A quick intro: The following is an op-ed I wrote during the 2021 election. If you’ll remember, it was a time of increasing incivility and unrest as communities grappled with how to move forward in the new chaotic phase of the pandemic. We were mired in the extreme backlash that came after the Black Lives Matter protests of the summer prior. All at once, it seemed that our local school boards were under attack by rabid, sometimes violent hordes of angry parents upset about the “dangers” of masking and this “new” threat called “critical race theory.” As someone who cares about racial justice and studied critical race theory as a law student, I entered the fray in my community in order to correct the record, and the local Q Anon labeled me a communist propagandist sent to destroy my community from within. They had taken over our township’s Republican party with the support of the national Republican party.
To be clear, I was unbothered by the accusations that I was a Marxist infiltrator. My circle of progressive friends were quite envious of my new moniker, and everyone found it all quite hilarious. Less hilarious were the intentional efforts the radical far-right both near and far took to make my family and me feel unsafe. Equally disturbing was the discovery that neither the law nor the police could or would do much to protect people from this particular kind of terrorism.
But the silence of people I had considered friends is what I personally found most painful. These were people I was in community and building community with. I heard their silence loud and clear. Their unspoken message: I‘d made my bed. Who else but me to lie in it? I felt shame for how much these threats and the silence of “friends” in turn silenced me. It disempowered me and disconnected me from myself. I internalized the idea that I had somehow deserved the attacks and was not worthy of protection. I felt like a fraud, a fair-weather activist.
It has taken most of 2022 to process the attacks and the silence, and to recognize that the shame isn’t mine. I did what I needed to do to protect myself and my family. And I refuse to be one of the silent ones. I write this now to release it, to take back my power, and to remind myself and others that critical race theory was but a shapeshifting pawn in the culture wars used to manipulate the electorate. It will be and has already been replaced (SEE: banned books, LGBTQ student groups, gender-neutral bathrooms). We will see this again and again, in future elections yet to come. Written in Fall of 2021, my thoughts below on our Weimar Republic moment.
Fall 2021
For the past six years, my family and I have lived in a sleepy little township along the famed Mainline of Philadelphia. It is home to Tredyffrin-Easttown, a public school often ranked first in our state and among the best in the country. It is why people continue to flock here, regardless of pandemic upheavals and broader downturns in the real-estate market.
It’s not the sort of place where you’d expect the raging battles over race and national memory now convulsing school districts across the country to settle in. Unlike Virginia — where voters are rallying to Trumpian gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin as he demagogues race-conscious materials and instruction plans — we are not in the seat of the former Confederacy. And unlike Texas — another flash point in the moral panic over critical race theory — we are not prone to wage evangelically driven culture wars at the drop of a hat.
But that’s all changed lately. I should know, because I’m in the center of our school district’s suddenly pitched battle over the alleged excesses of critical race theory (CRT). As of last week, an orchestrated smear campaign on the right has taken hold here in the Mainline suburbs, characterizing me as a Marxist infiltrator, a “professional hater” and “controversial activist” charged with destroying and dividing this community via my role as PTO president of one of our district’s middle schools. As someone who needs board approval to buy $500 worth of sandwich wraps for our school’s faculty and staff, it was news to me that I wielded this much power and influence.
At the heart of this inquisition is a single Zoom panel discussion on race and equity I hosted as a concerned Asian-American mother in a district that includes an enrollment of Asian-American children above 25 percent. The session ran all of ten minutes and I did not give it in my capacity as PTO president. It included a primer on CRT, as well as an explanation of how the far right has come together to demonize this body of thought on a national scale. Finally, I contrasted the insights advanced under the aegis of CRT with our district’s own diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts.
In short order, aggrieved activists in my community circulated a change.org petition that garnered more than 240 signatures calling for my ouster from my volunteer position as the PTO president of my son’s school. Their online campaigns have linked to the home page of my PTO — which means that the group’s entire board was exposed to evidence-free assertions about the “divisive” work I am allegedly undertaking with their support. They have also posted video clips identifying my face and likeness on the likes of Breitbart, and included quotes from social media posts I drafted as a private citizen on my friend’s private Facebook page taken completely out of context. These were screenshot and sent to everyone from my friends to my principal to our superintendent. I lobbied for two days to have this material removed, as it eventually was. But by then, the damage had largely been done: the petitioners repeatedly violated the community guidelines change.org had instituted to “protect” me and other targets of petition campaigns on the site. I woke up Friday morning to an op-ed by disgraced former Philadelphia Inquirer opinion writer Christine Flowers assailing me for “castigating white parents.” Aside from being a dumpster fire of lies and misrepresentations, it’s also egregiously badly written.
