Parents skeptical of critical race theory talk to experts: Drawing Conclusions PART 1 FULL INTV

hi i'm carol anderson and i'm a professor of african american studies and i'm a historian at emory university sorry i'm coley glasgow i'm a dental hygienist and i've been working 30 years oh so you started working when you were three i did [Laughter] right out of high school i went right in wow after high school wow and i'm bart glasgow and uh i'm an attorney in atlanta okay it's nice meeting you bart and coley it's our pleasure awesome well thank you so much for just agreeing to me with us because i know you know i mean you're you're well written you're you've got lots of i know you've been called on many different uh venues to to give your expertise so i just i'm just appreciative we're both appreciative that you took the time to to come and talk and uh you know answer questions that we may have on the issue of critical race theory being taught in schools or just critical race theory so you know one of the first questions i had because honestly i think that our society has gotten to a point to where most news shows it's just you put up a protagonist an antagonist and it's just back and forth so um just to make sure what would you how would you define critical race theory to just like a layman just somebody like us critical race theory thank you for that question critical race theory is a legal theory developed out of harvard law and what it looks at it looks at the ways that the law creates race and then the way that the law sustains inequality via racism so when you think about for instance there's there's a wonderful article by a scholar named cheryl harris and it was called whiteness as property and what she looked at there was the way that whites would sue in court if the the press identified them as negro identified them as black and they were like this is an assault on my identity this is an assault um and and and being called negro carried with it damages and so it was whiteness as property how whites carry with them um a value system in this in this nation and so that's critical race theory looks at the ways that the law develops race and the way that it sustains racism okay and um and that brings up a good point uh because you were talking about how the law creates race so i mean because to me personally i don't look at i don't think there is such a thing as race i think it's a kind of a social construct or maybe even a legal construct i think we're all part of the same race just different ethnicities uh different you know you know have different identities but not different races so it is basically taking uh how the law creates race and how would you say the law created race and that wasn't a question i had but i mean you brought it up so i thought yeah and i've never heard that before i'm interested yeah and so it is for instance um in in enduring slavery it was the way that the law began to identify who was enslaved and who could be free and who could be a citizen um and it did that by identifying racial characteristics um and so you have in the 1740 negro act of south carolina where it says that the enslaved african descendants people will always be slaved enslaved for now and for those not yet born and so it was the way that the law began to to create the stratification and that's how the law begins to create race okay so things like the dred scott decision where it says that you know a a a a black person is three-fifths of counted as three-fifths of a person four census or for you know state representation that's kind of the same thing maybe not statutory but but our supreme court in the in history has said that right so when that dred scott decision said look a black person cannot be a citizen they weren't considered a citizen at the founding of this nation in the constitution they weren't considered a citizen if they were considered citizens they'd be able to carry the mail if they were considered citizens they'd be able to get a passport if they would be able to be considered citizens they would be able to cross state lines easily and they would be able to carry a gun wherever they wanted to so clear and then and then as you know there is that that key statement from chief justice roger taney that a black man has no rights that a white man is bound to respect yeah yeah dred scott and and that decision as you know was you had president james buchanan working with chief justice roger taney going okay i need you to have a decision that's going to put the nail in the coffin for the secession movement this is going to stop what looks like it's a brewing civil war so if you make it really clear that black people cannot be citizens we ought to be good instead folks were like what did he just say uh-uh uh-uh you know and it's like okay okay we're done we're done yeah well that dred scott decision was awful dreadful it really was it really was it was a terrible decision uh but of course they were in i mean we hope that we've made some improvements since then so i guess one of the questions i had is like now today uh because clearly uh there was uh jim crow laws that made it impossible for blacks to vote even though they were given the right to vote and it was there were um you know you look at dr king's movement you know i mean what what they stood for and i tell you this i mean i get i kind of chills thinking about this because i love civil disobedience i love it i uh my undergraduate was in political science and philosophy my senior thesis was on studying the civil disobedient movements of henry david thoreau mahatma gandhi and martin luther king jr i think what dr king did was amazing you know to to take that biblical principle of turning the other cheek and to show love when hate's being shown to you and i think that's why he said you know only love can cast out hate uh you know and so he was just i i just love what he stood for today with um what particular laws uh is it that you think critical race theory may be needed to address or how does it address those issues that are maybe in our society in law in morality is it i don't see the express racism like we would see with jim crow laws