Thread by @xianb8

The "school closings destroyed the lives of millions of kids and it was mostly kids of color" crowd seriously beliefs that all of us in these communities did nothing for our kids for two years and that our humanity comes from proximity to middle class whiteness.

This ignores that again and again it was families of color who CORRECTLY figured out that municipal leaderships were not to be trusted to value our lives during a global pandemic.

To look at the way hundreds of thousands of students' caregivers were treated as expendable and then conclude that the problem here was that we didn't force families of color to attend school in person is some serious eugenic nazi shit.

I love teaching. I treasure school because it's a place where everyone comes in with some commitment to mutual learning.

But the school system is racist as hell. And it's racist as hell because the policymakers trying to force in-person have constructed it to be racist as hell.

And I'm not getting any parents from our community angry that we are working together to protect our kids.

I hear a lot of folks from corner offices at ACME Soylent Green saying "We killed service workers, why are you so uppity that you think you deserve protection."

So I'll be blunt. If you are a middle class white do-gooder, put up yourself. I'd say your kid, but you might do that and I like your kid.

If our kids get lead poisoned, let me feed you lead. If our kids get COVID, let me kill you instead of their grandparent.

Cause otherwise, you are just playing fantasy football with our communities and fuck that forever and ever.

And just to illustrate: Do you like doors on your bathroom stall? Do you like toilet paper?

These were some of the issues that students made a video about at my second CPS school.

Can you imagine a world where rich white people didn't have access to these things?

Do you like Bologna sandwiches? In the current building I teach at (and my child attends), students had to eat only bologna sandwiches for months cause we could make hot food because CPS privatized the cleaning and we ended up with 1000s of roaches and rats.

And I could go on forever. Like the time the future secretary of education and his team raised school standards above every other district in the state so they could call all of the high schools "failing" and steal power from the family councils of each school.

Or the fact that white communities get to vote for their school boards, but almost all of the appointed boards are in districts with large numbers of people of color.

Or how they made a bunch of selective schools pulling students out of the community so that white families wouldn't have to go to majority Black schools, and then compared test scores and pronounced a drop in scores of neighborhood schools AFTER THEY TOOK OUT THE HIGHEST SCORERS

Or when a bunch of white educators took teaching techniques from Black educators w/o credit and got millions to set up application based schools that suspended vast quantities of kids of color, were actively segregated and ultimately had to apologize for their racist ideologies?

But yeah, folks think problem here is teachers won't collaborate on forcing students of color in substandard buildings in a pandemic that has every step of the way killed more in our communities even as we supported more mitigation than the white communities being spared.

And why did the city leadership just hold a press conference where they promised high grade masks are coming?

Because for 2 years they've been skimping on pandemic mitigation materials because they thought no one would care about our communities.

And they just left tens of thousands of FINISHED COVID tests OUT IN THE FUCKING SNOW WHERE THEY SPOILED this week.

We tested our kids, drove around or walked around or bused around trying to find a drop off point and they didn't even process them correctly.

And this is the level of humanity they treat CPS kids on the daily. And then we get either excuses or worse pity as if without extra, racist, condescending attention our children couldn't possibly learn.

Our community loves, lives, and raises children beautifully.

Who raised the people in charge? Where did they go to school? Cause I'm seeing a lot of problems with math, literacy, ethics, and empathy from the folks running things.