Forgive us for a little skepticism about what on the surface might look like a positive development in the recent controversy at the Francis Howell School Board. Board President Adam Bertrand has expressed interest in revisiting the board's outrageous decision last week to effectively purge the district's buildings and printed materials of an anti-racism proclamation approved three years ago.

In a Facebook post this week, Bertrand opened the possibility of a "rewrite or modification" of the proclamation, instead of its removal. That could be interpreted as an acknowledgment of public outrage over the board's previous action and a potential reversal of it. If so, bravo.

The problem is that Bertrand and other members of the new conservative board majority were put in place as part of a movement that has its own ideas about what an anti-racism proclamation should look like — ideas that raise and challenge nonexistent bogeymen like "critical race theory" and "Marxism."

Should those or other right-wing gauntlets find their way onto the hallway walls of Francis Howell schools, the board should brace for a well-deserved backlash from a public that is surely tired of this culture-war nonsense in their schools.

There was nothing nonsensical about the original proclamation passed by the previous board. It was the summer of 2020 and America was in the midst of a racial reckoning following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Locally, thousands of protesters marched in support of Black students, demanding that the mostly white Francis Howell district address systemic racism in its curriculum, hiring and discipline practices.

The board's responses then included a non-binding but symbolically important five-paragraph proclamation vowing the district "will speak firmly against any racism," "promote racial healing" and acknowledge "the challenges faced by our Black and brown students and families."

Given the fraught racial history of America generally and (at times) in the Francis Howell district specifically, this simple statement — with nothing legally actionable tied to it — would seem to be at worst harmless and at best an opening of needed racial dialogue.

But the newly seated conservative majority on the board somehow found enough fault with these words of racial tolerance to vote last week to effectively purge them from the record and literally remove printed versions of them from school building walls. (Technically, the measure the board passed does away with all proclamations passed by previous boards, a bizarre move that was obviously intended to target the anti-racism proclamation.)

Though district parents and others have expressed outrage at the board's action, there's ample reason to suspect that any effort by the current board to revisit the controversy may not be grounded in a good-faith response to that opposition.

That's because Bertrand and other members of the conservative majority were elected last year under the banner of the political action committee "Francis Howell Families," which is part of an ideologically aggressive right-wing movement that seeks to bring the culture wars to the classroom.

As the Post-Dispatch's Blythe Bernhard has reported, the PAC has opposed the original anti-racism proclamation in the past, calling it "woke activism" — which, of course, is today's conservative catch-all phrase to confront anything that smacks of tolerance, inclusion or (heaven forbid) anti-racist reform.

The PAC in 2021 drafted an alternative proclamation "against all acts of racial discrimination." So far, so good, but then it goes on to define these to include "racially-divisive Critical Race Theory, labels of white privilege, enforced equity of outcomes, identity politics, intersectionalism, and Marxism."

Fear of "Marxism" today is such a silly conservative trope as to verge on self-parody, and critical race theory in schools is a right-wing myth.

As for the rest, it all falls broadly under the heading of opposition to any racial dialogue whatsoever — and that, ultimately, is what the right-wing schools project these days is all about. Their movement equates recognition of racism with racism itself, and recognition of white privilege with reverse racism. Racial discussion, they believe, equals racial division, so just don't talk about it. That's a useful mantra for those who benefit from what is still systemic racism in America — but not so much for those on the other end of it.

Is this or something like it what the new board has in mind for a "modification" of the previous anti-racism statement? If so, it will have actually found a way to be more racially divisive than it already has been.

REPRINTED FROM THE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH

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