i mean those are with the dred scott decision that's just expressed that's just clear to everybody what are the laws now that you feel like the that critical race theory addresses and why it's important i love that thank you um so one of the things that i talked about in my book white rage was undoing the civil rights movement how do you take on those incredible accomplishments of the civil rights movement the civil rights act of 1964 the voting rights act of 1965. and you do it by what what ian haney lopez a professor calls dog whistle politics where you talk about law and order you talk about welfare queens and you cast that in terms of you racialize it so that crime is seen as a black thing this is what black people do they are inherently criminal and it's language that we had in the 1740 uh negro act and it it comes through in our laws dealing for instance that led to mass incarceration where you have the disparities in sentencing for having cocaine and for having crack so in in that disparity meant that um i'm going to get these figures wrong but it's like if you had you had to have 10 times you got for equal amounts you got 10 times a higher sentence for for crack than you did for cocaine and it's because crack was so prevalent more prevalent in the black community and you had hyper policing happening in that community when we look at the studies what we see is that african americans don't do drugs more than anybody else in fact they do drugs the least where they're equal is with the use of marijuana but when it comes to the hard drugs they do drugs the least of any racial or ethnic group in the united states but the ways that the laws are written is that they are incarcerated at a much higher rate so how do we incarcerate more for doing drugs the least that that's that inequality that is built into the law built into the system that we're talking about here and that's what critical race theory is looking at because it asks the question for instance um derek bell who was one of the key architects of critical race theory asked the question how is it that we could have the brown decision that landmark decision brown one and brown two and still have schools more segregated than ever how does that happen and it happens through a series of laws coming in so we had we had the the laws that provided for shutting down the public school system that then provided state funded tuition for white children to go to all white private academies and there was nothing for black children so like in prince edward county virginia where they shut down the school system for five years imagine being in the fifth grade and your school system shuts down and it doesn't open up again until you're in the 10th imagine everything that you've lost and by that time then the laws that came into being dealt with providing opportunities for white parents to be able to to to have the choice to move their child out of that school if it was threatened with desegregation so when you're asking about what do how do these laws work that's how they work they work through the criminal justice system they don't have to say let me back up even the jim crow law is dealing with voting because of the 15th amendment that says the state shall not abridge the right to vote on account of race color or previous condition of servitude so mississippi you know i was going to mississippi didn't you so in the mississippi plan of 1890 they said okay we don't want black folks to vote but we can't write a law like we used to write saying we don't want black folks to vote so what are we going to do we're going to use the legacies of slavery and make those legacies the access to the ballot box and that way it looks like it's fine it's open to anybody who can read it's open to anybody who can read and anybody who can pay the poll tax and so it doesn't deal with the fact that you had african-americans who were killed because they they dared to learn how to read and it doesn't deal with the fact that you have unequal funding of black schools so that you know those schools were shutting down they weren't even open for most of the school year and they did most of them didn't go some of them didn't go beyond the fifth or sixth grade um and so to require then that they read a section of the constitution like they had a harvard law degree and then interpret it to the liking of the registrar and right and so you get the williams decision of 1898 that basically says the poll tax and the literacy test do not violate the 15th amendment because everybody has to pay and everybody has to read and so that way you can deny african americans access by using the kinds of societally created characteristics for that those people for them and and use those characteristics as the access to the ballot box and so that's what happened with the poll tax and the literacy test and it's what we're dealing with now as we're looking at these battles over voting that also look race neutral on its surface but looking at the characteristics of inequality um that have been born over centuries centuries of of of of this of this nation's history yeah yeah and i want to get to that that's one actually one of the questions that would be great to go to go to but and i don't want you to chime in yes whenever you brought up schools and you brought up desegregation and integration and um you know and there was a recent story about an atlanta public school whose principal decided that in whatever grade level and i tell you as an attorney all of them are allegations until it's actually proven but it seems to be that the principal thought it was a good idea to segregate classes uh on the basis of color there were i think two black classes and four white classes and i think it was a black parent who discovered that and was very taken back and thought why why would you do this you know and because she wanted her child move to another teacher's room she didn't know anything about it and from one understand the administrator said it wouldn't work because she'd be by herself she would not be you know because that's a white class and this and and it kind of took me back if it's true it took me back to like you