Thanksgiving comes early at Charlottesville High

By Jack Cashill

When candidate Joe Biden launched his 2020 presidential campaign, he offered events at Charlottesville, Virginia, as his rationale for running.

Biden specifically cited Trump’s allegedly racist reaction to a 2017 dust-up in Charlottesville, shamelessly misrepresenting Trump’s comments about the violent clash.

“We are in the battle for the soul of this nation,” said Biden. He warned that if Trump were reelected, “He will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation, who we are, and I cannot stand by and watch that happen.”

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More recent events at Charlottesville High School (CHS) suggest that Biden’s battle has already been lost. So chaotic is the environment at the high school in this leafy university town that 30 teachers staged a sick-out on Friday, forcing the school to stay closed through Thanksgiving.

No one should be surprised. Principal Rashaad Pitt, at least until he was canned this week, listed as his foremost area of expertise “restorative justice.”

Charlottesville City Schools identify as “an interconnected, equity-focused school community committed to providing the skills and knowledge needed for lifelong learning, engaged citizenship, and personal fulfillment.”

As is becoming evident to the liberal white parents who send their children to this multi-racial cauldron, a steady diet of “restorative justice” and “equity” can turn a rootless black teen into a self-entitled monster.

“I can’t stay quiet anymore,” wrote one parent on Facebook. “Charlottesville City Schools is out of control. [Administrators] deflect by talking about national news points, but the real danger is coming from within.”

The night before the sudden Friday shut down, CHS counselor David Wilkerson took to Facebook to describe the mayhem that unfolded in the school on Thursday.

“Today, we had roving bands in search of the next fight, multiple fights from which to choose, and hundreds of kids filming and cheering,” Wilkerson wrote.

“We are infantilizing the kids who have neither the personal discipline nor the support from home to make healthy decisions and setting them up for horrific consequences in the near future.”

CHS is about 25% African American. The absence of any references to race, and the evidence from school fight videos elsewhere, leads the savvy reader to infer that the instigators are black.

In a thoughtful follow-up, Wilkerson suggested why this everyday chaos had become part of American public education throughout America.

“During COVID, we had the opportunity to re-imagine public education,” wrote Wilkerson. “Instead, with the best of intentions, we went right back to the way we have always done everything except we LOWERED standards.”

“In the interest of confronting mental health and learning loss,” he continued, “we stopped insisting on attendance, ensured that no grade could ever be below a 50%, and relaxed deadlines whenever possible.”

As a result of the chaos, parents black and white have been pulling their kids from school. Said one black mother whose daughter wanted to escape the violence, “She just feels like no one hears, no one listens, there’s not really any real consequences going on.”

This racially driven madness may be new to Charlottesville, but it is now new to inner-city America. As I document in my book “Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America,” chaos has been the norm in many city schools for at least 60 years.

When Michelle Obama was ready to start elementary school in 1969, for instance, her parents, Fraser and Marian Robinson, refused to send her to shiny new Dulles Elementary School just a block away.

From the Robinsons’ perspective, the problem wasn’t the school building. It was the school’s students, many of whom came from nearby housing projects.

Committing a Class C misdemeanor, the Robinsons used the address of Marian’s sister in Chicago’s middle-class South Shore neighborhood to enroll both Michelle and her brother, Craig, at Bryn Mawr Elementary, a 15-minute drive from Parkway Gardens.

Two years later, the Robinsons moved to that neighborhood.

By the time Craig was ready for high school, the nearby South Shore High was virtually all black. Wary of the students, the Robinsons paid to send Craig to a predominantly white Catholic high school.

To afford the tuition, Marian took a job downtown. The Robinsons were not even Catholic. As for Michelle, she attended a selective magnet school more than an hour away by bus.

Ignoring her own experience, in 2019 Michelle condemned a largely white audience for the sin of “white flight.” Said Michelle, “I wanna remind white folks that y’all were running from us, and y’all still runnin’.”

Among the things that unnerved white people, Michelle imagined, were “the color of our skin” and the “texture of our hair.”

The posting of school fight videos online is making it harder and harder for race-baiters like Michelle to ignore the racial problems they and their political allies have helped nurture.

The graphic nature of these videos also make it harder for Michelle and her friends in the media to blame racial turmoil on people who flee to avoid it.

Jack Cashill’s new book, “Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America,” is available in all formats.


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Jack Cashill

Jack Cashill has a Ph.D. from Purdue University in American studies. His latest book is "Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America's Cities." Read more of Jack Cashill's articles here.


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