Ma’am, let me handle this response
If you go to the web site of the ACLU of North Carolina, you’ll find this description of the organization’s self-appointed task:
Our mission is to preserve and defend the guarantees of individual liberty found in the North Carolina Constitution and the US Constitution, with particular emphasis on freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of religion, equal protection under law for all people, the right to privacy, the right to due process of law, and the right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure.
Notice that the wording of the ACLU’s mission doesn’t include anything like, ” … to tell middle-school principals how to run their operations, because God knows they can’t do it properly without our oversight.” But that hasn’t stopped the ACLU from scolding a Raleigh principal named Teresa Abron for the way she handled a gang-related confrontation between two seventh-grade girls, one black and the other Hispanic.
You can read details of the incident here, but the ACLU’s unhappiness springs from the fact that Abron ordered that all black seventh-graders be gathered in the school auditorium for a come-to-Jesus talk about gang activity. All Hispanic seventh-graders got the same talking-to a few minutes later. Personally, I’m gratified to know that school principals still exist who will make clear to students that unruly behavior will not be tolerated. But the ACLU was disturbed because — you might want to sit down for this — no white seventh-graders got the gang lecture. The organization pointed out, with pecksniffian certitude:
” … schools have an obligation to treat all students equally, regardless of race or ethnicity, and the segregated assemblies yesterday afternoon clearly violated that principle of race neutrality.”
This is a prime example of how cultural sensitivity crowds out good sense. No white kid was involved in the confrontation. Nor, for that matter, were sixth-graders or eighth graders of any hue involved in the confrontation. But because Abron couldn’t be sure exactly who among the school’s black and Hispanic seventh-graders had been part of the stand-off, she decided it was best that all of them hear the message — a reasonable thing to conclude.
I suspect the ACLU doesn’t know that the principal it has publicly held up for rebuke was one of a group of Raleigh students who in 1971 — when a school integration plan was put into effect — had to leave their all-black high school and enroll in a formerly all-white high school. They spent a tense, eventful year working through a whole host of racial situations. In short, Abron doesn’t need to be lectured about how to handle such matters. She’s lived them in a way few of us have.
I talked to Abron a few years ago when I did a look-back piece for the News & Observer on that tumultuous year of integration. I recall her as a polite soul, so I can’t imagine she’d say what she might like to say to the ACLU, so I’ll do it for her:
Bugger off. Find a real issue.
December 8th, 2007 at 6:30 pm
I am not a “polite soul” either! When someone, or a group, attacks something that I know to be true and correct, I will fight back and will be unrelenting. I was a witness to the assemblies.
Since the ACLU-NC defends free speech, I’d like to take this opportunity to use that right, and tell them that they are armchair quarterbacks who have no business or authority butting into this matter. They looked through the peep hole at one event in our school, to find fault, without even getting all the facts. What occurred at the school was not “business as usual” and yet they look through their biased magnifying lens and paint a story the way that they want, in order to advance their political agenda. They should be ashamed of themselves!