know because my understanding is the principal that runs the school is himself uh black and i just trying to figure out how does critic would critical race theory condone that endorse that in any way or would it i mean would there be a some kind of a reasoning why it might benefit both uh i i can't see one but i just thought i'd bring it up and ask and no critical race theory wouldn't be able to to to engage with that critical race theory really is looking at the law and the way the law is shaped um and the way that the law constructs race and and perpetuates racism and it's a it's a legal theory that is taught in law school um it's not taught in k through 12. um so the way that it would look at that system um no i don't see it i don't either i just i just thought i'd ask maybe there was something i was missing because it seems like you you want integration we want children to be integrated we don't want uh regardless of what is taught and we you know we might have differences on that but we want children to be together i mean i can't see anybody who would want their children segregated so do you have anything well i wanted to ask tell us about your background about where you grew up and yes i am i am very midwest my father was career military um daddy served for 20 years in the army fought in world war ii and in korea and when he got out we moved to columbus ohio because he wanted my brother to go to the ohio state university and i ended up where i got my sensibility from was watching my neighborhood turn into the hood watching how we had a neighborhood of honest hard-working god-fearing folk who were doing everything that they were supposed to do and watching that neighborhood crumble despite them doing everything that they're supposed to do and seeing my father fight tooth and nail for that community fighting the city you know when are you going to come pick up the trash you know basic municipal services that just weren't happening when are you going to cut the grass on this city lot the you know it it's overgrown um rats are in there when are you going to do your job and seeing the pushback from there the the ways that that community was then defined um as pathological instead of honest hard-working god-fearing folk who are doing everything that they can in order to to raise their kids in order to keep their homes up in order to have a safe neighborhood and getting absolutely no support for that so that's where my sense of of justice comes in and we always had books in the home daddy we were the only family on the block that had the world book encyclopedia we had that too right right right and i was a voracious reader right just going through and reading you know a to z always um and and and so the love of learning came through there and also when i was in utero my father was like you're going to college so i knew i was going to college in my my my my elementary school was virtually all black um my my junior high school was all black my high school i was bust and whoo they didn't want us there and you could feel it and it was the the the lack of support that happened in that space uh when i said you know i'm going to you know i'm signing up for classes i'm going to take the college prep track because daddy told me i'm going to college and and and my guidance counselor said no you're going to make a great secretary and i said no i'm going to college and she said no you're going to make a great secretary um that's why i can take shorthand but what i would do is i would check myself out of study hall and go sit in on those college prep classes because i knew i was going to college and and then they figured out what i was doing and told me i couldn't do that anymore and i said why not and they said well the school board won't allow it i said the school board won't allow me to get educated because i was that child um praise god you did yeah yeah and i think about how um how many other of me ran into that buzz saw but didn't have the father behind them going you're going to college um and and and i came out the womb hard-headed anyway we all are and so it was it was that that really helped shape uh who i am um and also being raised in the church um with a very strong sense of right and wrong and knowing that what i'm looking at is wrong yeah wow sounds like your dad was an awesome man daddy was amazing yeah dad is amazing that is awesome i mean he probably sacrificed a lot for his kids did he take you to the woodshed too oh oh yes oh yes that was really mommy's job okay yeah yeah yeah it's something uh you know when you're talking about schools and where you went to and uh the you know in the in the high school that you're busting into and you're really the minority uh there and and how you were treated um i would tell you that you know uh colleen and i got married when i was 19 she was 18. she just graduated yeah we were babies yep we were uh we went to college together my parents believed uh we were both raised in in uh in the faith in christian homes and they were strong believers in the leave and cleave uh principles so when i they paid for my first year college but when we got married we were on our own you are you are now you know on your own and um but uh but coley uh went to and actually two hbcus in nashville went to tennessee state university and meharry medical college wow and it was just the uh wonderful and i'll let her tell you about it because the whole experience was but i was married we were married and she would talk to me about it and it was uh you know other than maybe two instances uh where somebody had kind of you know gotten upset that she was even there which we we figure every family's got somebody who is you know for whatever reason but i'll let her tell you about it yeah tsu and meharry had a joint dental hygiene program mahari has the dental program and so most of our classes were at tennessee state we did travel to mahari and i mean though we we got really close with our classmates i had uh most of my faculty were black but i felt loved and embraced just like everybody else and so and they were quite frank with us because during that time tsu was in the middle of a kind