“Reopen” Racism at La Mesa/Spring Valley School Board Meeting
Chardá Bell-Fontenot, Vice President of the La Mesa-Spring Valley School Board and mother of two young boys, has gone into hiding. She dared to raise the topic of racism during a meeting to adopt a plan to reopen schools after almost a year of COVID-19-related closures.
Pearl clutching outage at the mere mention of the R word has escalated into threats against her life. It’s as if promises of violent revenge are still acceptable behavior in response to people who dare get "uppity.".
Now don’t get me wrong.
I get it that parents want schools to reopen. I know that teachers also want schools to reopen, no matter how much venom gets spewed their way over the union asking for silly things like safe working conditions. I also get it that too many school administrators have done nothing but piss parents off with their mushy-headedness.
But this article isn’t about debating the finer points of reopening. It’s about how right wing grievance politics, the rhetorical and epistemological cornerstone of Trumpism, is exploiting very real concerns and turning them into broadsides aimed at undermining public confidence in governance.
It’s no coincidence that an incident at a small school district’s board meeting has escalated into something much bigger.
Right wing outlets like the Washington Examiner, Fox News, and PJ Media have all cranked up the outrage at a Black woman who dared to question reopening.
https://twitter.com/Wendy4SD/status/1366164017652277251?s=20
Never mind that Bell-Fontent cast the only vote against the reopening plan, which will return students to classrooms starting April 19, two days a week, for two hours a day. Never mind that her remarks were part of a longer contentious discussion with references to previous differences. And never mind that she was simply trying to slow the process down by questioning claims made about an overwhelming number of parents wanting a quick reopening.
What could have made her suggest that racism was involved? Was it the huge difference, mentioned in this Pew survey, between white (and more affluent) parents and minority parents?
Or was it a reaction to the overwhelming hostility directed at educators and administrators by local appendages of the so-called Return movement?
Is it a coincidence that Carlsbad Council member Cori Schumacher responded to news of his situation by Tweeting?
#Vista Unified Trustee & other North County school board members going through the same thing. Vile supremacist entitlement on full display in our public meetings throughout the SD region, esp impacting BIPOC women & LGBTQ elected officials & trad. female-identified industries.
Pay a visit to the ReOpenSanDiego Facebook page if you're interested. You might remember leader Amy Richert’s videos (since taken down) showing confrontations over mask requirements with Target and Costco employees.
This group is among the ones pushing a recall petition aimed at Bell-Fontent.
There are other similarly named groups, and it’s not surprising to see the same names popping up over and over again. Dig around and you’ll find a collection of Qanon conspiracists, anti-maskers, and 5G worrywarts.
Here’s a sampling of posts:
A story from the EpochTimes -- CPAC Speech by the South Dakota Governor on Their “Success” with Covid
A story from the New York Post - New Jersey Driver Wearing N95 Mask Crashes Car and Passes Out Due to Insufficient Oxygen
A user post suggesting San Diego County jail deaths were caused by experimentation with vaccines
A user video: Need proof Covids a hoax? Then here it is!!!!
A user post: The case against masks “Reclaim the only two airway conduits you have for your capacity to breathe. Ignore the Communists-Fascists.
Epoch Times interview with Rep. Darrell Issa proclaiming that life goes back to normal for people who have been vaccinated
A user video: Bill Gates manipulated to suggest his personal connection with the pandemic
A Patriot party member announcing kickoff of collecting signatures to recall Jen Campbell ( I told you those recall folks were hinky)
Now let’s back away and look at the bigger picture again.
Without getting all conspiratorial, it’s plain to see that various flavors of right wing extremists are using varieties of victimization to build their movement.
Other than the stream of (un)consciousness flowing from the Dear Leader, there is no organizational structure. And it is true that GQP activists have grasped the idea that complaining about schools, etc., being shuttered has more political value than boasting about opposing voter rights, civil rights for LGBTQ humans, and financial support for impoverished Americans.
But there ARE organizers on the far right. Like Ammon Bundy, who you might remember as the leader of the 2016 occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon — a deadly 41-day standoff between federal agents and militants who rejected the federal government’s authority over public lands across the West.
He claims to have 50,000 followers in 35 states, hooked up with a phone app allowing them to call a militia like they’d call an Uber and stage a protest within minutes.
From the Los Angeles Times:
Since last March, when he launched People’s Rights — which he describes as “neighborhood watch on steroids” — the organization has attracted tens of thousands of members and sponsored more than 50 demonstrations across the country, dispatching gun-toting activists to the homes of politicians, health agency managers and even a police officer who had arrested a protester.
Experts who track extremists say that the network has significant overlap with white supremacist groups and other far-right organizations and that it has whipped up paranoia and rage, risking lives of hospital workers, health officers, politicians and others in the crosshairs.
“Success,” like the militia mania at the statehouse in Michigan and the January 6 melee at the Capitol building brings opportunists flocking to get a piece of the action.
https://twitter.com/Wendy4SD/status/1366105673960857603?s=20
The dump Newsom effort isn’t unique. There have been “recall” movements in recent months aimed at governors in Arizona, Louisiana, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin, all based on grievances connected to the actions of governments relating to the pandemic.
Part of this hubbub is about partisanship, specifically how people have reacted to the Coronavirus. It’s been a self-fulfilling prophecy that resistance to public health measures has caused higher levels of infections which have triggered more restrictions.
Via Salon:
A paper published in Nature on Nov. 2 — and therefore lost in the election media frenzy — showed that partisan identity was a stronger predictor of how people reacted to the coronavirus than factors like age, race or the severity of the virus where they lived. Researchers hoped that conservative reluctance to practice social distancing would decrease as the pandemic grew worse, but the opposite happened. Conservatives grew more likely to take risks, not less. High levels of right-wing media consumption made refusal to take basic precautions much worse.
But individual behavior is only a small piece of the puzzle. Republicans' tribal hatred of liberals and total-war approach to partisan politics is probably the biggest single factor in why the coronavirus spiraled so badly out of control.
Being a victim has proved to be a lucrative business for right wingers as of late. It turns out there’s a physiological reason why, as James Kimmel, Jr., a lecturer in psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine explained in a recent Politico article:
I am a violence researcher and study the role of grievances and retaliation in violent crime. Recently, I’ve been researching the way grievances affect the brain, and it turns out that your brain on grievance looks a lot like your brain on drugs. In fact, brain imaging studies show that harboring a grievance (a perceived wrong or injustice, real or imagined) activates the same neural reward circuitry as narcotics.
This isn’t a metaphor; it’s brain biology. Scientists have found that in substance addiction, environmental cues such as being in a place where drugs are taken or meeting another person who takes drugs cause sharp surges of dopamine in crucial reward and habit regions of the brain, specifically, the nucleus accumbens and dorsal striatum. This triggers cravings in anticipation of experiencing pleasure and relief through intoxication. Recent studies show that similarly, cues such as experiencing or being reminded of a perceived wrong or injustice — a grievance — activate these same reward and habit regions of the brain, triggering cravings in anticipation of experiencing pleasure and relief through retaliation. To be clear, the retaliation doesn’t need to be physically violent—an unkind word, or tweet, can also be very gratifying.
So there you have it. People are strung out on being mad as hell.
Not all the parents urging schools to reopen are reactionaries, but they are clearly being exploited by people who ultimately don't want public schools to exist.
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