What’s clear is that far-right extremism has come to roost in the cradle of America’s civilization, just minutes away from the hallowed grounds of the Valley Forge National Park where Washington wintered with his troops during the Revolutionary War. In truth, this paranoid turn in my community’s political discourse has been brewing for some time. Since last June, our district — like many surrounding districts in the western suburbs of Philadelphia — has been under siege by Q Anon extremists; a torrent of dark money from the right has also unleashed an cortège of national strategists, who gleefully promulgate delusions about the deep state, alleged school board cover-ups, and the sinister corps of “woke” teachers who are demonizing white students and instructing them in the finer points of racial self-hatred. The architects behind this petition are the same people who have held an Unmask protest at one of our first in-person school board meetings since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.
They are the same floating corps of extremists you see frothing and screaming on cable news, accusing school boards of abusing children.
(To quote Mean Girls, this guy doesn’t even go here). The overlap between the anti-mask contingent and the anti-equity contingent is the center of a Venn diagram. They are led and organized locally by a group of suburban women who have formed a PAC called the Conservative Women of the Mainline (CWML) (much has since been scrubbed off the internet, but we have the receipts). During an interview on the Candace Owen show, Turning Point’s Erin Elmore had this to say about the CWML: “These women did not have political aspirations. They were playing tennis and living their best life. And then they saw their kids learning critical race theory. They saw their kids being stuck in masks all day. They saw their kids not going to school for 18 months. And now they are a group of moms that came together and said “Enough. We are running for school board. We are changing our schools. We can’t live like this anymore.” Their “movement” started with a billboard during the height of the COVID pandemic, demanding that our schools open 5 days, and they have spent the past 18 months in a delirium of victimology, complaining about the evils of maskne, and turning on well-worn tropes of non-White populations overrunning “their” suburbs in an attempt to fundamentally change them to their detriment.
Republican candidates have brought divisive talking points and underhanded politicking typically reserved for bigger stages to our local school board and supervisor elections. This is not your father’s Republican party. While the veneer is of moderate candidates running on platform’s of “transparency” and “accountability,” the reality is far from the truth. They lie about their Democratic opponents and incumbents as political strategy and with seeming impunity. They lob serious allegations about what the current sitting retinue of all-Dem, all-volunteer school board directors may or may not be doing with our tax dollars, why our district is “hiding” curriculum from parents, how they are purposefully preventing parents from discussing or objecting to textbooks or library books. They’ve gone so far as to form fictitious groups to send out mass unsolicited emails to spread these untruths. They rub elbows with Jan 6th insurrectionist, Stop-the-Steal conspiracy theorist, and Muslim hate group leader Scott Presler, who has been on a one-man campaign to “come for your school boards” and included Tredyffrin in his roadshow.
One Republican candidate of note is Deana Wang, a first generation Chinese American immigrant running for school board. She is supported by the CWML, as well as the Keeping Kids in School PAC that emerged during the early months of COVID — a PAC that coaches parents, among other things to “Capture video of very upset children acting out with tears or frustration,” to attend board meetings, and “if Zoom public comments are allowed, have parents from your group flood Zoom comments with prepared questions so as to outnumber any comments from detractors.”
Wang was one of the most vocal critics of the supposed infiltration of CRT in our K-12 schools, drawing comparisons between its tenets and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, characterizing both as fomenting “animosity and violence.” She’s since acknowledged that CRT is not taught in our schools yet touts Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a good text to teach our children about slavery, claims sexuality is a choice, and distorts the idea of equity in a way that renders most special education accommodations meaningless. As a former research scientist at a pharmaceutical giant, her confusion about the general workings of US federal intellectual property law are puzzling. These are the very same laws that govern and protect the proprietary teacher training materials provided by the Pacific Education Group (PEG), the DEI consulting group that has been the target of much local anti-equity ire. Wang has argued that parents and taxpayers have a right to this copyrighted materials, often conflating curriculum with teacher/staff training and continuing education.
The local Democrats, for their part, have largely and tragically slept on the Chinese American vote. They are not familiar with this electorate, and I personally know left-leaning Chinese American voters who plan to cross the party line to vote for “one of their own.” As an Asian American voter who believes deeply in equity and justice and would love to see more AsAm representation in all facets of public life, I am alarmed and appalled to see our first Asian American woman candidate for school board ride in on a divisive, warped agenda. One that attempts to appease a suburban electorate that broke against Trump in 2020 with culture-war invectives and faux moral panics over i.e. the possible arrival of Mao’s Cultural Revolution to the classrooms of Conestoga High School. White adjacency is a powerful, disorienting drug. This is the new politicized, radicalized Model Minority.
The CWML is made up of many fellow parents whose children play and interact with my children. In the classroom, on the playground, on the soccer field; they share lunchrooms and party invites. Since the smear campaign, those spaces don’t feel so safe anymore. I can’t tell you how horrifying that has been for our family, and we have done what we can to stay safe. If this all sounds unhinged, that’s because it is. But the really bonkers part is that this is happening everywhere, all the time it seems. The Q Anon factions have laid siege to our suburban communities all across this nation, and there is no counterpart. The Democrats have ceded the field; left the arena. The few remaining are overwrought parents, private citizens, and the few candidates and incumbents still brave enough to run for election in this charged atmosphere. We are armed with stones and daggers, outnumbered and overwhelmed in a battle against an enemy fighting with tanks, machine guns, and the latest in 21st century weaponry, many of them intangible.
It’s no exaggeration to say that the assault on our schools is also an assault on the foundations of our democracy. This is not about a difference in opinion. It is truth vs propaganda, liberty versus authoritarianism. And as many recent ugly turns in American politics have made abundantly clear, our democracy has been imperiled for some time now. What’s at stake in these battles is ultimately the question of whether we still hold democracy, inclusion, and equality to be essential features of an open America; whether the country will be able to advance these ideals with a full awareness of how we have betrayed them in the past. And we have plenty of past to instruct us here.
My husband grew up in Communist East Germany. He has typically bristled at comparisons to Nazis or hyperbolic comparisons of latter-day American life to the last days of Weimar democracy in the 1930s. No longer. We now regularly have long-into-the-night, hand-wringing conversations about what kept good people from speaking out against fascist lies and Nazi propaganda. And we stay up later still reckoning with the answer: that the climate of intimidation and silence created around their agitprop campaigns simply made it too easy for ordinary citizens to look away and pretend nothing all that serious was happening. Until and unless we realize that the fight to i.e. preserve the insights of critical race theory is the fight to preserve free thought everywhere, it’s all too easy to envision the same thing happening here — even in the comfortable precincts of the seemingly untouchable Philadelphia Mainline.
I live in a community that does not like to speak out. Until now, we’ve not had to enter the fray, our relative idyll immune to the vulgarities of politics. Well, I am here now to ring the alarm bells. Our time to speak out has arrived. The Weimar Republic marked the brief period of democracy in Germany between the world wars. Distrust in institutions, a longing for a glorious, glorified past misremembered, an us-vs-them scarcity mentality, and an alarming tolerance for and complacency around rising authoritarianism eventually led to its downfall and ushered in the brutal fascist, Nazi period. Does any of this sound familiar? How do we work our way out of this stranglehold?
To begin, we need to build on both the liberatory movements of the past and the movements of the moment, coalesce around a common desire for liberation that is intricately tied to — among other things — racial justice. And we must do so in coalition with one another. A coalition that is intentionally multigenerational, multiracial, multidimensional. This diverse, inclusive coming-together will allow us to meet the present and the future with an eye towards peace, justice, and my god, a kindness that has likely always been aspirational, and has sadly remained heretofore elusive to the greater American project. The “Nazi” now lives next door. What will you say? What will you do? How will the history books remember you, my neighbor, my friend? It is time for you to enter the arena. Let’s go.
Who I am: I am a documentary and impact producer who has worked in film and television on projects ranging from sustainable food practices, gender-based violence, voting rights, to affirmative action around the world. I am also a graduate of the University of Cincinnati College of Law where I received a joint JD/MA in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and took courses in Critical Race Theory. I am the mother of a middle schooler and a high schooler in the Tredyffrin-Easttown School District in suburban Mainline Philadelphia, and am also the PTO President of the VFMS. I was shocked at last June’s explosive school board meeting on our district’s DEI initiatives to see so many fellow Asian Americans — specifically Chinese Americans — in our community speak so passionately against it. Since then, I have been organizing with other pro-equity Asian American parents and parents of color as a private citizen to support our district’s DEI efforts, including through outreach to siloed Asian American groups within our community.
What has followed since that time is something out of a dystopian hellscape. I want to do my part to support racial justice efforts and ensure that the foundations of our fraying democratic society stay intact.