of a bad area and they told us you know sometimes people walk through here and they're not part of the campus so y'all always walk together when you go across campus and at that time tennessee was doing a lot of reconstruction to make the campus bring it up to par with like mtsu and the other universities so there were i was there two years and at first it did feel awkward that i was a minority but within a few weeks it was so normal it was so normal and then there were two different occasions where uh we were walking across campus and somebody walked up to us with a group of guys and they're like you don't belong here and so we just kept on walking i mean i didn't know how to respond because that was my school too and and you know and this is part of what has happened in this society is is the sense of where are you you know who are you um and and and this battle that we have like i'm teaching the civil rights movement this this fall so i i heard you i heard you um and and you know and the role of these hbcus in that movement the role of fisk in that movement and and that movement was an interracial movement when you have a jim's word in a gym pack and um just blinking on her name how can i blank on loki's mother's name mulholland oh i hate do not put that in the film um joan trump hour um yes when you have um that happening and you see the kind of backlash so like during the freedom rides when jones mother wrote down to the warden at parchman a prison where they had been been put for daring to ride on the wrong side of the bus and and he was like if you just knew how to raise your white daughter the way she was supposed to be raised you wouldn't be having these problems um the there is so much policing of of of of place of know your place that happens in this society critical race theory does not go after that critical race theory is not about policing of place critical race theory is about helping us understand how we got to have a structure that is about place that's what that does so in sharing that is the goal of critical race theory to bring reconciliation yes the goal of critical race theory is to help us understand how it came to be how we came to have the stratification how we came to have these hierarchies and how they're embedded in the law so that we can get beyond this so that we can get to a space where we can be you know and so the first thing is you've got to know what you're dealing with is it's that great question that you asked it was like you know we we had um we had that incredible civil rights movement that got us to the civil rights act and the voting rights act so what does critical race theory do with that and it helps us understand how the civil rights act and the voting rights act could only get us so far because of the stuff that was embedded in it and the stuff that was used to undermine it so the way that it gets undermined it's what leads to the allen decision where the the supreme court says look this isn't only about the obvious mess you do this is also about the subtle mess you do trying to block folks from voting we're going after the obvious and the subtle because that subtle does damage and so that's what critical race theory does it's really looking at the structures built into the law that that create these hierarchies about place that's interesting so i guess i would ask you know on that critical race theory what you're saying is is it helps us understand it's a legal construct it's a theory that helps us understand how how these things how we've gotten where we are and and and where maybe we need to improve um as a and this i guess is maybe it's a little nuanced i don't know but would you say then that the theory is such the legal theory uh is not something that should be taught in schools that theory but the the things that should be taught to help us reconcile and to understand our past and to learn from it should be taught in schools am i making sense don't make me come over there and hug you [Laughter] so yes and so critical race theory is about the the kind of legal concept so that's a law school thing and so the debates really are about the histories that are taught in our schools so how do we understand why there was a civil war and and you had a whole lot of work being done by the united daughters of the confederacy early on and then by a scholar named ub phillips to say oh it wasn't about slavery slavery was a benevolent institution and the slaves were happy because they were well taken care of they were fed they were clothed they were loved it was a good thing for black people slavery was was a benevolent institution this was about states rights that's what this war was about and so when you get a narrative that teaches that and that that was a narrative that came up um in the era of the lost cause so it started getting generated shortly after the civil war and really took hold during the rise of jim crow and then just took its tentacles into public schools um through the first half of the 20th century teaching that slavery was a benevolent institution it wasn't until scholars in the 60s and 70s were like okay so if slavery was so good why they keep running away you know asking that question and getting into the archives getting into the the data that historians use the the letters the the memoirs the the laws the the the the books though the the the the policy papers that they're all generating at that time to be able to to ask to ask and answer the questions and so the battles that we're having now so the the the the the red herring is critical race theory but that's that's i'm like if your baby is being taught critical race theory in kindergarten your baby's in mensa the that so what we're really talking about is the history that helps us understand how we got here that that that's where the battles really are in what that history should look like so in texas for instance texas got it bought a textbook that defined the enslaved as immigrant workers when was this i mean is this like last year okay right so that when you have what when you have that kind of illusion over slavery which was so foundational to to the u.s in the ways that our laws work