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The Washington Post ponders the mystery of polarized school board meetings [1]
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Date: 2023-01-19
“I’m not denigrating the concept of acknowledging true questions our community has. That’s vital. That’s what I’ve spent my entire adult life doing,” Rochester, Minnesota, Mayor Kim Norton told the Post. That said, “Do I think we have an obligation to have the same personal attacks be made week after week, year after year? No.”
Norton, by the way, is a Democrat, and identifying her as such is literally the only time in the article the Post makes space to name a political party at all.
Rochester has put a once-a-month limit on any individual commenting at city council meetings. Other local governments have similarly limited the length of comments permitted or the frequency with which people can comment—restrictions that highlight the degree to which a few people are trying to waste everyone else’s time. Mostly, though, it’s the screaming and yelling and pedophilia accusations and efforts to ban any book that features LGBTQ characters or characters of color.
The type of experts a newspaper like the Post turns to for opinions on what level of public vituperation should be allowed predictably show how unattuned to the political environment they are.
”If a person is impassioned, a person is loud, a person is visibly shaken, those things are all okay in the public sphere, as long as there’s no actual physical safety threat,” said Francisco Negron, the chief legal officer for the National School Boards Association. But what if it’s not “a person”? What if it’s effectively a mob? Because that is all too often what we’re talking about during the past few years.
Negron’s view on misinformation is: “It’s democracy. Everybody in this country has the right to their opinion.” No consideration of how allowing the proceedings of government to become a venue for spreading misinformation and disinformation is dangerous to democracy.
The one useful thing beyond time limits and limits on how often someone can speak Negron could offer was a requirement that only locals can participate in a meeting—a relevant restriction because in some cases, the screamers are coming in from out of town to intimidate local policymakers, which, again, is a reminder that these are not individual distraught parents or even organic grassroots groups.
We’re talking about a political environment in which Republican politicians and Fox News are lying to their audiences about what is going on in schools, creating mass hysteria over false claims like litter boxes in schools and campaigning against books that make white conservatives uncomfortable by claiming that they’re damaging to children, whether by making white kids feel guilty or by “grooming” and pedophilia (translation: telling LGBTQ kids they’re not alone). School board members are getting death threats and prominent Republicans are outraged that anyone would investigate those death threats.
Crucially, the goal in many cases is to get the government to censor books or the teaching of U.S. history. The noble defense of free speech—the freedom to intimidate, to walk riiiiight up to the line of overt physical threat—is of speech that seeks to eliminate from public schools any representations of a vast swath of people and experiences. School board members are being baselessly accused of pedophilia because they, for instance, oppose removing books like Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer from school libraries. They are being threatened that “I will bring every single gun loaded and ready” if masks were required during a period of runaway community transmission of COVID-19.
Free speech is hugely important, but when free speech claims are being invoked in service of top-down efforts at censorship, it’s a red flag. And it’s particularly important to see and call out the fact that—now and at too many times over the years—those claims are treated more solicitously and seriously when coming from conservative white people than from Black parents or from students fighting racism in their own schools. At that point, free speech claims in service of abuse and intimidation become another way to solidify the grasp of conservative white people on the workings of power.
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