It's a long article, so I'll just pick some select quotes, but I would say it's worth the full read.
www.nbcnews.com
A viral video forced a wealthy Texas suburb to confront racism. A 'silent majority' fought back.
Southlake is known for its top-ranked public schools. But a heated fight over a diversity plan has some parents questioning their future in the city.
www.nbcnews.com
Robin Cornish was at work in the fall of 2018 when she got a text message from another parent. It was a link to a video showing several white high school students laughing as they filmed themselves shouting the N-word at a party.
One of the students in the video had shared it on Snapchat, and now it was going viral.
Cornish, a 51-year-old Black mother of five, recognized the girl leading the chant as the younger sibling of one of her son's former friends. Cornish was upset as she watched the 8-second clip, she said, but she wasn't surprised.
This was Southlake, Texas, after all.
The elite, mostly white suburb 30 miles northwest of Dallas has a reputation as one of the best places in the country to raise a family, thanks in large part to its highly ranked public school system: The Carroll Independent School District, home of the Dragons, where the median home costs $650,000 and average SAT scores are good enough to get students into top-tier universities.
But the video of Carroll high schoolers shouting the N-word was about to expose another side of the fast-growing and quickly diversifying community, one that Cornish and other Black parents quietly referred to as Southlake's "dirty secret."
This was the city where, on the day after Rosa Parks died in 2005, elementary school children told Cornish's four oldest kids "now you have to sit in the back of the bus," she said. It's where a sixth grade boy once joked with her son: "How do you get a Black out of a tree? You cut the rope." It's where, weeks after her husband died suddenly in 2008, a white boy on the football team told her son, "Your mom is only voting for Obama because your dad is dead and she's going to need welfare."
This past summer — nearly two years after the viral video — the school board unveiled a plan that would require diversity and inclusion training for all students as part of the K-12 curriculum, while amending the student code of conduct to specifically prohibit acts of discrimination, referred to in the document as "microaggressions."
Within days, outraged parents — most of them white — formed a political action committee and began packing school board meetings to voice their strong opposition. Some denounced the diversity plan as "Marxist" and "leftist indoctrination" designed to "fix a problem that doesn't exist." The opponents said they, too, wanted all students to feel safe at Carroll, but they argued that the district's plan would instead create "diversity police" and amounted to "reverse racism" against white children.
The dispute grew so heated that parents on both sides pulled children out of the school system, while others made plans to move out of town. One mother sued the district, successfully putting the diversity plan on hold.
One example: Every year when Cornish's children were small, Carroll fifth graders were required to participate in Colonial Day, an educational celebration in which students dress up like characters from the 1600s. But little thought seemed to go into what that meant for Black children, Cornish said, an oversight that became all too clear when a classmate told one of her daughters that she couldn't dress up like a nurse; she would have been a slave.
The opposition to the diversity plan was fierce, immediate and well organized.
Moore and other board members were flooded with angry emails from parents. Some formed a political action committee, Southlake Families PAC, and started a website demanding that the board "focus on fall classes, not setting up a district diversity police!" The group quickly raised more than $100,000 from dozens of residents, including from some of the high-powered executives and leading conservatives who've settled in Southlake. (Dana Loesch, a former National Rifle Association spokeswoman and right-wing media star who lives in Southlake, gave the group $2,000, campaign finance records show.)
For months last summer and into the fall, the public comment section of Carroll's school board meetings became a spectacle, as dozens of parents showed up each week to speak against the plan.
As in-person classes resumed in the fall, Moore and other Carroll board members searched for a compromise. The board agreed to appoint seven new volunteers to the diversity committee, including some who'd been critical of the plan, and asked the group to propose revisions based on community feedback.
But that work was halted after one parent, Kristin Garcia, sued the district over the way the diversity plan was developed, alleging that board members had violated the Texas open meetings law. Although the district has disputed that claim in court filings, a judge issued a temporary restraining order in December prohibiting the school board from working on the plan while the litigation is pending.
Allen West, the Texas GOP chairman, addressed the dispute in August when he was invited to speak at a church near the city. In a video of the speech posted to YouTube, West told the audience that the situation in Southlake follows a pattern of school districts attempting to indoctrinate children with liberal values.
West, who is Black, then offered a suggestion for how to fight back. He told the audience to welcome new residents from out of state with a pecan pie, but then to ask, "Now why are you here?"
And if those new neighbors don't share traditional conservative beliefs about gun rights and tax policy, West advised the audience to respond with seven words: "Go back to where you came from."
With that, the room of mostly white Southlake residents, including City Councilman and mayoral candidate John Huffman, jumped to their feet in applause, the video shows. Huffman, who has opposed the district diversity plan on social media, did not return messages seeking comment.
West ended his remarks by urging the crowd to continue the fight to "run these progressive socialists the hell out of Texas," and was again given a standing ovation.
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