Forsyth County Georgia Board of Education - Jere Krischel - 1/18/2022

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
I have a dream today.

Well, I only have three kids, and only one of them is still "little", but that sentiment resonates across the ages to me.

Yesterday, we celebrated the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a civil rights hero of our nation. Sadly, by today's standards, he would be declared a "colorblind racist", because he wanted people to be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. It felt like within my lifetime we were living the dream of MLK, but in the past 10 years we've seen a doubling down on race-based thinking.

With that in mind, I'd like to thank the Board and the Forsyth County School System for removing the most racist and offensive diversity, inclusion and equity links from their web pages. There are still some links to racist content, hosted by organizations such as "Children's Healthcare of Atlanta" and their well intentioned, but terribly racist, Strong4Life program, but we're definitely moving in the right direction, and with strong oversight, we can remove resources that normalize and encourage a victimhood mentality in our schools, students, and teachers. It is my hope that our diversity, inclusion and equity team will review such racist organizations as the "Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development", or ASCD, and disassociate from them if they are not willing to change their racist viewpoints. We need to commit to a systemic and continuous review of the racist and biased content that has infused so many of our professional education organizations.

Of course, I'm sure there are people willing to defend the racism of CHOA and ASCD - they'll insist that being colorblind is being racist, and that asking to treat everyone equally is simply perpetuating white supremacy. Which, by their logic, would mean that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a white supremacist.

There's no doubt, racism exists. There's even blatant and obvious systemic racism against Asians trying to get into Ivy League schools. But there's a danger in centering every conversation, about every problem, in every context, around race. It takes something real, but by extreme exaggeration, gives it more power than it would otherwise have. Even worse, it blinds us to the things that we should be addressing, such as single parent households, self-sabotage with a victimhood mentality, and poisons of social media that promote fear and hatred to make money in our modern #AttentionEconomy.

If we are to properly focus our DEI programs, the demographics we track shouldn't be about skin color, or sexual preference, but about our students in fatherless homes. Or our students living in poverty. Or students with parents who never made it to college. Typically poverty has been tracked by looking at students who qualify for free lunches, but do we have any demographic information on how many students live in fatherless homes? Or how many students have parents who never graduated from high school?

I respectfully ask the Board to consider re-centering demographic tracking away from race, and towards more important social factors, such as fatherlessness and poverty.

Thank you very much for your time, and again, I'd love to have lunch with anyone who disagrees with me.