Two teens got into a fight at a New Jersey mall last week. When the police arrived, a cop tackled and handcuffed the 14-year-old black kid, while another cop pushed the 15-year-old “white” kid onto a couch “but did not restrain him.”
(The older kid was initially described as “white” in media reports, but he says he’s mixed-race, with a Pakistani father and Colombian mother.)
The incident was caught on video (below), which quickly went viral because of the disparate treatment of the teens; even the “white” teen says, “I don’t understand why they arrested him and not me,” adding, “I say, that was just plain old racist. I don’t condone that at all.”
Public officials are calling for an investigation, and the black teen’s family has hired a civil rights lawyer. Read story here.
But if you’re a Florida high school teacher, don’t use this incident as a “teaching moment” to explain racism to your students, because you’ll break that state’s law against teaching “critical race theory” and go to jail for making white kids feel bad (see story here).
Related stories: See map of states passing or considering CRT gag laws here; read the American Bar Association’s explanation of “critical race theory” here. The gag laws aim to push America’s history of racism out of classrooms; in Texas, the GOP lieutenant governor wants to extend that to revoking tenure of college professors (see story here); this is the same Republican politician who said senior citizens should be willing to die from Covid-19 to keep the economy open (see that story here). The American Federation of Teachers, a teachers’ union, has vowed to defend any teachers who get in trouble for teaching “honest history” (see story here), but I’ve suggested teachers in those states either leave the profession or relocate to another state, because the states passing these laws don’t deserve to have teachers (see my posting here).