Racist video in Cullman, a critical reflection on what we don’t teach our children

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This is an opinion column.

Let them talk.

Listen to them.

Let the students do the talking.

Listen to their discomfort. Listen to their fears. Listen to their pain.

Hear black students strive to be educated in Cullman, the few in a school district that is 93% white. They deserve to talk. They deserve to be heard.

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They deserve to stand in front of their friends, neighbors, and most importantly, city leaders and share what they are going through. To just go to school. To 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 belly of racism – a term I’ve written before , unfortunately – which has long tormented not only Cullman. Long plagued by too many other places too.

Read about the racist video at the Hoover School here.

That a white student in this city – a white student who is the son of Cullman School Board President Amy Carter, no less – feel comfortable enough, comforted enough to spit out “white power” and ” kill all n —– s “, which another white college student thought cool to shoot a video of the tasteless rant and share it for a good snapchat laugh, well, that says a lot. about our children, but above all about ourselves.

About a state where leaders like Governor Kay Ivey and members of the state’s education council are whipping each other over a legal construct that teachers cannot teach about race (although none of them were teaching it anyway) rather than tackling what we are not teaching our children.

What don’t we teach them about empathy, how to look at black peers and see beyond their skin tone, how to look at themselves and see their own misconceptions, their own biases, their own teenage flaws?

What don’t we teach them when the only consequence of the white student’s horrific actions, at least as far as it’s made public, is a few more laps in basketball practice?

What don’t we teach them when the president of the school board has the temerity to say that her son was imitating a TikTok, as if it was an excuse? (I was raised with: Just because [name of neighborhood knucklehead] doesn’t that mean you do too.)

What aren’t they taught when black students – they just want to go to school in peace, all of you – endure racist incidents (micro-attacks, that’s what we call today? ‘hui, although they are not microphone at all at your home) from middle school? When one of them tells his mother about being called a monkey by a white student, of a white student saying — as my colleague Rebecca Griesbach reports — they could only see the black student’s smile in the face. black.

A black tenth grader says schools lack accountability and other white students have “normalized” racial abuse.

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“Nobody is doing anything about it,” the student told Griesbach. “Like the friends they tell them, don’t stand up for anyone.”

“They don’t feel alone,” another black student explained.

“I feel like everyone in school is against me,” said another black student. ” I can not say anything. I just have to deal with it, because they all laugh and think it’s funny.

The black students who were named, along with some of their parents, attended last week’s necessarily uncomfortable school board meeting in the dining hall of West Elementary School in Cullman. However, they were not allowed to address the board, apparently because they did not register on time. A lame excuse, especially in these critical times. Especially when Cullman’s principals claim to offer diversity “awareness”, whatever that means.

Here’s an irony to you: This toothless resolution passed by the State Board of Education chaired by Ivey prevents teachers from instilling in students “political ideologies that promote one race or gender over another.” .

Yet it seems – and again, Cullman is not our first callback – some school systems and the cities in which they serve students, white students, receive exactly this belief. Why else would they feel so comfortable, so comforted by their racial assaults? Why if not if they did not feel above the students of another race?

More irony: the aforementioned resolution includes this sentence: “… let’s move forward to create a better future together. “

On Friday, the Cullman City Schools, while refusing to discipline the two students involved in the 11-second video, said they hired two mental health specialists to speak with the students about “conflict, meanness and bullying” (please leave it to the at least one of them are black) and will conduct “listening sessions” with students “who may have differences” to determine how to update their code of conduct,

It’s a good start.

Let them talk. Listen to them. They deserve it. And more.

Roy S. Johnson is a finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for commentary and winner of the 2021 Edward R. Morrow Prize for podcast: “Unjustifiable”, co-hosted with John Archibald. His column appears in The Birmingham News and AL.com, as well as the Huntsville Times, the Mobile Press-Register. Contact him at [email protected], follow him on twitter.com/roysj or on Instagram @roysj.

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