Lost in the Shouting

In the school board battles across the country over race, the voices of Black parents talking about what their kids actually experience are often drowned out

- DANYA HAJJAJI

DURING THE PUBLIC COMMENT PART OF A meeting in June of the school board of Perrysburg, a suburb of Toledo, Ohio, speakers could raise any subject they wanted. Some spoke about efforts in the schools to combat racism. One white student passionately argued that more needed to be done. Another dismissed a particular anti-racism initiative as an intellectual fad. Others worried that such things could be camouflage for anti-white propaganda.

Tawiona Brown, the mother of 17-year-old student Josiah, says she hadn’t planned on speaking. Nonetheless, she stood up. To represent her son before and after a day at high school “from a parent’s perspective,” she said, she held two sheets of paper.

“Josiah, you like watermelon?” she said and crumpled one sheet. “You’re an n-word with a hard R,” she said and crumpled the paper some more, finally crushing it into a wad.

Then she held up the second, unwrinkled sheet. “When your babies come home to you, mentally, this is what they should look like,” she said.” Nice, even, smooth, nothing wrong.” Unfurling the crushed sheet, she continued. “When my baby—and he’s a big boy, and I still call him my baby—when he comes home to me, mentally, this is what I have to clean up with my son.”

The culture war skirmishes that have been raging in American schools over “critical race theory” and race-based programs and curricula are only likely to get more intense as kids across the country return to classrooms. So far, the loudest voices in those fights have tended to be those of white parents and students arguing about history and ideology. Often buried are the voices of Black kids and parents talking about lived experience.