Heartbreaking story about the misguided misanthropic racist book banners wreaking havoc in South Carolina. South Carolina Republican snowflakes fear diversity and honest history. In 1861, South Carolina fire-eaters attacked Fort Sumter and began the Civil War. South Carolina is the state of despair, where former Yale University Baseball Team Captain RONALD DION DeSANTIS taught history in a fancy-bears prep school before encumbering a seat at Harvard Law School. Under DeSaNTIS Flori-DUH passed a similar law, now in federal court, that bans accurate history on the basis of not wanting to make any White person feel bad. What errant nonsense. Enough flummery, dupery, nincompoopery, Trumpery and insurrectionist legislations and law enforcement.
Our prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, Supreme Court Justice Robert Houghwot Jackson, said it best in 1943, in the Court's flag salute decision in West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943):
"If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. If there are any circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us." [Footnote 19]
"We think the action of the local authorities in compelling the flag salute and pledge transcends constitutional limitations on their power, and invades the sphere of intellect and spirit which it is the purpose of the First Amendment to our Constitution to reserve from all official control."
From The Washington Post:
Her students reported her for a lesson on race. Can she trust them again?
Mary Wood’s school reprimanded her for teaching a book by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Now she hopes her bond with students can survive South Carolina’s politics.
Six months earlier, two of Wood’s Advanced Placement English Language and Composition students had reported her to the school board for teaching about race. Wood had assigned her all-White class readings from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me,” a book that dissects what it means to be Black in America.
The students wrote in emails that the book — and accompanying videos that Wood, 47, played about systemic racism — made them ashamed to be White, violating a South Carolina proviso that forbids teachers from making students “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress” on account of their race.
Reading Coates’s book felt like “reading hate propaganda towards white people,” one student wrote.
At least two parents complained, too. Within days, school administrators ordered Wood to stop teaching the lesson. They placed a formal letter of reprimand in her file. It instructed her to keep teaching “without discussing this issue with your students.”
Wood finished out the spring semester feeling defeated and betrayed — not only by her students, but by the school system that raised her. The high school Wood teaches at is the same one she attended.
It had been a long summer since. Wood’s predicament, when it became public in a local newspaper, divided her town. At school board meetings, and in online Facebook groups, the citizens of wealthy, White and conservative Chapin debated whether Wood should be fired. Republican state representatives showed up to a June meeting to blast her as a lawbreaker. The next month, a county NAACP leader declared her an “advocate for the education of all students.” The county GOP party formally censured the school board chair for failing to discipline Wood.
Wood’s case drew national, polarizing attention. Conservative outlets and commentators decried Wood’s “race-shaming against White people.” Left-leaning media declared her a martyr to “cancel culture,” the latest casualty of raging debates over how to teach race, racism and history that have engulfed the country since the coronavirus pandemic.
South Carolina is one of 18 states to restrict education on race since 2021, according to an Education Week tally. And at least half the country has passed laws that limit instruction on race, history, sex or gender identity, per a Washington Post analysis. Wood is not the first teacher to get caught in the crossfire: The Post previously reported thatat least 160 educators have lost their positions since the pandemic due to political debates. Among them was a Tennessee teacher terminatedfor telling White students that White privilege is a fact. A Texas principal who lost his job for allegedly promoting critical race theory. A Wisconsin teacher who was dismissed after criticizing her district’s decision to ban the song “Rainbowland,” which lauds inclusivity.
The months Wood had hoped to spend hiking, doing yoga and vacationing carefree on the beach turned into a summer spent avoiding people’s gazes at the grocery store and the gas station.
Now she had to go back to school. Which meant confronting the conundrum she had avoided all summer.
Wood believes trust is fundamental to the classroom. She has to trust her students. They and their parents have to trust her. But trust, she believes, is impossible without authenticity. And for Wood, teaching authentically means assigning writers like Coates — voices unfamiliar, even disconcerting, to students in her lakeside town. Because of what happened last year, though, Wood now worried anything, from the most provocative essay to the least interesting comment about her weekend, might be resisted, recorded and reported by the children she was supposed to be teaching.
And if she couldn’t trust them, how was she supposed to make them trust her?
Mary Wood reflects on trust — and the lack of it — in her classroom.
