Category Archives: Race and race relations

by James A. Bacon

Joel Mungo is a teacher at Menchville High School in Newport News. Over the past several months, he says, someone periodically left a banana outside his classroom door in what was “clearly a deliberate act.” As a Black person, he not unreasonably interpreted the bananas as a play upon the old racist trope that compared Black people to monkeys.

After the sixth incident, reports WAVY News, Mungo complained to the school administration. A review of surveillance footage found that the culprit was one of his 10th-grade students. The racist implications were self-evident. As Mungo told WAVY, “I’m the only Black teacher he has. He has six other teachers. No other teachers were involved.”

When notified, the student’s parents seemed to be truly embarrassed, Mungo says. But when the child was suspended, they became irate. The article does not say why, but one can imagine that they considered suspension from school to be excessive for the nature of a non-violent, non-criminal offense. For his part, Mungo remains angry, and he is in the process of pursuing legal action, he says, although it’s not clear from the article whom he intends to sue or on what grounds.

“It’s 2022. Just to have some type of hate crime is absolutely ridiculous. I was sickened,” he said. “I’m just fed up with the racism around, especially at our academic institutions. It’s time to take a stand and just let people know it will not be tolerated. … You can’t allow it to go on because then it will just continue to go on.” Continue reading →

by James A. Bacon

It is dogma among practitioners of Critical Race Theory (or whatever other label you wish to apply to the doctrines of the Woke) that Hispanics are akin to Blacks in being “under-represented minorities,” or URMs for short. As URMs, Hispanics are said to be victimized by systemic racism, White privilege, and Whiteness, as evidenced by the disparities in educational achievement between black and brown people on the one hand and Whites and Asians (who are deemed “White-adjacent” even when their skin color is dark) on the other.

Leftist ideology holds that Hispanics are victims of discrimination — either from individual bias, structural racism, or both. But are they? Is it not possible that the No. 1 challenge holding back Hispanic academic achievement in Virginia public schools is the language barrier?

A high percentage of Hispanics come to the United States from poor countries with little education and minimal working knowledge of English. They have to learn the language when they get here. That’s not a monumental problem for adults living in self-contained communities where everyone speaks Spanish, but it is an obstacle for school-age kids who have no choice but to learn the language — especially when school districts are hard-pressed to find teachers qualified to teach English as a second language.

Scarcity of teachers capable of teaching in Spanish is a very different problem than endemic bias and racism, and it calls for different solutions. Continue reading →