The Viral Classroom Nazi Salute Video Has an Even Darker Backstory. I Lived It

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/alabama-nazi-salute-critical-race-theory-1328143/

No paywall
https://archive.ph/6s9k5

The 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama — where Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, and Denise McNair were murdered in a 1963 bombing before any of them got to see their 15th birthday — is a 10-minute drive from where I grew up. I don’t believe I ever heard their names in any class I ever attended. I was never taught about Emmett Till or Ruby Bridges. I didn’t read “Letter from Birmingham Jail” until I no longer lived in Birmingham. I’m sure I read Truman Capote, but I wouldn’t have been told he was gay. I was taught that the Civil War was about “states’ rights” rather than slavery and that slavery would have been a silly thing to fight a war over anyway since most slaves were treated kindly by the people who enslaved them.

Somewhere along the line, I was told that Abraham Lincoln was the worst president America has ever had. To be fair, there were one or two teachers who tried to push back against this false narrative (I did read Toni Morrison), but I don’t remember racism ever being named explicitly. If it had been, it would certainly have been treated as a bygone of the past because now, I was instructed, we lived in a colorblind society, one in which the erasure of race and ethnicity was passed off as a virtue.

All of this was intentional because Mountain Brook High School is a place where intentionality is expected. It is one of the top-performing public high schools in the country and currently the second-highest performing public high school in the state. By the time I graduated, I knew my sines from my cosines, could read music by sight, had a solid grasp on the theory of relativity, and possessed almost all the academic tools I’d need to function in the world and succeed in college, where roughly 98% of my classmates were headed. My education was stellar in all ways but one.
Right now we’re in a manufactured national panic over what happens when students are given an anti-racist education, often and insidiously mislabeled as “critical race theory.” But I know from experience that we should be far more worried about what happens when students aren’t given anti-racist education. I know what it means to attend a school in which this type of education is denied. I very personally feel its costs. And — most importantly — so do the students at that school who continue to suffer for it, whether they know what they’re missing or not.

My hometown was brought to the nation’s attention this past January, after a Mountain Brook High School history teacher invited his class to recite the Pledge of Allegiance while performing the Nazi salute. The class had supposedly been discussing the fact that raising one’s arm in such a way had once been called the Bellamy salute and used by Americans up until the 1940s when it was discontinued for obvious reasons. But the context does not explain why the teacher would have asked his class to embody a salute that is now and forever will be associated with a genocidal, fascist regime. All but a handful of students rose from their seats and did as they were told. “I was shocked and confused why people would do this,” Epps Tytell, the only Jewish student in the class, tells me. He was too stunned to make a move.

*snip*

[vlyons]

1. I grew up and went to publiv high school in Dallas, class of '65

By law, Texas public schools were segregated. I didn't know any black people. When I6, I stood in line to desegregate the basement lunch counter in the downtown Woolworths. Later that evening, my parents read me the riot act for 2 hours. My Dad, a cop, was so racist that when a black person appeared on the Ed Sullivan show, he changed the channel.

In high school, we had a history teacher, who dressed up in a confederate uniform to teach the civil war. It wasn't until I went to college, where there were some "yankee" professors that I learned that good ol' Jim Bowie was in "Freedonia" (Nacadoches) forging land deeds with the king of Spain's signature to sell to suckers. Or that good ol' Sam Houston persuaded the Indians in EAST Texas a trade of million acres of their own land to not attack the white women and childfen while he led all the good ol' slave owning boys down south to fight Santa Ana. No one ever mentioned that the reason the whites wanted to secede Texas from Mexico was because Mexico freed its slaves in 1829. So what's the point of pulling up roots in Al, Miss, LA, etc and moving to Texas if you can't have slaves to pick cotton?

I keep hoping that white kids will meet and get to know some really great and wonderful black folks and have that Huckleberry Finn moment, when they realize that their black friends are truly great friends and a lot better human beings than some of their white neighbors.

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. A very good article. It shows how places that had some chance of getting better are now forced

to regress. That school (in a district created to be white and rich) had an incident with swastika drawing. And they did the right thing at first - contracted with the ADL to give courses to their teachers. And then "Critical Race Theory" became the Fox News bogeyman, bigoted parents flooded school meetings, a teacher who'd been on the course denounced it, and the school chickened out and cancelled the ADL courses. And now Republican are passing laws to prevent anyone discussing race or other bigotry problems.

They've gone from complacent, but eventually able to see they had a problem that needed fixing, to Fox News drones, whose reaction to a video of classroom Nazi salutes is to falsely blame the one Jewish student for taking the video, and then to ban cellphones to make sure people don't see things like that again.