A Virginia mother has decided to pull up a bar stool and settle into the fake-a** narrative that critical race theory (CRT) is what’s at the heart of her biracial son’s recent “brainwashed” realization that he is indeed considered Black in this country.
Melissa Riley, who is white and Native American, is in fact so convinced that CRT is the boogeyman that she’s suing her 13-year-old son’s school district, according to the New York Post.
Riley’s son’s father is Black. She tells the Post that her son never saw himself as any different than the other kids in Charlottesville, Virginia, even though his skin was darker than that of most of his friends.
She described the teen by saying, “He looks Hawaiian. … He’s beautiful.” But after the “CRT” lessons in his school, Riley says everything changed.
Riley and her lawyer appeared on one of the most racist of the Fox News offerings, Jesse Watters Primetime, and claimed that before “CRT,” she never had issues with her son.
“He is in eighth grade,' Riley told Watters. “He's seeing himself just as a Black man. He's seeing things that don't go his way as racism. And he is finding safety in numbers now.” Riley even complained that her son won’t do his household chores anymore because he says it’s racist to ask him to do them.
Riley and her son are plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the Albemarle County School Board, filed in December 2021 by the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), over the school’s alleged “CRT” curriculum.
“They have totally changed his perspective. They have put him in a box,” Riley told Watters of the alleged anti-racism curriculum at Henley Middle School in Crozet, Virginia.
Ryan Bangert, Riley's lawyer, told Watters: ”It's never right for a school to teach kids that they are determined by their race. It's never okay for a school to tell kids that bigotry should be fought with bigotry and racism should be fought by doubling down on racism. Those things are not okay. … They're a violation of students' civil rights.”
The school board responded to criticism and the suit by affirming that it intends to continue teaching anti-bias lessons as part of a “continuous growth model.” Per the New York Post:
“These are non-negotiables,” the board wrote. “We are firmly committed to achieving these outcomes and to supporting the inclusive programs and activities that make this possible. We welcome all points of view in how best to strengthen our continuous growth model, and we reject all efforts that would have us resist positive change in favor of the status quo.”
Again for the folks in the back: CRT is only taught in law schools. It’s a university-level course. Anti-CRT rhetoric is simply code for “I don’t want my kids to learn that the United States is built on the foundation of systemic racism.”
According to the Crozet Gazette, some parents at Henley have been outraged since the school launched its Courageous Conversations About Race (CCAR) program in 2019.
The curriculum encompasses “four units covering topics such as identity, community, bias, discrimination, and social justice, with an emphasis on anti-racism as a unifying theme for eighth-graders. Parents have attended recent school board meetings in droves to express their satisfaction or displeasure with the lessons,” the Gazette reports.
The ADF complaint alleges that Henley’s “CRT” curriculum “indoctrinate[s] children in an ideology” and “views everyone and everything through the lens of race. … Far from exploring ideas or philosophies surrounding justice and reconciliation, that ideology fosters racial division, racial stereotyping, and racial hostility.”
So let’s unpack Riley’s ridiculousness. As a Black person myself with a Black biracial son, I have to ask why this woman waited until her son was in middle school to tell him the truth about how this nation sees him. Is teaching him about white privilege, white supremacy, slavery, segregation, red-lining, and racist, violent, and often deadly policing really what’s changed him?
Teaching kids about the reality of racism isn’t designed to taint or divide them. It’s about teaching them the history of the country they live in. And without education, reconciliation, and truth, there will never be change.
So Riley should be bowing down her entitled head to Henley Middle School and thanking them for doing the job she should have been responsible and ballsy enough to do herself. Because all those white kids he doesn’t look like need to learn about race more than he does. Who knows, they might become Virginia police officers someday, and how soon they may forget their middle school friend isn’t one of them when guns are drawn and illegal stops have been made.
Republished with permission from Daily Kos.
UPDATE:
