Beverly, Kelly Yang, and the Sullivan County Board of Education

This morning I thought I would write an amusing story about Beverly, my schnoodle, who through no fault of her own currently looks like a long-legged naked mole rat attached to a Schnauzer head. But I went to sleep thinking about a tweet from an internet friend, fellow author Kelly Yang, and I woke to an article on the same general topic in my local newspaper, and so I'm going to write about those instead of my dog. But I'll post a photo of said dog, for interest:

 

See? It's unfortunate, but not nearly as ridiculous as the crap being doled out to Kelly Yang and a Sullivan Central High School teacher named Matthew Hawn. Let's take them individually.

Kelly Yang is an author I've never personally met but one whose work I admire. This year Appalachian Literacy Initiative selected her novel Front Desk as one of the choices for 4th grade. Front Desk is about a10-year-old Chinese immigrant, Mia Tang, who's helping her parents run a motel in California. It got universally terrific reviews--it's well-written and funny. It's also a great example of a kid in a tough circumstance making good. Most of the students ALI sends books to are low-income, so we like to have books that mirror that and end hopefully. (Not all of them: Dog Man is a perpetual favorite, and so is Animal Smackdown. But it's a point in a book's favor when it comes to our list.)

Two days ago Kelly tweeted that the New York Times had quoted an organization who had put Front Desk on a list of books that teach Critical Race Theory and "demean our nation and its heroes." It's been awhile since I read Front Desk. I've been searching my mind, and I can't think of anything about it that demeans anything. There's an antagonist--but he, like the Tangs, is of Chinese descent. There are different people of different backgrounds. There's a discussion that it's harder in America if you're poor than if you're not--which is pretty hard to argue with. The whole reason ALI sends books to low-income students is that their lack of access to books means they're 250% less likely to read at proficient level than their higher-income classmates. 

I looked up the other books on the list. Most are nonfiction. One is a YA novel by Meg Medina called Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass. I have no idea why that book is supposed to have anything to do with Critical Race Theory, but it's on the very short list of books I wish I'd written myself. My admiration for Yaqui Delgado is unbounded.

It seems to me that lots of people are talking about Critical Race Theory without having any idea what it means. I found a definition online:

Critical race theory is an academic concept that is more than 40 years old. The core idea is that race is a social construct, and that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies.

The basic tenets of critical race theory, or CRT, emerged out of a framework for legal analysis in the late 1970s and early 1980s created by legal scholars Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Richard Delgado, among others.

The fear seems to be that schools are trying to get students to hate white people. 

We don't teach hate by teaching the truth. We teach empathy, perhaps. Justice. Critical thinking. Adolf Hitler calls himself a Christian in his book Mein Kampf--but we don't claim that speaking against Hitler demeans Christianity. Teaching the entire truth of our past and present might make students hate what certain white people have done in the past--but it's not going to make them hate every white person. Nothing is all white people any more than it's all Black people or all Asians or all Presbyterians. But also, no one is actually teaching the nuances of Critical Race Theory in elementary school. Letting kids know that sometimes other kids have a hard time for reasons they can't control--that teaches some kids to be more compassionate and others that they aren't alone. It's love and it's hope. It's a responsibility that I as a writer for children take very seriously.

Ok, Matthew Hawn. I never met him and never heard of him until this morning, when I read about him on page 3 of my local paper. Matthew Hawn, who taught at Sullivan Central High School for 16 years, is coming before the Sullivan County Board of Education  on December 14 to appeal his termination last spring for not offering varying points of view in his contemporary issues class. According to the paper, Hawn assigned a reading of a Ta-Nehisi Coates book "The First White President" and also played a four-minute video of someone reading Kayla Jenee Lacey's poem "White Privilege."

I've read some of Ta-Nehisi Coates's books and am familiar with most of them, but hadn't heard of one called "The First White President." I just Googled it. Now I understand why the Sullivan County Board of Education is so upset. I live in Sullivan County and know the local brand of prejudice pretty well. "The First White President" is actually an article published in the magazine The Atlantic, in October, 2017, and it links the presidency of Donald Trump with racism. I encourage you to read it. If you're pro-Trump your knee-jerk reaction might be negative,. I encourage you to really examine the facts Coates presents as well as the words he uses to present them. Now imagine this article being picked apart and discussed in a high school class. Pretty instructive--which was of course the point.

As for the poem "White Privilege." Wow. I didn't know Kyla Jenee Lacey until just now. There's an interesting article online, from Slate magazine, where she's interviewed specifically about this poem and Matthew Hawn's firing. Here's a salient bit:

One thing that the school board mentioned in their decision to dismiss Hawn was the “inappropriate” language in your poem. What was your reaction upon hearing that? Did that strike you as being the real reason why?

I know it’s not the real reason why. I have their required reading list. And in the books that they are required to read, there’s sexual assault, murder, a lot of cursing. So I know that it was just a terrible excuse for their discomfort. And this is coming from somebody who was 16 years old having to, who grew up in a mostly white neighborhood, in my latter childhood, reading Mark Twain and reading the word “n***er” over 200 times in a book.

I went to look up what was on the Sullivan County high school reading list, but couldn't find it online. Sullivan Central High School closed last spring when the new consolidated county high school, West Ridge, was built. Contemporary Issues is still a class at West Ridge: This course acquaints the student with topics of national and international interest and equips students with the analytic skills needed to assume leadership roles as a citizen. 

I want to wrap this all up in a tidy conclusion, but I haven't got one, just a sense of heartsick frustration. Our children are capable of understanding nuance and truth, empathy and love. They deserve books like Front Desk and teachers like Matthew Hawn. 

Matthew Hawn's hearing will take place on Tuesday, December 14th, at 4:30 pm at the school board meeting room, 154 Blountville Bypass, Blountville, TN.