On Jan. 30, several students attending West Springfield High School (WSHS) in Fairfax County, Virginia, told their parents about a disturbingly racist video they were forced to watch at school. These students, coming from all racial backgrounds, took issue with the fact that the video displayed white people, illustrated as cartoon mosquitos, taking bites out of people of color with their “microaggressions.” In the end, the video concludes that white people don’t understand microaggressions because they do not often experience them.
Similarly, in December 2022, during an eighth-grade civics class at Irving Middle School, a feeder to WSHS, a substitute teacher randomly announced to the students that black people had to go through things that white people didn’t — and that “white folks just didn’t understand.” When I notified the school’s principal about the incident, she said she would “look into it” and then never followed up with me.
Across the county, students of all ages repeatedly are receiving a troubling message: White people are clueless and/or perpetrators, and people of color are victims. A Fairfax County fourth-grade teacher, whose classroom is marked as a “safe space” and decorated with a transgender flag, spent an excessive amount of her instructional time regarding our nation’s founding focused on the races of people in the pictures. Another elementary school teacher, on the other side of Fairfax County, went as far as having students role-play slaves and landowners to demonstrate the “economics of slavery.”
Institutionalizing Inequality in Public Schools
Fairfax County Public Schools
