I Know a Teacher Who Made National News!

A Sad Tale of Victimhood at the Hands of Communal Ignorance

My first real full-time teaching job was at a charter school in South Carolina. I was thrilled to get the position, not so thrilled by the time I left, but along the way I learned a great deal and met some really good people, among others. One of those was a woman who worked at the same place for a semester before moving on to an area public school. I didn’t think there was anything remarkable about her at the time, other than a pronounced leftist bent very much out of the norm for the culture of the school and community as a whole. I had assumed it was why she had left the school, but I didn’t give it much thought as I didn’t know her that well anyway. I was therefor a bit surprised when I was looking up an unrelated story in the Washington Post and there she was, the subject of an entire article.

The gist of the story is that she decided to assign her AP Language Arts class selections from Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, which relates the story of his early years and his growing awareness of racism in America. The memoir is basically a midwit-tier extended Tumblr post built around the thesis that the only reason America exists is to destroy black people, or “Black bodies” in Coates-speak. As Steve Sailer noted, Coates’ biggest narrative challenge is that all of the violence directed at him, a sensitive and bookish youth, came from his urban peers rather than the Klan, and much of his analysis of the structures of white supremacy is merely an extended rationalization for the problems he would prefer to be dealing with (the book begins with the story of his black friend being killed by a cop, without mentioning that the cop was himself black until far into the story). The whole thing is pretentious, pompous, and overwrought, with all the subtlety and nuance of an HR-mandated diversity module narrated by Spike Lee. In other words, it was perfect for a high school English class save for one thing- the kids ratted her out to the administration, who demanded that she halt the assignment immediately. Like Galileo before her, she responded to this attack on her intellectual freedom by meekly complying and thus staying out of serious trouble.

Like this, but with an NPR vibe

English teachers, like public school teachers as a whole, tend to be nice white ladies with this year’s hottest new opinions. In blue areas this means they just kind of blend in; no one pays any mind to their BLM flags or Pride messaging or any of the other signals of compliance they send to the regime. Like Havel’s greengrocer, they put great stock in signs. This is true even in a very red state like South Carolina. However, it is important to note that there are major differences in how the leftist mind-virus spreads in culturally conservative areas as opposed to to its native habitats. I believe that when one understands these differences an opportunity manifests itself for an incipient Dark Renaissance. Let me explain.

Well, not all beliefs and religions . . . or all cultures . . . and honestly not really all colors either. All ages is our current project . . .

South Carolina is a fairly insular place with a relatively small population. It is half the size of its nearest neighbors North Carolina and Georgia, and unlike those states, does not include large enclaves of progressive emigrants fleeing progressivism in order to spread progressivism. Yes, such people do exist in South Carolina, but they tend, for now, to be more diffuse. Part of the reason for this is that SC really lacks any large urban areas; Columbia and the far wealthier Charleston are really just very large small towns (in feel if not in a technical sense) and outside of the metro area of the latter no city has more than 75,000 people. Even the inhabitants born outside of SC tend to be from the surrounding states and culturally Southern; there is nothing in the state like the Yankee colony that is Raleigh-Durham. When I taught there, the family names of the students in my classes were commonly the same as those adorning local street signs and other public places.

This has both good and bad aspects. The people as a whole are exactly the sort that one would want in an ideal dissident right community- good-natured, honest, self-effacing, and religious. They hunt and fish and love occasions where they gather as families. They are generally intolerant of crime and laziness and regard progressive social trends with bemused distain. Above all, they valorize low-church Protestantism, the Republican Party, and college football. These are not distinct concepts in their worldview. While they understand on an intellectual level that Jesus did not play D1 ball, they know He would have should such have existed in Ancient Palestine.

If Christianity had not been introduced to the area, the locals would be sacrificing bulls to his Genius, and they may still be doing it anyway.

And that is where the bad parts start to manifest themselves. While South Carolinians are deeply conservative, their conservativism is of a temperamental rather than a thoughtful nature, and while this does provide some cushion against the ills of the modern world, there is little place in such a community for someone pursuing a more engaged intellectual life. The whole culture militates against it. I not infrequently experienced students dropping out of my dual enrollment (college) classes with the parental explanation that said students wished to focus on baseball or the like that semester. College selection was heavily weighed in terms of what level of NCAA play was represented (“Oh, your son got into a DIII school? That’s nice I guess . . .”). I knew students who turned down Ivy League offers on the grounds that local colleges would allow them to be in the starting lineup freshman year. It should be said that none of these people, students or parents, had any real interest in professional play as far as I could tell. Nor did they perceive the Ivies as being more “woke” than any other college in general. They really did just want to keep playing their game for four more years, at which point they would ideally take up a profession with an income sufficient to finance their own children’s club sports, on which it was not unheard of for even working class families to drop thousands of dollars a year.

If you aren’t interested in this sort of thing there isn’t really an outlet for you. Integrated as it all is, rebelling against a piece of it tends to lead to wholesale rejection. Unfortunately, a distain for sports fandom, or for the brittle and superficial religiosity, or a political culture embodied by Nikki Haley and Lindsay Graham, does not tend to lead to a higher or more nuanced take on them, to personal athletic excellence, deeper spirituality, or RETVRN. Instead, especially for women, “better” tends to be interpreted as that culture offered by managerial neoliberalism. It’s the path of rebellion that generally meets the least resistance, even in South Carolina, and it comes ready made with a national support structure in the form of sympathetic media constantly denouncing as retrograde and immoral all the things to which you feel superior in your immediate environment.