in the ways that our politics works in the ways that our economy worked in the ways that this nation was built up by the time that the civil war happened slavery accounted for about 80 percent of the nation's gross domestic product i mean um and and so to to elide over that with you know they were just immigrant workers means that then those students coming out of that school system don't have the knowledge to be able to understand what they're seeing you know i i was telling somebody the other day about this man named g.k chesterton i don't know if you're familiar with him uh but he was a english philosopher author he was a lay theologian he you know would his contemporaries were tolkien and c.s lewis and those guys but it was i can't remember if it was early 1900s i think it was but london england was going through some very politically sharp times like we are today and the london times sends out this letter to all of these well-read authors and it's asking them if they would please respond with what do they think is wrong with the world today and uh i remember uh reading g.k chesterton's response he decided to to reply and he took out a piece of paper he said dear times comma and he said i am and then he just signed his name uh and so i think sometimes people and that's where i fall i feel like if there's if something is systemic there's a tendency to say no one's to blame it's systemic and and if i want to stop being part of the problem then i slap a little uh you know whatever they call those things on social media around your profile picture to say i support this or i support that but what have we really done what what has that person really done to change the narrative or to correct their behavior because i think it's individual i mean i think i think we have to take individual responsibility so that's why when i see anything systemic whether it's in the church or whether it's wherever it is it to me it undercuts personal accountability personal responsibility or it has a tendency people can do that and then they can just feel like oh i've given money to this cause or that cause so i have now i'm not part of the problem does that make sense i i see exactly what you're saying and so i think part of what happens is that um it's not one or the other that we have to recognize the system that we're in that creates these hierarchies that creates these inequalities and then we also have to recognize the role of personal responsibility and making good choices and that we don't abdicate responsibility on either one because those individual choices help sustain or disrupt and dismantle that systemic inequality and but but to say that the system um that our individual choices is just our individual choices it means that we're not paying attention to what that long history has done in terms of conscribing or expanding the range of choices that we have to make and so when we acknowledge what that long history has done in terms of of of then saying whether we can go from a to z or a to b for our choices that then gives us the kind of perspective to know how to intervene how to how to see the world in a way that we can improve it that we can enhance the quality of life for everyone good awesome all right well you know it i i did have one last question well i was going to ask you you had mentioned several times that crt is more in a university setting and we're in cherokee county there's other i mean it's almost like a nationwide uh critical waste theories coming to our elementary school and so what is that that is panic that is fear that is inaccurate you you will not have teachers teaching critical race theory in kindergarten you won't have them teaching it in eighth grade you won't have them teaching it in high school it really is a legal theory that has you know they barely teach it in terms of undergraduate it really is a law school thing so what that is also dealing with one of the triggers for this was the 1619 project okay i've heard about that that and i've got to tell you i'm in it i'm i'm in the book that's coming out in november and the 1619 project says we have to look at the role of slavery in the united states in shaping the united states and the pushback to that was donald trump's 1776 commission that said we've got to have a patriotic history you know we've got to we've got to have a history that you know talks about how wonderful and how exceptional and how great the united states is and and that sounds great but what it doesn't do is to take into account that this is a nation that had slavery this is a nation that that removed indigenous people off of the land this is a nation that also said we hold these truths to be self-evident and it's in one of the things that i talk about consistently is that in this nation our battles have been on that aspirational plane that's where our battles have been and if we don't take into account that we had these systemic inequalities from our founding then we don't understand what these battles are and how incredible this democracy is so think about this the civil war when 80 percent of your gdp is tied up in slavery and you go to war and it ends slavery wow but we can't tell that tale if we're not telling the tale about the role of slavery in the united states in shaping our politics in shaping our economy and shaping our vision of who is a citizen who is not a citizen and it's that aspirational plane we hold these truths to be self-evident that gives us a martin luther king fighting for democracy in the middle of the 20th century after the us has helped to defeat nazis and so there's this fear that talking about teaching slavery teaching the removal of the indigenous people that what that will do is that it will make our students feel ashamed it will make our students feel embarrassed because when we're teaching that we're also teaching about the strengths of the american people to fight for democracy that that the will the resilience to fight to imagine what real freedom looks like and to really go for it and so that battle that we're having is that battle over a patriotic history where we end up with these kind of cardboard figures of our founding