Conservatives Cancel Teacher For Telling Kids The USA Did Bad Stuff

As the conservative onslaught against teaching critical race theory in the classroom intensifies across the USA, the firing of a Tennessee teacher last month for assigning the essay “The First White President” by Ta-Nehisi Coates to students in his Contemporary Issues class in February, and later in March, playing a video of “White Privilege,” a spoken word poem by Kyla Jenée Lacey to the same students, emerges as the third rail. Sam Seder and the Majority Report crew discuss this.

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Sam Seder: What we will get to that story of a teacher who's teaching, let's be clear, a Contemporary Issues class back in February and then later in March. He was playing a video of "White Privilege," a spoken word poem by Kyla Jenée Lacey, and also this teacher assigned an essay that was first in "The Atlantic" magazine written by Ta-Nehisi Coates, "The First White President." And apparently, that's a firing offense in Tennessee.

Emma Vigeland: I remember that essay, which purely because I remember it you should fire me.

Sam Seder: Well what is amazing is the outcry that we would hear about college campuses that people have been protesting and somehow prevented the student activities council for supporting you know Milo Yiannopoulos or Ben Shapiro from showing up, yet when we're actually talking about a public school where a Contemporary Issues teacher assigns a Ta-Nehisi Coates article, and with all due respect to Ta-Nehisi Coates, this isn't the most radical of radical writings. But even if it was

Emma Vigeland: I wish it was. I wish it was a little bit more radical than Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Sam Seder: But regardless, the idea that this is grounds for firing. This is the thing, is that there are new stories that go on every day, and this has been from, I want to say time immemorial, but time immemorial when it comes to cable news, right... Like 15 years ago, I was on CNN arguing with somebody — the male president of the Concerned Women for America at the time — about the existence of the War on Christmas, and he cited some school in Wisconsin where they changed the name like of "Silent Night." They took Jesus out of the song "Silent Night." Now apparently, they had done that like 20 years earlier or something like that, it was just a different tune, whatever it was. And that existed, it was real, but was it catching a phenomena that was existing?

If you hype that, understand that you're building a narrative in media circles, and also know how all this works in this country. There is an existing power dynamic, and so the idea that the salience of one guy on cable television saying that there's an anti-white agenda, like Tucker Carlson for instance. There's an anti-white bias in this country, versus hundreds of students saying this in a college. Well even if you were to put 100 students in one college and 100 students in the other, we have history in this country. We have an existing power structure. You need to assess what constitutes news and what constitutes an actual danger to society based upon those contexts. The history of this country, the structure of this country, where the wealth lies, all of it. And to divorce yourself from those realities and claim that one threat is as much as another threat is completely blinkered. I'm sorry. It's just there's a difference between if you have kids under 10 and you have a window open on the first floor, it's different than having kids under 10 with a window open on the 10th floor.

Emma Vigeland: It's also just incredibly important to understand that it's a part of a larger project of — one: completely concealing those power dynamics; and two: making things like this Tennessee story possible. Because this is a part of a mobilizing effort by Conservatives with this critical race theory stuff because if you're involved in your local school board then you're certainly more likely to be involved in your State House races, and you're more likely to be supporting Republican candidates in those races.