The article mentions this, noting that the teacher in question grew up in the kind of home normal for a South Carolinian of her generation and shared the values of her neighbors until she began growing frustrated with their culture while in high school, particularly, the author is careful to note, their “conservative, Christian views.” Probably brighter than many of her peers, she had questions for which they had no answers. It is important to note a few things here. One, public schools everywhere, among other functions, are designed to provide intelligent and well-meaning young people with pat answers that reinforce the values of the managerial regime, in this case, that conservative values are backward and that any attachment people have to their culture and traditions are merely masks for ignorance and bigotry. This has the effect of giving the boredom and isolation of such young people an animating political and social significance and focus; the world can be remade into a place where ideas matters and people care about things other than MaxPreps. The main barrier in this understanding is the stultifying ignorance of the people of the community, whose views should be dealt with as with dead wood- fire. Two, and not to get all Dems-are-the-real-racists here, but this is why you never see the reverse of this. There are no articles in the national media about a teacher who went into a Baltimore high school with a copy of The Bell Curve and is made out to be a martyr. The system finds willing scalawags like this woman because it does indeed reward them, in this case with a long article with a number of pensive photos and turgid prose detailing the fear she feels toward the students and families whose values she despises. And finally, there is no rightist alternative on offer. All the school did was forbid her from teaching Coates’ book. No one seems to have suggested, in this most unthinkingly normiecon of places, even something within the boundaries of respectability like David Horowitz’ Radical Son, or Thomas Sowell’s A Personal Odyssey, (both books, that while I disagree with many of the respective authors’ premises, I found well written and interesting). It’s as though the people at the school, while rejecting the woke, are themselves happy to remain asleep, provided they are able to dream about an undefeated season for the Gamecocks. After all, even though she has made very clear that she has every intention of continuing to undermine their culture and values they have still retained her as an employee, as if having banished the hateful book, they are now beyond the issue.

It’s a great book.

The lesson here goes back to a theme I have touched on many times before, that there is a great opportunity for those of us on the right to reach out to the young before the system claims them. While I have said before that public schools are to be avoided -and nothing in this article should give anyone any hope on that score- making yourself available to answer the questions of bright young people in any context, even when the answers are difficult, is of vital importance for the future of the West. In my role as a teacher I am constantly faced with young people asking about Ukraine and Israel and Trump and religion and any number of other things, and there is nothing more important to be, and nothing more satisfying on a personal level, than giving them honest and mature responses that cover the gamut of possible outlooks.

“Some people see the war in Ukraine as way to weaken Russia; these people see Russia as an autocracy that threatens the rest of Europe [normie], but others see Russia as responding to American provocations, NATO expansion, and the specter of economic domination [getting warmer]. Note that the predictions made at the start of the war by the US government and its allies have all come to nothing. What might that tell you about the credibility of the system in other areas? Have you heard of Gell-Mann Amnesia? [in the zone] Let me tell you about James Burnham. Have you ever heard of Alexandr Dugin ? . .”

-Me, paraphrased

Simply by being knowledgeable (to the degree I’m able) and honest with them I'm able to do more positive good than the micromanaging Karens of the public system and all of their book-bans combined. And to be clear, and fair to the teacher in question, I don’t think her assignment in and of itself was bad. Yes, the book is terrible and her intention in assigning it was very much to play the woke-scold against a captive audience of teens. But Between The World and Me is very much a topic of national discussion and knowing about it, in the abstract, is not a bad thing. My students are given a solid dose of Marx, of Critical Race Theory, of Intersectional Feminism, and a range of normie liberal writers like Robert Reich and Thomas Frank. I present their ideas as I imagine they would present them, and everything, including De Maistre, Dugin, Evola, Gomez-Davila, de Bonald, Guenon -the ones I actually like- I open up to criticism and I make the students aware of how others have criticized them. I suspect (obviously I wasn’t there) that the Coates lesson was less than welcoming of that kind of feedback, that the students were simply meant to accept that they were the beneficiaries of the racism that caused young Coates to be robbed of his lunch money by his fellow urban youth, that it had never really occurred to the teacher that that criticism of Coates was even possible, given that he is a certified genius AND diverse. In the end, her own beliefs are just as reflexive and hidebound as the people among whom she is forced to live- unless the Washington Post sees fit to honor her sacrifice for the regime by making her a columnist, writing endlessly and superciliously about her benighted community of Trump voters for the amusement of our decayed elites.

So in short, if you want good barbecue, go to Shealy’s Barbecue in Batesburg-Leesville. And while you’re in South Caroline, perhaps consider teaching. There are a number of charter schools and private schools where one can do great work, as well as a thriving dual-enrollment system and a good amount of junior colleges, not to mention the homeschool collectives. Greenville hosts one of the largest homeschool conventions in the country. But above all remember, as I’ve said before: a commie taught a kid today- DID YOU?