In Johnston County schools, race is now like Voldemort — not to be named

I’ll concede government in North Carolina has become exhausting.

Much has been appropriately said against the Johnston County Board of Commissioners’ $7.9 million blackmailing of the local school board — forcing the enactment of a critical race theory ban. But it’s also worth exploring, for a moment, what the Johnston County school board did to pay the ransom.

Technically, the board members amended the district’s “Code of Ethics and Standards of Conduct.” That may sound uninteresting. But the addendum is one of the more remarkable documents I’ve ever read.

First, perhaps unsurprisingly, the new regulation says, “no student shall be subjected to the notion that racism is a permanent component of American life.” Of course any objective reader of U.S. history would have to conclude that racism has been an exceedingly powerful force in our national story — from the first day of our existence until this very morning. So this rings in denial.

Perhaps the school board is betting on what may come; saying racism has always been our worst problem, but, who knows, someday it might disappear. More likely, they have concluded that race, in Johnston County schools, is now like Voldemort — not to be named.

Next, and most astonishing, the school code demands that “all people who contributed to American Society will be recognized and presented as reformists, innovators and heroes to our culture.” (I’m not joking.)

So Jefferson’s democratic aphorisms can be explored, but not his atrocities to over 600 slaves. Jackson’s battles with the national bank can be emphasized, but not his ethnic cleansing through the Indian Removal Act and the Trail of Tears.

Woodrow Wilson’s purported progressivism is OK, but not his enthusiastic removal of African-Americans from the civil service. Or Teddy Roosevelt’s statements about Native Americans. Or FDR and Earl Warren’s embrace of the Japanese-American internment. All pristine heroes. All day long.

But these are small problems compared to the opening categorization. What legal entity in Johnston County will decide who has “contributed to American Society”? Some job that. Teachers can be fired, after all, for guessing wrong.

Regulations of speech, when allowed, are meant to be narrow, precise and readily determined. This provision may be the most open-ended, contestable, undecipherable and convoluted regulation of expression ever written in the English language.

And there’s more.

The code further indicates “U.S. foundational documents shall not be undermined.” The U.S. Constitution, one assumes, is a foundational document. But it contains a fugitive slave clause. It includes a required moratorium, until 1808, on any congressional ban of the importation of slaves. And, most famously, it provides:

“All Representatives...shall be apportioned according to their respective numbers, by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service, and excluding Indians not taxed, three-fifths of all other persons.”

How is a Johnston County teacher to deal with these provisions? Does their mention “undermine” the Constitution?

I’m guessing an instructor has two options. First he could proclaim them “heroic” — though only the boldest Klansman would sign up for that duty. More likely, Johnston County hopes to assure the horrifying clauses go unmentioned. Silence. Like the tomb.

Can these constitutional provisions be mentioned still in the Johnston County schools? Can they be read?