fathers who who saw everything just perfectly and did everything just perfectly but no these were human beings who made good choices and they made bad choices and we've got to understand the ramifications of both of those to understand the richness of this nation and so it is the battle over history that we're having here and it's being called critical race theory because the word race is in there and so that is like the the the the chum in the water that's like no and it's not that at all it really is about um the kinds of histories that are taught yeah i look back at uh history like egyptian history where the pharaohs were one pharaoh could just wipe out what another pharaoh did it would just they didn't want to you know it's like it didn't happen well it did happen so i see and now obviously slavery played a huge part in america i mean i don't see how you can how someone can avoid saying that and it actually uh and while it's it's it is absolutely dreadful uh it did give that opportunity for people to stand up and to you know call for justice and into into and to call to those aspirational goals that are in those founding documents and they are aspirational they are you know uh we hold these truths to be self-evident that all people are created equal and they're endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights among these are life liberty and the pursuit of happiness and to me it is um that's aspirational but when it was written and when it was ratified it was not realized and so we we have to continue going on because then you have dred scott how can you say dred scott can comport with that it can't it was a beautiful i mean you know one of the things i i love doing uh and i've been going back to it more and more but you know rousseau who wrote the social contract you know he starts that with that famous line you know man is born free and he is everywhere in chains sometimes those chains are you don't see them but they're still changed so we have we have um we have progressed you know we have dred scott was overruled eventually you know uh brown versus board of education one and two took care of the separate but equal we got a little closer to those aspirational goals and dr king led the movement we got close to those aspirational goals it's just i see us getting so divided and i and and i hate it i hate it that we can't have this kind of dialogue because i mean i'm a i'm conservative i mean i i am very conservative but i believe so strongly in the in those rights that are given to us not by our government not by the state but by god and that means that actually everyone in the world has them not just americans we just realized them they were self-evident to our to our to the authors so um so what i guess what you're talking about is is that just to try to see if i understand it right critical race there is not something being taught wouldn't be taught it's something that uh points out that we need to teach realistically what occurred in our history the good and the bad so that we know to to learn from the good and model it and and and to learn from the bad and stay away from it yes okay yes um so it is um it is the way for instance that uh the brown decision right so after the brown decision uh brown won and then you get the supreme court with brown two with all deliberate speed um and that was 55 in 56 we get the southern manifesto not yet that basically has over a hundred members of congress saying they will use all of their power to defy the us supreme court and you get these governors working together to figure out how to take down the supreme court decision how to stall to stall to stall until the folks are so weary that they'll just give up and say fine and so we're seeing a process of political leaders um saying they're coming after your children you know so we are here this is orville faubus for instance in little rock arkansas and he used the brown decision as a political means because he was going to be in a tough tight election race to say i am here to protect your children i'm keeping these kids out of our schools um and you know and these were nine honors students um who were who wanted to go to central high in little rock arkansas and he calls out the national guard to keep them out of that school and it became it became a political mechanism to to to gin up hate to gin up dissent when in fact little rock prior to that time had been what they called a moderate southern city so that they didn't have any problems desegregating the buses like they had in montgomery it was like us no big deal okay fine um you know and it was actually the school board that had worked out this integration plan and and and had it where the nine students were the honor students would be going to central high they had it all worked out nobody was up in arms and then you had political leadership coming in and seeing that there was gold in them there hills and really stoked the flame so much so that you know you saw the national guard come in and then eisenhower president eisenhower calls horrible faults to to the white house going look son and orville's like yeah okay and then he goes back and he reneges on the deal um and and and eisenhower being a general it's like uh-uh you know you gave me your word and instead what you see is the same kind of violence that faubes said was not going to happen and so what what and that led then because there was also in this international context because the u.s you cannot be the jim crow leader of the free world the soviets were having a field day with this a field day with this you know you're you're reading through pravda and they're talking about look they're they're trying to bayonet poor black ch poor negro children who are just trying to get an education i mean it just and so eisenhower calls in the national guard and and has them escort these children through then you have orville faubus shut down the public school system in little rock after that year and and then they the state provided funding for white children to go to all white private academies so that they could continue their education and there was nothing for black children so when we know