivations.
This should go without saying, but apparently people don’t know this? Some white people also fight for equality and are and have been integral to the liberation movements of all Americans. White kids were among the sit-in protesters here in Nashville. White kids were on the Freedom Rides. White people have participated in BLM protests. It’s not as though when your white kid learns the story of Ruby Bridges that they’re going to inevitably identify with the crowds of angry white racists — unless you’ve taught them that they’re on the side of the angry white racists.
I don’t particularly trust the idea of heroes. People — all people — are deeply flawed. But still, I want to talk about Joseph Durick. I’m not Catholic, but I’ve asked around about him, and the worst that anyone has told me about him is that he had a problem with alcohol. So, aside from the caveat about him having a job known for sometimes harboring terrible people, as far as I can tell, he was just a regular person with regular flaws.
Joseph Durick was born in Dayton, Tenn., in 1914. This means he was 11 when the whole country’s focus turned to Dayton during the so-called Scopes Monkey Trial. He grew up and became a priest. He served in Alabama during the 1950s. He was actually somewhat committed to racial justice, even then. But he was among the moderate white clergy Dr. King was complaining about in his "Letter From Birmingham Jail." Like, not just in general. As the Encyclopedia of Alabama explains: “During King’s marches prior to his arrest, a diverse group of Alabama’s leading white religious leaders had gathered to discuss the rising racial tensions and issued a public statement that questioned the timing and methods of the civil rights demonstrations.” Joseph Durick was one of the signers of that statement.
If you haven’t ever read King’s letter before, please do. I read it in middle school, and I immediately came to hate America and to loathe my white skin. Oh no, wait — that did not happen. I actually felt a mixture of fear and pride that a minister — one with daughters — would be so courageous in his convictions, and I wanted to work for the kind of country he imagined.
Joseph Durick also read it, and he took it to heart. I’m sure it pricked his pride to be called out like that. I know it would bother me. But he ruminated on what King had written, and he let it change him. In 1964, Durick came to Nashville as coadjutor bishop. In 1969, he became bishop. He served on the Board of Project Equality. He was a member of the State Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights. When King was assassinated, Bishop Durick marched as a mourner.
King wrote in the "Letter From Birmingham Jail" about people like the Moms for Liberty, who try to sweep the tensions of our time out of view:
I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.
What the Moms are doing is trying to return to that negative peace. And it is our jobs — especially us white people living in the Nashville Bishop Durick helped bring about — to bring this stuff out into the open where it can be seen and dealt with.
