What the world needs now.
We see all the stories about right-wing parents and provocateurs interrupting school board meetings, demanding that we stop oppressing the TRUE victims of school bullying. The white children. That if they get told that people who look like them have been racist or abused positions of privilege, that their growth will be stunted, that they will not get to fully express their own thoughts of racism or abuse their own positions of privilege.
While it infuriates us, we tend to think “Oh, this only happens in extreme right-wing areas. It can’t spread to places who are actually in touch with reality on a day-to-day basis.” Think again.
The town I currently live in (Franklin, MA), is pretty well-off. It fits comfortably in a comfortably “liberal” state. For approximately 38 of my 47 years of life, I have been proud to call Franklin my home town.
That came to a screeching halt this week.
There’s a young woman who lives across the street from me. She, along with her younger sister, walk my brother’s dog daily.
And I recently watched her recount that she’s heard her classmates casually call LGBTQ+ folks homophobic slurs, or racial slurs.
“When kids are coming to theater every single day and saying, ‘I got called a f***** in the hall today,’ or ‘I got called a racial slur in the hallway today,’ that’s not something to joke about, though it’s become something that we’re so numb to that it becomes a joke,” she said.
This was during a School Committee meeting set up to discuss graffiti that apparently was meant to bully others.
However, she then was attempted to be shouted down by a parent who had attempted to shut her up, because she was taking focus away from the REAL persecuted group, white children. Before you think I’m joking, this parent had apparently disrupted the meeting previously, when this… person (for lack of a better civilized word) argued that being white should be a protected class at school, and argued with school officials who disagreed with them.
So, as a result, this “concerned parent” was already frothing at the mouth to denigrate anything that didn’t fit her bigoted world view that the real problem in education is that white children aren’t protected more than anyone else. So she tried to bully a just turned 18 year old girl into shutting up.
Her message? Telling the young lady to stop talking, that ““This has to stop. This is the indoctrination.”
Yes, that’s right. a LGBTQ+ young woman was told that relating her experiences of homophobic and racial slurs being casually used to denigrate her and her theater group was “Liberal Indoctrination”
The section of the meeting where the incident happened was included in this boston.com article, so you can judge it for yourself.
www.boston.com/…
Now, the meeting was put into recess, and I believe the parent was asked to leave, and the town superintendent of schools released a statement that I think is at least on the positive side of the ledger.
www.franklinps.net/…
Today, the young lady in question came over to walk the dog, and I let her know I was proud of the way she had handled it. She is likely still upset, and embarrassed about being the center of attention. But she seemed to be handling it well. I can’t imagine how stressful a week it has been for her.
I wish I could say that I’m proud of my town for the response. I actually am, to a point. They handled it pretty well, shut down the bigot who was yelling about “Indoctrination”, and released a statement not only praising the young woman, but providing concrete steps to stop things like this.
I’m not proud that it got to this point, however.
Maybe because I thought my town was better.
But it’s a reminder. These stories aren’t just in areas where the base impulse is to sigh, shake your head and say “damn, those right-wing areas are crazy”.
So don’t have a false sense of “It can’t happen here.” It can, and quite possibly is.