“I should probably head out,” Wood said to her husband, Ryan Satterwhite, glancing at the time on her oven’s digital clock: 7:38 a.m. But she didn’t move. “I just don’t know what’s going to happen.”
“It’ll be fine,” Satterwhite told her, setting his mug down and crossing the room.
She looked up at him and placed a hand on his chest. They stood framed in the front window for a moment. He bent down to kiss her.
“Hopefully,” she said. Her mouth quirked into a half-smile, half-frown.
She readjusted her bag, gripped her car keys and walked out the door.
The first complaint didn’t alarm Wood.
It was early February. A day after she gave out copies of “Between the World and Me,” a mother emailed asking to speak about “an assignment.” Wood didn’t see it as different from the parental objections she was used to fielding in Lexington-Richland School District 5, which serves roughly 17,000 students and is about two-thirds White. In interviews, several teachers recalled dealing with opinionated Chapin parents who pushed back against lessons or for better grades.
Wood emailed, phoned and left a voice mail with the mom. “Please call me back,” she remembers saying. She figured they would chat and that would be the end of it.
Wood thought she was on safe ground. She had taught Coates’s book — and accompanying YouTube videos titled “Systemic Racism Explained” and “The Unequal Opportunity Race” — the year prior. No one complained.
She also counted on the fact AP Lang is supposed to be a high-level class. The College Board curriculum says it can address “issues that might, from particular social, historical, or cultural viewpoints, be considered controversial, including references to … races.” Wood’s supervisor, English department chair Tess Pratt, had signed off on Coates’s book. Plus, Wood had required AP Lang students to read a speech from former president Donald Trump, a balancing conservative voice.
And Wood believed the school district had come to accept her — respecting her students’ 80-plus percent AP exam passage rates year after year, above the national average — even if not everyone liked her methods. Chapin was her hometown. Chapin High School had been her school, the place she began to question the conservative, Christian views espoused by her classmates, friends and family.
No teacher ever assigned her someone like Coates, Wood said, but her father Mike Satterfield, a teacher and later principal at Chapin, encouraged her to pursue whatever outside reading she found interesting. That led her to left-leaning authors. By the time she graduated from University of North Carolina Wilmington, she was a self-professed liberal.
Satterfield capped his long career in education by winning a seat on the school board in November 2022 — and that made Wood feel safe, too. (Satterfield declined to comment beyond writing in an email that “I love my daughter very much and respect her for the person that she is.”)
She knew most students leaned right and guessed that many of her colleagues did, too, based on their social media presence and offhand remarks. The popular circles at school are red, current and former students said.
But amid a red sea, Chapin’s English department was a blue island. And Wood was known as the bluest of the bunch — conspicuous for decorating her classroom with posters of Malcom X, Ruth Bader Ginsburg quotes and LGBTQ pride stickers.
“She had that granola-crunchy vibe,” said a former Chapin teacher, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional and personal retaliation. “It wouldn’t be difficult to guess how she votes walking into her room. I think that’s what made her a sort of lightning rod.”
Aubrey Hume, a recent Chapin graduate, recalls seeing the Malcolm X poster and immediately clocking that Wood thought differently from most people in town. She also taught Black, female and queer voices that most students never heard in other classrooms nor at home, Hume said.
“It was like, ‘Oh, I got Miss Wood, and now I have to scoff and roll my eyes because she’s going to teach me things I don’t want to learn,’” Hume, 18, recalled. “A lot of kids did not like her.”
Elizabeth Jordan, now 20, was one of those students. Raised in a conservative, Christian household, Jordan was unhappy to learn Wood would be her AP English teacher back in 2019, Jordan’s junior year.
At first, Jordan found Wood’s lessons unsettling — especially the classes focused on mass shootings or transgender rights, during which Wood held up left-leaning viewpoints for students’ inspection. Jordan could not understand why Wood was asking high-schoolers to discuss controversial current events.
“All I was thinking was, ‘This isn’t allowed, this just isn’t allowed,’” Jordan said. “Just because it was a complete 180 from anything I had known.” (South Carolina had not yet passed its legal restrictions on what teachers can say on these topics.)
Elizabeth Jordan, a former student of Mary Wood's, recalls how she disliked Wood's lessons at first.