this history we see the ways that race and racism gets politicized and how it how it becomes how it can be deployed in order to to meet an egotistical gain a political gain i want to be governor um and i'm in a tight race and so i'm going to really you know create this crisis that'll show my leadership ability and so when we know this history we know what we're looking at we're like oh you know it's apocryphal for mark twain when he said history may not repeat itself but a show do rhyme and so part of it is just seeing these rhymes hearing these rhymes the rhythms of the ways that it is deployed and the way that saving the children becomes um a mechanism that that covers that's the fig leaf for covering what is really a raw assent to power well really the kind of last question i have and and you brought it up when you were talking about the little rock schools because that you had said it earlier and then you just brought it again it reminded me and uh and i can't thank you enough for again for for you know just agreeing to do this and answer our questions and uh you know my dad when we were being raised you know i was kind of stubborn sometimes and so he would tell me he would you know he was trying to get a concept across to me and i just wasn't getting it he'd say okay bart take the cotton out of your ears and put it in your mouth um and and i think that a lot of times today what we have is people on all sides with cotton in their ears and and and running you know their mouths and not really listening to each side because it's almost like we like like when we say even when we say we it's like i believe i know how they feel so i'm going to attack what i believe they feel instead of listening and asking and say tell me explain this to me and i think that you know maybe it's the it's the cable news cycle maybe it's the maybe it's our shorter attention spans whatever it is we've gotten away from productive dialogue and so i was thinking about when you were talking about little rock and the schools uh you know it is undeniable that we have kids and and mostly minority that are in urban blighted areas with schools that are failing that just i can't imagine being a parent and saying i really have no choice i i mean my child has to go to that school i can't afford to send them to a private school the school's failing them the school's got failing grades you know they're passing them along i just cannot understand i could not being that parent would would just be so tough every day every morning and so you know i for one and unless i like i said i i listen to all information we listen to information we we are not you know we would rather be catalysts than just you know you know we're never going to change but what do you think about school voucher systems force for places like that where the parents really have no choice the kids aren't really allowed to reach their full potential but they don't have the money to put their kids in any other school i mean for the alternatives of a charter school or something like that and i am a firm believer in public schools public education vouchers have not proven to be the answer when i was in ohio and you know when i was in ohio the cleveland public schools lord had a what 27 percent graduation rate and and the the mayor the governor at the time set up a voucher system for the cleveland public schools except that where the bulk they they're like 80 000 students in that school system there were only 5 000 vouchers available and the bulk of those vouchers went to students who were already in private schools um um and and and so the history and so you also look at what happened in detroit detroit schools you know you know the long history of detroit public schools from the milliken decision and and so the detroit public schools have been in trouble for years and you had then basically a move to to create a wave of charter schools in detroit and the result had been that they weren't any better in terms of educating the students and so we have to ask ourselves why why there's something that we know what we need to do why aren't we doing it why aren't we putting the resources in our public school systems that our public schools need why aren't we putting the support structures around teachers so that they can fly with these students why aren't we doing that and that's and i think part of that is um i think part of it is the way that we ended up when we talk about how did we get here we ended up with a twin pincer motion in terms of supreme court decisions on brown one of those twin pencils was the rodriguez decision am i getting this right coming out of san antonio in right before the milliken decision that dealt with the terms of equal funding and and so you had a school district the edgewood school district i believe it was the edgewood neighborhood in san antonio that was overwhelmingly mexican and african-american and they were charging themselves at the highest rate possible by law in terms of property taxes and were only able to generate something like 23 dollars per head for student and then you had um i forget the name of it the other school district in san antonio that was a predominantly white affluent neighborhood that was not taxing themselves at the highest rate and they were generating several hundred dollars per student um and so the student the parents in the edgewood district sued and the supreme court ruled that equal funding is not necessary to have equality of schools and so you take that decision and then you take the milliken decision where they try to deal with issues of racial balance in the the detroit public schools by incorporating the suburbs and the supreme court ruled the suburbs didn't create this problem they can't be part of the solution you're going to have to figure out how to do integration all in detroit itself and so what that meant when you're looking at taxing based on property values and where property values um have a long history of of of what happens with zoning laws so when you're you have zoning laws that allow dumps to be put in place when you allow frankly porn shops and and and carryouts and liquor stores um all of that