Book Review: They Came for the Schools: One Town's Fight Over Race and Identity, and the New War for America's Classrooms, by Mike Hixenbaugh, published May 14, 2024, 272 pages (in Kindle, not including copious notes), adapted/continued from the podcast, “Southlake and Grapevine,” By Mike Hixenbaugh and Antonia Hylton. Recommended for ages 12 and up, or high school grades, Lexile measure unavailable.  Please note: this book is not yet in the pageturner library and requires student requests for purchases to be made.

Author Mike Hixenbaugh had already been a journalist for years, exploring such main topics of concern, as: healthcare, the military, and education, when in 2020 he and his wife, who is Black, put a Black Lives Matter sign on their front lawn in Southlake, TX.  They thought it a bland but supportive statement after police knelt on George Floyd’s neck for more than 9 minutes, killing him as he said he couldn’t breathe, crying out for his mom. After all, just a few days earlier, Mitt Romney had held up the same sign as he marched with anti-racism protesters. 

“…[O]ur family’s black-and-white cardboard yard sign felt like an even-handed, nonpartisan way to take a stand for human rights. But many Americans, especially white conservatives, viewed signs like ours as an attack on law enforcement, or worse, an attack on America. That might explain why, every weekend for two months after my wife put the sign up, someone drove their four-wheeler into our yard and did donuts in it, churning up deep divots in the grass. I didn’t know it at the time, but similar acts of anti–Black Lives Matter aggression6 were quietly popping up all over the country. Yard signs were stolen, set on fire, and desecrated with swastikas and slurs. In one case, a white man in a Detroit suburb7 admitted to shooting at a Black family’s home, slashing their car tires, and writing racist graffiti on their truck because he didn’t like the BLM sign posted in their home’s front window.” My own family knew better.  Our new next-door neighbor had a “Freedom” sign on HIS lawn, and we were keenly aware that in this country, every action on the part of or for Black people has always been met with immediate, vicious retaliation by White people.  We would never have dared to put up a sign, wear a supportive t-shirt--or then, even venture out in public. That “Freedom” sign meant no freedom at all, for us. (1)

Most of Hixenbaugh’s book homes in on this never-ending, wearisome, and absolutely terrifying system of retribution that cripples the souls of those MAGA condemns, merely because thy exist. In this context, it created a war against schools, teachers, and education itself.

Southlake, TX, was established as a bastion of wealth and Whiteness. Settlers came because of  “generous land grants…that had once been occupied by members of the Comanches, Kiowa, and Wichita tribes. Families came from Missouri and other southern slave states and built log homes and churches.”  The racism was built in.  As the community developed, laws passed to limit growth, requiring each new home to have at least an acre of land. “…[I]n America, income is often a proxy for race, and…by keeping Southlake wealthy, its leaders were, in effect, keeping it white.  [By 1971] Opposition to affordable housing became a litmus test for anyone seeking elected office in Southlake, even after the city started attracting major corporate development.”

Then Trump won the Electoral College (but not the popular vote) and became president.  His campaign unleashed a level of vitriol and racist hatred that MAGAs interpreted as imprimatur to cut loose vitriol and racist hatred everywhere in the public domain. It was mirrored and repeated in FOX news (2) and other right wing “news” outlets. In Southlake, racist taunts by high school students against other students increased by magnitudes; some parents of biracial and LGBTQ students spoke up about the pain and humiliation their children were suffering from bullying.  In response, the school board began an investigation into revising its rules to create greater racial awareness and promote kindness.    A volatile opposition would soon be created to castigate this attempt as “critical race theory.”  To Whites who had no clue what it meant, but who were fully aware of the great replacement conspiracy, it sounded ominous, which was precisely why über racist Chris Rufo had provided it; he fully intended it to be wielded as a cudgel, no matter that few knew what it was. (3)  Southlake exploded.  

The first book they tried to ban at Southlake’s prestigious high school was Blended, by Sharon M. Draper. (I’ve reviewed one of her award-winning novels here in “Love That Book!”)  “A parent made me have a meeting with her & my principal this morning because she said this book makes all black people seem better than white people and like victims,” [a teacher wrote,] along with a picture of her copy of Blended…“That’s their truth, and it’s the truth of what’s happening in the world,”  [the teacher had responded], noting that Black parents don’t have the luxury of putting off conversations about racism until their children are older.

