The Westerly School Committee

REJECTION OF RESOLUTION RELATING TO EDUCATION AND CURRICULUM

July

Good Evening,

Thank you for the opportunity to speak tonight.

My name is Anne Pearce and I am a Westerly resident. I was a senior scientist in

Research and Development for years before returning to the East coast to be closer
to family and to start our own family. We have lived in Westerly for the past years.

Growing up, I wanted to be an engineer like my father, but, in grade school, my

decision to go into engineering was met with skepticism because I was told "girls are
not good at math and science" and that I should reconsider my career. Then, after
getting my degree in chemical engineering, I was met with more subtle sexism in the
workplace. I remember my rst manager telling me after a meeting, that I "shouldn't
sound smart because I may make the men working on the project feel bad." I also
remember how bad I felt. I share this story because I see the same propaganda in the
Petitioned Resolution used to deny sexism exists being used to deny racism exists.

The consensus among the majority of US historians is racism has been central to the
evolution of American institutions and culture. Teaching that does not mean you are
teaching students to hate them, it means you are teaching students to understand
them.

The Resolution presented to the School Committee is not aligned with your mission
and goals to "create an inspiring, challenging and supportive environment where
students are encouraged and assisted in reaching their highest potential.", "to assist
in fostering a community of lifelong learners with our students at its center,
acknowledging that all children can achieve at high levels when provided with
opportunities, high expectations, and proper supports, and striving to promote critical
thinking and problem solving skills,. These are worthy goals for our students, shared
by our Superintendent, Assistant-Superintendent, our teachers, and parents. I could
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 not nd any of these goals listed in the proposed Resolution and not one meaningful
or insightful recommendation on education, curriculum, or how to prepare our
students to be critical and free thinkers.

The language used has little to do with a desire to improve education and curriculum
in our school. The language is taken from playbooks written by groups such as
Citizens for Renewing America, the Heritage Foundation, and Idaho Freedom
Foundation, that provide a generic playbook to follow. I found one of these playbooks
online- "Combating Critical Race Theory in Your Community, An A to Z Guide on
How to Stop Critical Race Theory And Reclaim Your Local School Board." The
language in this Resolution is taken directly from this playbook.

This legislation is only an effort to substitute political mandates for the judgment of
professional educators, hindering students’ ability to learn and engage in critical
thinking across differences and disagreements. Our students deserve a free and open
exchange about our history and the forces that shape our world today.

The Resolution poorly de nes and misrepresents the components of CRT and it
appears the intent is to silence broader discussions of racism, equality, social justice,
and the history of race. In the Resolution, there is a bullet point that the school must
prohibit the teaching, "The State of RI and the United States of American are
fundamentally and systemically racist" This is dishonest. The years of scholarly
work documenting systemic racism in RI and in this country is daunting.

How American society remembers and teaches the horrors of slavery is crucial. But as
recent studies have shown, many textbooks offer a sanitized view of this history,
focusing solely on “positive” stories about black leaders like Harriet
Tubman and Frederick Douglass. Prior to , Texas schools even taught that states’
rights and sectionalism—not slavery—were the main causes of the Civil War.

In addition, widespread framing of the Civil War as a battle between equal

entities lends legitimacy to the Confederacy, which was not a nation in its own right,
but an “illegitimate rebellion”.
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 Between and , the Atlantic slave trade brought more than , enslaved
Africans to what is now the United States. White European Americans who
participated in the slave industry tried to justify their economic exploitation of black
people by creating a "scienti c" theory of white superiority and black inferiority. One
such slave owner was Thomas Jefferson, and it was his call for science to determine
the obvious "inferiority" of blacks that is regarded as "an extremely important stage in
the evolution of scienti c racism." He concluded that blacks were "inferior to the
whites in the endowments of body and mind."

In , % of African Americans still lived in the South, where they were held
captive by the virtual slavery of sharecropping and debt peonage and isolated from the
rest of the country, Sharecropping, a system in which formerly enslaved people
became tenant farmers and live in “converted” slave cabins, was the impetus for
the Elaine Massacre, which found white soldiers collaborating with local
vigilantes to kill at least sharecroppers who dared to criticize their low wages.

Hostility and hierarchies that fed the Southern caste system remained major obstacles
for black migrants in all areas of the country. Low-paying jobs, redlining, restrictive
housing and rampant discrimination limited opportunities, creating inequality that
would eventually give rise to the civil rights movement.

