The Push for Racism in the North Carolina Public School System

North Carolina State Board of Education member seeks to “criminalize” students with white skin. By: Sloan Rachmuth

Not since the era of Eugene “Bull”Connor has there existed such a blatant campaign to stigmatize public school children and their parents because of the color of their skin.

School officials in the Tarheel State have teamed up with far-left organizations to create an echo chamber to convince the public that white people have designed a school system that is an abomination to people of color — a cruel system guided by the unfair rules they set, and that the current system is the product of inhumanity against minorities.

The effort is led from the top by James E. Ford, one of the 13 members sitting on the North Carolina State Board of Education. Ford helps to make policy and set the curriculum to teach the 1.4 million students now enrolled in the state’s public school system. James E. Ford, North Carolina State School Board MemberMost of Ford’s public discourse revolves around systemic ‘white supremacy:’ The North Carolina school system ‘shaped by white supremacy’ awarded Ford the Teacher of the Year award in 2015 after he beat out several white teachers with more tenure for the prize. So, what gives?

To learn more about Ford’s worldview, we turn to his media page: “I am a Black male education professional, the grandson of sharecroppers, and a descendant of enslaved Africans in America. This informs everything I do.” Ford judges himself by the color of his skin rather than the content of his own character. And he applies this standard to others: Got it: no matter how hard good-intentioned people strive to attain equality for all, they will remain malevolent, irredeemable, and will destroy society if they have the wrong skin color. But deep down, Ford knows that his claims of systemic white supremacy can never really be proven, or disproven, because his judgement is based on his own personal views about skin color —i.e. it is based on his beliefs rather than confirmable facts. Though he has been promoted and exalted within the school system, and has been chosen by a white Governor to serve on the school board; Ford still has little faith in the goodness of white people: During a virtual meeting hosted by the NCAE and the Public School Forum of North Carolina in October, Ford claimed that racism in schools is systemic and that there is “no good solution to it.” Ford then used his platform as a North Carolina State School Board member to propose a policy to “criminalize racism,” whether intended or not, during his address to educators, and this should alarm everyone. Public School Forum of North Carolina & Color of EducationFord continuously singles out ‘white supremacy’ as a pox on the house of public education, so we can assume that vast swaths of white students would face punishment for unintended, or imagined, racist offenses under his policy proposal. Consider this Tweet: According to Ford, anyone talking can be guilty of racism, which could be criminalized if he has his way.

Picture, for a moment, the national sh#*storm that would rightly occur if a white state-level school board member advocated “criminalizing” students with the wrong skin color.

But if you even think about lodging a complaint against Ford for his unreasonable discourse about race, then you’d better read this first: Ford knows that racial, as well as other differences have existed between people since time immemorial and will continue to exist forever. He also know that differences can be used to play race against race, class against class, etc. But race hustling brings big paychecks (see All Sharpton). According to Ford’s publicity page, he’s a paid speaker on race issues and has a non-profit that addresses, you guessed it, white supremacy in education.

Another nonprofit raking in millions for solving the unprovable problem of systemic ‘white supremacy’ is the Public School Forum of North Carolina — the same organization that sponsored James E. Ford’s October presentation. The group claims to be an unbiased and nonpartisan think-tank, yet they are represented by far-left policy director Lauren Fox. Lauren Fox, Public School Forum of North CarolinaIn 2019, Fox wrote this about white public school parents (children): For Fox, white public school parents (and their children) are robbing black children of opportunities. Accordingly they should be policed, or even punished as a deviant, regardless of whether they commit an offending act.

When a parent or child has white skin, it is the perception that counts.

Here Fox has skipped from false accusations of white parents asserting their ‘power’ to an actual offense of intentionally robbing black children of their futures —a totally unprovable violation. Fox’s rationale harkens back to Witchcraft trials and Stalinist purges, which is why her role of “stimulating conversation and engagement” with educators and legislators is so dangerous.

Fox, who is white, accuses other people with white skin color of wantonly destroying the lives of those with darker skin color: Lauren Fox sees black Americans as people with no agency to act for their own benefits, or to advocate for their children’s education, and have absolutely no control their own destinies because they are dependent on whites for their own— ideas that are provably false. Just ask our first black North Carolina Lt. Governor-elect who beat out 8 well-funded white opponents during his primary race.

In painting whites as superior to blacks, Lauren Fox is the racist. Kristopher Nordstrom, NC Policy WatchAnother education race-hustler is Kristopher Nordstrom with George Soros’ NC Policy Watch — the media arm of the NC Justice Center who pitches themselves as the “state’s preeminent voice for economic, social and political justice.”

A few years ago Nordstrom gained notoriety in left-wing circles for writing a “report” accusing white parents of intentionally trying to usher in segregation by choosing charter schools. Nordstrom, who is also white, has no children and, thus, can escape his own scrutiny of making educational choices for his family.

Nordstrom ignores the recent Espinoza v. Montana Department of RevenueSupreme Court case where black families argued that school choice “improves the education of all students.”

But Nordstrom’s report claims that black families cannot attend charter schools because they need free lunches and free transportation for their children. Lack of income is definitely a barrier for all students, black and white. But to make generalizations based on people’s membership in a particular minority racial group is racist.

Laughingly Nordstrom also demands that white parents who want to do the work to help make education more accessible and equitable for all (and there are many) should first make sure that adults over 65 are insured: We’re now seeing an uptick in teachers joining in with the shaming of white parents so they too may join an elevated social status among the far-left. Charlotte-Mecklenburg teacher Justin Parmenter, carnival-barker for the NCAE, has recently declared war on white parents (and children): Last week I wrote about the problem of allowing a prominent race-hustler like Parmenter to operate within our public schools.

The Stigma Committee James E. Ford and these other fringe characters hold no authority over the police and fire departments as Bull Connor did in Birmingham, but they do have influence over either the state’s educational policies, or the public’s perception of them.

They have also appointed themselves the governing body of what we’ll call the “stigma committee.”

The stigma committee’s goal is to generate enough moral outrage at white parents (and their children) so as to depersonalize them, to place them in a disreputable category which provides the basis of personal discrimination against them.

When stigmatized, people must act to avoid the psychological impact of humiliation, and this keeps them quiet about advocating for their rights. We have seen this shamefully play out before in the Jim Crow South and no one of any race or nationality wants to the process to repeat.

Stigmatizing people is a largely political exercise for this ‘stigma committee’ because they realize that power is more of a process than it is an object. They crave the power of moral standing and of respectability — both as individuals and collectively — to sit in judgement of others. They know that the more often their twisted ideas are applied and their empty ‘equity’ standards are legitimized; their influence gets sustained and reinforced.

This group cynically want to embed the mistreatment of all children into our school system, not as means to help needy children, rather to flex their own perceived political power.