“…[S]tudies have shown that even infants are aware of racial differences, and that by the time they turn four, children have begun to internalize biases. At twelve, many children will have formed hardened perceptions about race.”  And if Southlake’s White students were feeling bad about themselves, wouldn’t they have tried to be sort of invisible, as Black students do? Instead, they were feeling mighty and coming out of the woodwork to make other students feel bad. They'd even made a racist video denouncing their fellow students in 2018, which was the prima facie reason the school board was looking into making changes.

 While the school board presented a 34-page suggested plan to encourage  kindness for all students, it was dry legalese not many bothered or cared to read.  The other side began to run school board elections like political campaigns, with catchy slogans that served as call-and-answer response, with colorful banners and parades; in short, they brought noise and nonsense--but compelling noise and nonsense. (5) MAGA won every position on Southlake’s school board.  Teachers who’d previously won awards were now shunned, threatened, outed, and condemned; some left, some were forced to leave.  Southlake’s stunning upset and political ham-handedness spread like wildfire, first, of course, to Florida, and soon it infected the entire nation. It was 2022; COVID had battered the nation and people were fed up with isolation. Again, this went nationwide, like fire tornados; underpaid and overworked in the best of times, these were worst times, as everybody was exhausted from a year and a half of sickness, closed schools, Zoom classes and home schooling.  A group called Moms for Liberty in Florida began book banning such as this country had never seen before; they focused on parents’ “rights” to control what their students learn--considering that half the country barely has a 6th grade  literacy from decades of private voucher tactics stripping public schools of funding, this novel concept is extremely bad for education; again, Moms for Liberty (4) swiftly went nationwide. Underpaid and overworked in the best of times, these were worst times for teachers, students and parents alike, as everybody was exhausted from a year and a half of closed schools, Zoom classes and home schooling. Teachers were leaving--and continue to leave-- their dream careers for good.  Also that year, Chris Rufo gave the White community of Southlake--and the rest of MAGA nation-- a handle they could wield as a weapon: critical race theory. (3) In 2019, mostly only academics knew the phrase. Chris Rufo made it a declaration of war, aligning himself with the likes of apartheid tech bros Elon Musk and Peter Thiel; it was Rufo's best idea for getting in on the vast wealth of MAGA donors and led him straight to the halls of power in Trump and Ron DeSantis, who essentially gave him control of stat college education in Florida with a hefty salary and al its concomitant perks.

“Cutting the budget both at the state and local levels would have the added benefit of limiting the ability of public schools to indoctrinate students with liberal ideas, according to Vera Billingsley, candidate for San Antonio’s district school board said, and force schools “to get back to the basics.” She recalled reciting a daily prayer and a Bible verse at school each morning as a child in Ohio in the early 1960s, back before, as Billingsley saw it, America lost its way. Now schools were becoming fortresses to protect against the ever-present threat of mass shootings, and children were struggling with soaring rates of depression.

“To Billingsley and her allies, the solution to these problems was simple, and had nothing to do with gun control or increased funding for mental health services: “If they would bring the Proverbs every day into the school like I did with my kids at home, they would be fine.” 

And there it was. “..[T]he game plan [had been] spelled out in public view: Use the power of local boards and state legislatures to force religion back into public schools, then hope for a legal challenge that might serve as a test case to get the Supreme Court to overturn the separation of church and state in America, once and for all.”  It’s completely doable, too, given that Trump’s bought-and-paid-for Supreme Court had already ruled a public high school Coach Kennedy had a 1st Amendment right to say christian (6) prayers on the football turf of the local school (21-418 Kennedy v. Bremerton School Dist. (06/27/2022).
Did the students’ right to freedom of religion count? No. Did the Court notice that students would of course feel compelled to join in because of the power the coach had over their lives in school, on the field, maybe even at home? No. Did the coach even bother to stick around in his role as campus christian enforcer? No.  He promptly retired.

Last year and this, there are signs that the situation is beginning to improve; even in the rich & conservative community of Grapevine--only 4 miles from Southlake-- which lost its entire school board to MAGAs. Now parents there have vowed to bring life and funding back into the public school system they love, and it's conservatives who are leading the way.  Their rallying cry is, “Don’t Southlake my Grapevine!”  Despite Chris Rufo and the lies he tells (5) to get rich off conservative billionaires, the war isn’t won yet-- by either side. Christian nationalism (I plead no inconsistency here, it's the first word of the sentence), however, continues to be an existential threat to democracy.  Although it repeats the same clichéd arguments made by slave owners before the Civil War (7), evangelical power may yet cause a second civil war, or lead us into a fascism from which we might not soon recover. (And why aren't we taxing political speech made from church pulpits?)