Racial, economic and educational disparities are deeply entrenched in U.S.

institutions. Though the Declaration of Independence states that “all men are created
equal,” American democracy has historically—and often violently—excluded certain
groups. “ , such as Indigenous, Blacks, and women.

Instances of inequality range from the obvious to less overtly discriminatory policies
and belief systems. Historical examples include poll taxes that effectively
disenfranchised African American voters; the marginalization of African American
soldiers who fought in World War I and World War II, but were treated like second-
class citizens at home; black innovators who were barred from ling patents for their
inventions; the segregated nature of travel in the Jim Crow era; the government-
mandated segregation of American cities; and segregation in schools.
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 In , the Kerner Commission, a group convened by President Lyndon Johnson,
found that white racism, not black anger, was the impetus for the widespread civil
unrest sweeping the nation. As Alice George wrote in , the commission’s report
suggested that "bad policing practices, a awed justice system, unscrupulous
consumer credit practices, poor or inadequate housing, high unemployment, voter
suppression and other culturally embedded forms of racial discrimination all
converged to propel violent upheaval.” Few listened to the ndings, let alone its
suggestion of aggressive government spending aimed at leveling the playing eld.
Instead, the country embraced a different cause: space travel. The day after the
moon landing, the leading black paper the New York Amsterdam News ran a story
stating, “Yesterday, the moon. Tomorrow, maybe us.”

Fifty years after the Kerner Report’s release, a separate study assessed how much had
changed; it concluded that conditions had actually worsened. In , black
unemployment was higher than in , as was the rate of incarcerated individuals
who were black. The wealth gap had also increased substantially, with the median
white family having ten times more wealth than the median black family. “We are re-
segregating our cities and our schools, condemning millions of kids to inferior
education and taking away their real possibility of getting out of poverty,” said Fred
Harris, the last surviving member of the Kerner Commission, following the
study’s release.

In , one in thirteen Black Americans of voting age was disenfranchised, more than
four times greater than that of non-Black Americans. Over . % of adult Black
Americans were disenfranchised compared to . % of non-Black Americans.

A group of white men pose for a photograph as they stand over the body of black
lynching victim Will Brown before they decide to mutilate and burn his body during
the Omaha race riot of in Omaha, Nebraska. Photographs and postcards of
lynchings were popular souvenirs in the U.S.

Even after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of and the Voting Rights Act of
, segregation continued. Data on house prices and attitudes towards integration
suggest that in the mid- th century, segregation was a product of collective actions
taken by whites to exclude blacks from their neighborhoods. Segregation also took the
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form of redlining, the practice of denying or increasing the cost of services, such as
banking, insurance, access to jobs, access to health care, or even supermarkets to
residents in certain, often racially determined, areas. Although in the U.S., informal
discrimination and segregation have always existed, redlining began with the National
Housing Act of , which established the Federal Housing Administration (FHA).
The practice was fought rst through passage of the Fair Housing Act of (which
prevents redlining) and later through the Community Reinvestment Act of , which
requires banks to apply the same lending criteria in all communities. Although
redlining is illegal, some argue that it continues to exist in other forms. And I can go
on and on and on with our history of systemic racism.

CRT is not diversity and inclusion training, but a practice looking at the role of race
and racism in society that emerged in the law and spread to other elds of scholarship.
CRT recognizes that racism is not a relic of the past, but that the legacy of slavery,
segregation and the imposition of second-class citizenship on Black Americans and
other people of color continues to permeate the social fabric of this nation.

If our children grow up in a society with racism, told again and again our
relationships, or policies, are zero-sum - that if those people are going to have
economic progress, it's going to be at our expense, then our children grow up fearing
that any other groups gain will mean their loss. And this is not true.

We are at a crossroads in our nation and a major stumbling block in our progress is
those incapable of facing the reality of our shared history. We can no longer remain
quiet as others deny any meaningful attempt to teach the facts of this nation's long
struggle with racism or have it sti ed by those who promote the false idea that
progress for people of color has to come at the expense of white people. It is an
injustice to our children not to teach the whole truth of our history, not just a white
history or Black history, but an American history, else we deprive ourselves and our
children of so many opportunities to progress together.

Please continue to do the work you are doing to honor and uphold the goals of this
School Committee, and to stand together with our Superintendent, Assistant
Superintendent, our teachers and our community to reject this Resolution.
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