Kulturkampf

[HaughtyFrank]

Fun article about how intersectionality is not really working

A joke you hear a lot is that, in Amherst, only the “H” is silent. It’s a town known for raucous debate and lefty political infighting. Still, even by these disputatious standards, the arguments that have been carrying on around Amherst Regional Middle School, or arms, have been vociferous. How and when they started depends on whom you ask, but they broke into wider public view last May, when Amherst’s high-school newspaper, the Graphic, published a five-thousand-word article headlined “ ‘It’s Life or Death’: Failure to Protect Trans Kids at arms a Systemic Problem.” The piece anonymously quoted several trans and gender-nonconforming students, who recounted numerous incidents of bullying and harassment, harmful encounters with guidance counsellors, and fruitless complaints to administrators. Among the article’s striking details was that, at a prayer meeting at school, a guidance counsellor reportedly said, “In the name of Jesus, we bind that LGBTQ gay demon that wants to confuse our children.” (The counsellor later denied making this comment.) That same staffer, the piece alleged, handed out chocolate crucifixes to students.

An uncomfortable fact was that most of the concerned parents were white and the two counsellors under scrutiny were not: one of them, Hector Santos, is Latino, and the other, Delinda Dykes, is Black. Cunningham, who is Black, was the district’s head of diversity, equity, and H.R.; Morris, the superintendent, is white. At the school-committee meeting, which lasted nearly six hours, one of the few people who spoke in Cunningham’s defense was her son, who had worked at arms as a student-support specialist. “For a prime example of how women of color get treated in leadership positions,” he told the crowd, “I say look no further than Amherst public schools.” The troubles at arms, he insisted, were “not about the L.G.B.T.Q.+ situation,” but, rather, the product of an unusually combative teachers’ union and ordinary racism.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240403202944/https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-education/the-meltdown-at-a-middle-school-in-a-liberal-town