Because students at 12 do have already hardened ideas about race that need an upgrade, and because this is happening to their schools--and to them--this is imperative reading for high school grades.  

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 (1) Of course, the ideas expressed in this blog are mine and mine only, so there’s some necessity for personal context, here: I live with my small biracial family in a community currently governed by fascists. Our city invented skinheads around 1990, when we moved here--4 years later, two Black men were murdered on our main street, solely for their color. Skinheads driving by our adjacent big street (called Heil, I kid you not, because Nazis escaping WWII settled here) shouted the n-word at my husband as he gardened. As a result, our then city council formulated a humanitarian statement and the skinheads apparently left for Florida and Texas. For a time, we went purple, politically.

This year, our city council eradicated that statement, banned Pride flags and dismissed all community city commissions that provided input to the council.  They put ID requirements for voting on the ballot and it passed, although they’re now being sued by the state because they have no authority over voting (that’s the county’s purview).  They also refused to provide more housing as required by state law; the state is suing them for that, too, having already won at trial level (and having prevailed over 17 previous jurisdictions as the case goes to appeal.) They gave $7 millions to a private company that made their campaign banners--and are being investigated for it. They’ve appointed a group of 20 to ban library books, including one for 3-7 years olds called The Big Bath House, about the Japanese tradition of family women and girls getting clean together, a celebration of body positivity--“GROOMING! PEDOPHILIA!” screamed a guy at a recent city council meeting, waving the book above his head like a flag of the devil. Goodreads describes the book as, “A joyful celebration of Japanese cultural traditions and body positivity as a young girl visits a bath house with her grandmother and aunties.” (You can see the book cover here: https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1617072954i/56988008.jpg). They are now considering privatizing our libraries and giving them to a member of the city council!-- despite obvious conflicts of interests.  This will, of course, end unions at the library, lower staff wages, result in a mass exodus of qualified individuals, and lower library standards.  They have refused to hold an election on the issue of privatizing our libraries.

City council's lawyer insists that because we are a charter city, neither the state nor the fed have any business in their business. This is a very twisted, completely off-the-wall form of states’ rights that has no reality in law. Meanwhile, their gift to a private, highly politicized, conservative company without legal justification--and all these lawsuits based solely on their own litigiousness --are bankrupting the city for both near and far future.  One example: we have a newly built steel wall at the end of our street that’s supposed to keep out the rising sea. (This was a silly and expensive build by the county, as there is no wall possible to block the sea from the harbor, merely blocks away in another direction.) Truth to tell, though, our far more imminent concern is flooding from rains, because the drains supposed to siphon rain into the sea are compacted with debris and have never been cleared. Here is a clear example of the many ways small groups can have tremendous and terrible impact against all of us.

(2) As a result of its lies about the 2020 election and FOX’ s false claims alleging that voting machines “cheated” for Biden, last year FOX settled a suit brought by Dominion Voting Systems, paying out $787 million dollars.  Sadly, Rupert Murdoch’s network can afford to lie and continues to do so, to ridiculous levels. ““The irony here is that when a profit-making entity claims that the news harms it, it can get a fair hearing and a jury trial, and the truth comes out, or can come out. But when you get spoon-fed lies about this country or that country over 10 years of some idiotic war, the families of the deceased soldiers, or the taxpayers who got ripped off, can’t sue. They don’t have any role in court to play. It’s truly perverse.”  --Excerpted from:  https://www.thenation.com/article/society/fox-dominion-settlement/
Further, "The Murdoch family’s News Corporation and big fossil fuel companies Santos, Woodside, Exxon and Shell all paid little or no income tax in the 2021-22 financial year.  This article calls these Murdoch corporations  "climate criminals."  https://www.crikey.com.au/2023/11/09/tax-dodging-news-corp-banks-mining-fossil-fuel/