Over course of the year, though, Jordan’s opinion shifted. She noticed how students seemed to pay more attention in Wood’s class. She noticed that Wood never pushed students to adopt viewpoints but challenged them to account for their convictions. Now a junior in college, Jordan still remembers the debate that followed after a popular boy, the student body president, said transgender athletes should not be allowed to play sports.
“Okay,” Jordan recalls Wood saying, “can you explain that a little bit more?”
By 2023, when Wood assigned Coates, her strategy hadn’t changed: She still gave difficult texts about hot-button issues, convinced it was the best way to keep students’ attention — and teach them how to argue, an AP Lang exam requirement. She still demanded students consider novel perspectives, setting the essay question: “Explain Coates’ problem with America’s tradition of retelling history. Explain your support or disagreement with his position.”
For the two days Wood got to teach “Between the World and Me,” classroom discussions were lively and open, said Connor Bryant, 17, one of the students who took AP Lang last year. Bryant, whose father is a Chapin English teacher, said his peers debated systemic racism and what it’s like to be Black in America, agreeing and disagreeing with Coates, without Wood picking a side.
“She did a really good job of keeping things not boring,” Bryant said. “People spoke up and they had different opinions — I honestly didn’t hear a single complaint about the book from anyone.”
Still, Bryant did remember a handful of disengaged students in the back of the room. They whispered to each other during class.
As in years past, Wood’s style of teaching had left some students feeling uncomfortable. But this time, they didn’t come to respect her.
They reported her.
The student email arrived in school board member Elizabeth Barnhardt’s inbox at 8:51 p.m. on a Sunday, four days after Wood assigned “Between the World and Me.” The student thanked Barnhardt for “looking into this matter.”
“I understand in AP Lang we are learning to develop an argument and have evidence to support it, yet this topic is too heavy to discuss,” the student wrote, according to school records obtained by The Post. “I actually felt ashamed to be Caucasian.”
Another student email followed at 9:35 p.m. “I feel, to an extent, betrayed by Mrs Woods,” the second student wrote. “I feel like she has built up this idea of expanding our mind through the introduction of controversial topics all year just to try to subtly indoctrinate our class.”
Especially troublesome, the student wrote, was one of Coates’s sentences stating, “In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body — it is heritage.”
The student names were redacted from the emails obtained by Wood through a records request and provided to The Post. A parent who complained about Wood’s course to the school board did not answer a list of emailed questions. Barnhardt, who was endorsed by Moms for Liberty last year, did not respond to a request for comment.
“This topic is too heavy to discuss. I actually felt ashamed to be Caucasian.”— A student's email objecting to the teaching of Ta-Nehisi Coates's book “Between The World And Me.”
The following Monday afternoon, Wood had finished teaching and was preparing to leave school when she received a call from a school secretary. The woman told her she had an unscheduled meeting with Chapin’s assistant principal of instruction, Melissa Magee, and the district’s director of secondary instruction, Neshunda Walters, at 4 p.m.
The woman didn’t say what the meeting was about, but Wood guessed. She grabbed Pratt, the English department chair and one of her best friends, hoping for protection. And she pulled up the AP Lang course description on her laptop, figuring she might need it.
Wood and Pratt were kept waiting outside a conference room for over half an hour, they later recalled. Through a window in the door, Pratt said, she could see Magee and Walters sifting through pages of documents in a manila folder. Around 4:30, Wood and Pratt said, they were let into the room — but Walters dismissed Pratt over her protests, the department chair said. She kept waiting outside as Wood underwent what the English teacher later described as an interrogation.
A set of administrative talking points prepared ahead of the meeting, obtained through Wood’s records request and given to The Post, show that Magee and Walters were supposed to start by telling Wood her teaching had sparked “concerns.” They were supposed to mention the South Carolina policy against making students uncomfortable because of their race. They were supposed to remind her of school rules stipulating that “teachers will not attempt, directly or indirectly, to limit or control students’ judgment concerning any issue” — and that “the principal must approve supplementary materials” for classes.
1 comment:
Sad, sad when parents indoctrinate their children with far right propaganda and lies about the origins of the universe and then those kids go to school and make problems for good honest people. If the right wing way was so superior, you'd think they would start their own schools and those schools would stand out among the others... but of course that never happens for obvious reasons. That's got nothing to do with funding either. One reason is that they don't teach critical thinking and attempt to create an identity through omission and isolation from reality.
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