The all-white school board voted 5-2 to stop offering Black history and literature courses.
A Missouri school board that previously voted to rescind an anti-discrimination resolution has voted in favor of removing elective Black history and literature classes.
The seven-member Francis Howell School Board voted 5-2 Thursday night to stop offering Black History and Black Literature courses, which had been offered at the district’s three high schools since 2021, KSDK reported. All seven members of the board are white.
“Our students really wanted these electives,” Harry Harris, whose son is a student in the district, said during the board meeting. “Our families really wanted them and our teachers really wanted them. It’s important. It’s been great.”
In July, the conservative-led board revoked an anti-racism resolution that had been passed in 2020 following the police killing of George Floyd.
deleted by creator
Kinda like when Google removed the “Do no evil” part from their mission statement.
Removing three words can so easily change the world.
I thought it was just moved somewhere else?
I can’t remember the last time Google did something right.
A mission statement is a statement of purpose. Their mission statement is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. That has not changed
“Don’t be evil” was their motto. It was replaced with “Do the right thing”, and “Don’t be evil” was moved to the last line of the Code of Conduct.
Growing up in Indiana, they didn’t teach black history, and I turned out just fine except for not knowing about Jim Crow or the Tuskegee syphilis experiment or redlining or the Tulsa race massacre or Ruby Bridges, or lynching, or Malcolm X or the Black Panther movement or the MOVE bombing or…
I grew up in Wyoming. We didn’t get most of that well…
We did hear about lynching and Malcolm X. Not much in details about either, mind, but we were told that both had existed. They glossed over anything that Malcolm X stood for, or actually said, or did…
As for lynching… We learned the word.
To be fair, I grew up in the north east and went to a very good public school and never learned about ANY of that until I went to college/uni and started taking real history courses.
The south was not burned enough during the civil war.
Unfortunately what gets considered as “The South” is actually anywhere in the country more than ~30 minutes outside of any Metropolitan area. It’s not North VS South, it’s urban v rural, and Big Ag dropped a fuck load of money a long time ago to ensure land votes harder than people.
As someone who somewhat recently moved to California, it was shocking to see how conservative anywhere outside of urban areas is. Like California is seen as this haven of progressiveness, but that’s only because we have two of the biggest cities in the country.
Unfortunately Lincoln severely hampered the radical reconstruction movement, and then Johnson absolutely killed it.
Recommended reading: “Black Reconstruction in America” is a really great book that covers this kind of stuff. It’s by Dr. W.E.B. DuBois
Missouri should vote to remove the school board.
But it’s Missouri.
So they have a handicap. That shouldn’t stop them.
It’s a bummer. This is the district I went to high school in, and it was a fantastic district while I was there. It had its issues but I got a great education.
It’s truly depressing to see this kind of mentality take hold in my community. Sadly I live in a different school district now so I couldn’t have even voted against these board members, but I definitely had to vote down my fair share of people just like them in my local district.
Man you just really hate to see it. I hope this inspires a reaction that will ultimately oust these people before they can do irreparable damage.
Talking to a family friend who’s still in the area, I frankly can’t say it surprises me at all.
I’m with you, it’s really disappointing seeing it get this bad. It feels like Missouri has been trying it’s hardest to catch up to Texas and Florida, in fighting the culture war. Example: one of the Republican candidates for governor wants to get rid of the state’s department of education.
So much white resentment.
Removed by mod
I misread the headline as “Mussolini School Board” and, well, I wasn’t that far off.
But they are NOT Racist!
While nice to know white guilt effected 2 of them, perhaps white guilt isn’t the mechanism for addressing this?