Just this week (June7, 2024), a scandal erupted when the Washington Post’s CEO tried to “catch and kill”  a story about himself--and not for the first time!  ( “Catch and kill” is a phrase used by witness David Piper of the National Enquirer, in describing how he killed negative stories about Trump in the recent NY jury trial, in which Trump has been convicted of 34 felonies that kept truth from voters so he could win.  For more, see: https://www.npr.org/2024/06/07/nx-s1-4995105/washington-post-will-lewis-tries-to-kill-story-buzbee

(3) Before 2019 and Chris Rufo’s emergence as the nation’s most unapologetically & enthusiastic racist, few had ever heard of it.  It’s taught only in graduate schools and explores the many ways systemic racism in fact and law prevented--and still prevents-- people of color from living as White people do. Redlining in the mortgage lending industry and the 1924 Immigration Act (the Johnson-Reed Act), are only two examples, one private, the latter an act of Congress.  Corporate development creating environmental ghettos, and corporations refusing to open supermarkets and retail stores in Black communities, are a few more, but the list is sooo long, beginning in 1619 and including at its worst, slavery and Jim Crow. Today we also have the evisceration of the Voting Rights Act by a highly weaponized, MAGA Supreme Court, its flood of right wing dark money into political campaigns, and its tacit approval of MAGA gerrymandering to enforce tyrannical minority rule.

That Immigration Act, which prohibited immigration into the USA by certain named ethnicities, denied access to Italians in particular.  By the 1890s, Italians had recently been delineated as a lower form of humanity, perhaps stemming from Africa (the death knell). Especially on the east coast, where they had replaced the Irish (formerly considered of African descent but newly minted as fairly White), Italians were brutally beaten by mobs. You can follow the evolution of who’s been considered what in a compelling academic work of non-fiction titled, Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, by Sabrina Strings. I highly recommend it for the sheer hilarity of its history. 

In perhaps a new highest echelon of irony, Chris Rufo proudly claims Italian ancestry going back to the 13th century! See his post at: https://x.com/realchrisrufo/status/1536243877753012224/photo/2  Full disclosure: your reviewer is both Italian (Sicilian, the horror!) AND Irish, as are many born “back east” are.

(4) Last year, Florida residents were stunned to learn that mom Brigitte Ziegler, founder of Moms for Liberty, had engaged in a sexual threesome with her husband and a woman he’d apparently forced into sex with him on a dozen occasions.  A vote of 4-1 called for her ouster in December but she has refused as recently as March 5th  to step down, despite continuing calls for her to do so. See: https://www.wfla.com/news/sarasota-county/calls-for-bridget-ziegler-to-resign-continue-after-audio-interviews-released/ After an investigation by local police, her husband faces no criminal charges for alleged rapes.  “Former Florida GOP chairman Christian Ziegler [forced to step down after their sexual exploits were discovered] and his wife Bridget Ziegler, a Sarasota School Board Member and cofounder of the conservative group Moms for Liberty, have filed a lawsuit seeking to bar the release of records involved in the husband’s criminal rape investigation.”  Excerpt: https://news.wgcu.org/government-politics/2024-03-18/zieglers-sue-to-stop-release-of-rape-investigation-records  If I were catty, I might suggest that I, too, might have wanted my kids to be completely in the dark about sex, concerned they might figure out what mommy and daddy were doing in their spare time.  I’ll refrain (ok, not, sorry, no will to resist).

 
(5) “The evidence that discrimination on the basis of identity persists, albeit in subtler institutional forms than things like Jim Crow, is statistically overwhelming…What [Rufo is] describing isn’t a journalistic approach to “critical race theory.” It’s the mindset of a dishonest political attack dog, one that seemed to validate criticisms that he had played fast and loose with evidence. Rufo’s involvement with Trump and DeSantis further suggested he was less of a serious interlocutor than an operative... [He claims] the government “no longer exists to secure natural rights, but to achieve ‘social justice.’” Even business “no longer exists to maximize profit, but to manage ‘diversity and inclusion.’”

"This last line, in particular, struck me as absurd — even he couldn’t possibly think corporations cared more about their DEI departments than profits. When I pressed him, Rufo said the passage was intended to describe…ultimate objectives, …not to depict reality…When his hyperbolic claim was no longer defensible, he denied less than a minute later that he ever made it in the first place.