depresses property value right and so when you have that happening when you have these laws creating these things that depress property values but then you're predicating the financing of public education based on those property values i can see and that's the biggest thing for me the the inequality and educational opportunities is is i mean it upsets me uh that is one thing that i would want to do everything i can to to try to bring about not in equity in the outcome but in an equal opportunity to education and so you know on your point about the funding i actually you know i pulled up the georgia department of education numbers and i looked at fulton county schools and i looked at cherokee county schools i looked at the total budget and they have to be posted they have three years and for cherokee and then i looked at the total number of students and and you know it appears that from what i'm just simple edition i went to law school i'm not a mathematician but um but i play one on tv but it appears that the you know cherokee county school spends a little bit about two thousand dollars less per student as part of their overall educational budget would you break it down because the georgia department of education does this on their website to the instructional budget cherokee county pays about seven or eight hundred dollars less per student than what is paid in fulton county so i look at i say well it's obviously not a funding issue it's got to be there's got to be another solution to giving these kids equal educational opportunities i mean you know because we can i don't want to in other words i don't want to give somebody false hope even i want it to be real i want them to say look here's the you know it's like when we run a 100 yard dash and we we run 100 yards and we don't say well you're in this area so you only have to run 30 yards because you've got that does that person no good and so i want to see them have the educational opportunity but if they don't have it and the funding is basically equivalent maybe even more then i look at it i say what is what is what is the solution and that's why the school voucher thing you said 5 000 vouchers for these i mean it would be give them the amount that the schools pays on their instructional budget to anyone who wants to come out of a failing school a school that is not meeting the needs of those kids so and i don't know how you feel about that i mean i just did that quick research it may you know yeah and so and i am not a fan of vouchers um and i do get the absolute you know as i said my father was like you're going to college i and i'm a firm believer in quality education and i just believe that we have so one of my colleagues here professor vanessa sidlewalker amazing she is an education professor and she studied the ways that black teachers taught black children in the era of jim crow and how they succeeded in doing so that there are these models and they're working on replicating these models of success the ways that you empower students to learn the ways that you draw upon their strengths the ways that you see them in terms of their strengths and not in terms of their deficits all of these elements just help create an environment that is rich with learning to me that is part of what we must be doing and so when i talk about empowering teachers so that they can fly that's what i mean um well i could talk to you for hours i really could i know that andy may not uh and i know eventually the school is going to need their library back but i mean i really and i hope that it flips the narrative because coley and i have always been about reaching out to people with diverse and even adverse opinions because that's the only way we grow as if we're vulnerable enough to to talk and if your positions are not strong enough that can withstand questions and answers and productive dialogue and debate then you have to question whether why you're holding them preach yeah so i you know i'm all you know the the the uh i i really appreciate you spending the time i mean i like i said i honestly could go on and talk for hours with you and listen and and listen to what you say about uh you know your thoughts because it just it just listening does not it is not dangerous it's you but we all must come i believe uh principled understanding where you know what for me faith is huge so you know i look at it and i tell you what i love and whether this makes it on the tape or not i love the way that tony evans talks about people who don't think that races can come together and he says it's like oil and water he's like you put oil and water in a bowl and you mix it up and he's like it will oil and water will never come together he said but i love sandwiches and he says i love mayonnaise on my sandwich and he said you know what you do he said if you'll take an egg and put it in with oil and water and whip it up it's it emulsifies the water and the oil and guess what they both come together and they make something brand new and it tastes delicious and he's like and it doesn't mean that the water is any less water than what it was or the oil is any less oil than what it was but the egg brings them together to me my faith is that egg it is bringing people together and reconciling i think that's really the i really think that's the i think that's the true way for us to really be reconciled it can't nothing can be forced it has to be we're dealing with the heart issue so that's um i appreciate all your all of your insights and thank you for sharing with us and thank you so much for for being here and and asking these wonderful questions and engaging in this great conversation thank you i love it [Music] you

Channel: 11Alive

Views: 674,123

Keywords: 11Alive, Atlanta, news, local news, fact check, critical race theory crash course, critical race theory, what is critical race theory, atlanta news, investigations, critical race theory debate, cherokee county school district, cherokee county georgia, systemic racism, racism in america, critical race theory in education, emory university

Id: mmRO3J6IJC8

Length: 60min 1sec (3601 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 04 2021