"These distortions appear endemic to Rufo’s work.”  See: https://www.vox.com/23811277/christopher-rufo-culture-wars-ron-desantis-florida-critical-race-theory-anti-wokeness

More on Rufo: “Rufo has described his interest in the subject as a matter of expediency. In 2021, Rufo told The New Yorker that the term “critical race theory” was a “promising political weapon” for conservatives. “‘Critical race theory’ is the perfect villain,” he told reporter Benjamin Wallace-Wells. “Its connotations are all negative to most middle-class Americans … the phrase ‘critical race theory’ connotes hostile, academic, divisive, race-obsessed, poisonous, elitist, anti-American.”

“…[T]he interest of the book does not lie in this scattershot history. Its main interest is as an exemplar of a popular genre on the right: the adversarial intellectual history animated by envy, as well as antipathy. “Rufo likens corporate philanthropy to “protection payments”—with companies desperately giving money to keep “frivolous discrimination lawsuits” and left-wing outrage at bay… The most generous thing one could say about this history, as history, is that it is confused… For the most part, Rufo relies on juxtaposition to imply connection and causality… It is not worth pointing out every one of Rufo’s misreadings of critical theory or critical race theory, not only because to do so is to fall into the trap of appearing like precisely the kind of scolding and divisive elite that he would say I am—but because Rufo does not appear to care.

“Rufo promises to “pierce through the shell” of [CRT theorists’] language and “describe its essence” so that his readers can “begin … seeing … with clear eyes.” This project creates ample room for reinterpretation and broad generalizations, which he justifies with phrases like “in other words.”

“As his religious diction suggests, Rufo’s project here isn’t to trace an intellectual tradition through history; instead, he treats critical race theory as a shape-shifting, almost supernatural phenomenon that takes hold of people down the ages… His condemnation expresses envy—and a conviction that he can adopt the tactics of his enemy.

“He is doing just that. Rufo was recently appointed as a trustee of New College of Florida… In another sign that Rufo is not averse to using the power of the state where it serves him, he brought criminal charges against a former New College student whom he accused of spitting at him during a protest in May [‘23]. (Rufo later dropped the charges. The student disputes his version of events.) The student, like many others, has since left Sarasota.

“Rufo thinks it will be necessary to follow the path of Lenin—to seize the commanding heights of culture, education, and government. For all his denunciation of the long march through the institutions, the desire that Rufo cannot quite name is the desire to carry out a takeover of bureaucracies from the right—and call it revolution.”  See: “Christopher Rufo’s Troubling Path to Power: His incoherent attacks on critical race theory are only one part of a much larger plan for counterrevolution,” by Moira Weigel, November 27, 2023 @ https://newrepublic.com/article/176809/christopher-rufos-troubling-path-power

(6) I see no reason to capitalize the word “christian” when used in the context of a perversion of faith by people who adhere strictly, fervently, and exclusively to the Old Testament--which bears no mention of Christ by name-- while ignoring the New, which is the sole source of Christ’s teachings.


(7) For a fascinating read of those same tired arguments, and all the events of the six months leading up to the Civil War, please read Erik Larson's recently published, extraordinarily well documented and brilliantly drafted non-fiction masterpiece: The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War.  I promise you will not be disappointed. 

The Demon of Unrest also reveals that sexual perversity was built into the Southern male's temperament; their so-called fire-eater, James Henry Hammond, was a serial pedophile whose rapes of all four of his nieces lasted years, until he was exposed when the youngest turned 18 and publicly accused him.  He confessed and was out of sight awhile; then he purchased a house slave for sex, along with her 12-year old daughter, with whom he immediately also had sex .  Their three-way lasted many, many years, and both women continued to live in his plantation home long after he died.  In fact, almost all plantation owners raped their slaves as a matter of course; after all, it was an easy and enjoyable (at least, for the rapists) way to garner many more slaves without having to pay for them! We now know, too, that Thomas Jefferson had six children by his slave Sally Hemings, whom he took with him to France when she was just 14.   She and her children were forced to live, unseen, in a windowless room with a dirt floor, while his own bedroom across the hall at Monticello was grandly outfitted.  --https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4662350/Archaeologists-Sally-Hemings-room-Monticello.html
Although he freed the four of their children who survived into adulthood--the promise that ensured Sally's compliance all her days-- his remaining 300+ slaves were sold to pay his debts on his demise.

Your reviewer wonders whether MAGA will ever tire of its current fascination with, and yearning for, America as the next Soviet Union.  This is sorely not the “Freedom” our neighbor desires with his yard sign.  This is, instead, a threat of absolute denial of the natural human rights professed in the Bill of Rights.

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