 Good morning Hawaii folks. Good afternoon and a good evening for our other viewers, including especially Tina, Professor Randall, Ben, and David. And we have with us today the winner of the Great Teacher Award from the Society of American Law Teachers. Ben, you've got to love an organization whose acronym is SALT, right? I always thought that when I first joined them 30 years ago, I was like, this is great. Yeah, because if you call somebody the SALT of the earth, that's a very high compliment. Exactly. Hey, we have Tana Patterson, mediator, arbitrator, conflict coach, consultant in Germantown, Maryland. We have David Larson, not only an experienced professor at the Mitchell Hamlin School of Law in St. Paul, but also the engineer and the pioneer of the New York online case resolution project that has exponentially increased access to justice for a lot of people. And Ben Davis, a parapetetic professor of law, retired from the University of Toledo, picked up by University of Chicago School of Law in Illinois last semester and this semester by Washington Lee School of Law in Virginia. Welcome all of you to the year of the tiger. Welcome to Black History Month. What do you think some of the leading scholars of Black history might have to say about the polarization in our society right now? Professor Randall, this has been a topic of yours for decades. So what do you think they would say? I think, and this goes back to something Ben pointed out weeks ago and his point, I kind of disagreed with him, but I'm here to acknowledge, I was wrong and he was right, that this disagreement over the things going on with racism now is different in the overt decision to try to ban specific discussion of racism and not just ban, you know, you can discuss that Willie Mays was the first person, you know, sort of to cross the color line, but you can't discuss why, how he got there, the process. Florida is in the process of trying to pass a law to say that you can't make white people discomfort. You can't teach anything in the classroom that would cause, and it's very specific, it's not saying any students discomfort, it's saying, you know, white students need to not be discomfort. So to the extent they pass these laws in these states, it's going to be generations to undo that if you ever undo it. So that to me, it is the difference is that it's the legal system has this slow moving to change, people support the legal system even when they disagree with the underlying law so that that to me is a huge problem because people will defend the laws, even though they will say, you know, I don't entirely agree with the law, but it is the law, so we should go with it. And yeah, that's a huge problem. And Tina, you and I listened in on a webinar yesterday, which went into this with extremely knowledgeable experienced speakers, including Paulette Brown, former head of the ABA, and others. And some of those laws are really, really scary. They essentially deputize vigilante parents to pursue personal complaints against teachers with substantial financial penalties, and as well as career and professional penalties. What did you hear yesterday, Tina, that most concerned you about what's happening? So to provide additional context, they webinar that we both attended was regarding critical race theory and critical race theory as it applies in both academia, but at the higher level, but also at the other levels and what's happening in terms of conflict at the state and local levels in terms of jurisdictions, specifically what was unsettling to me was this encouraging as you stated, parents are being encouraged to report teachers who may be in conflict. And so some people have taken that to the other extreme and say, you know what, if you want to call in and report a teacher report your favorite teacher and what they've done to help your child, how they've helped your child to learn, how they've helped your child to really to apply rational thinking or critical thinking and get away from this nonsense. What struck me and I wrote this down on my post-it note was reconstruction reboot. That this to me is more or less a reconstruction reboot where we are literally looking at laws and legislative matters to further restrict people's opportunity to voice their opinion and to vote and how that's really being muffled or it's being spun in such a way that if you do have a different opinion that you are considered the contrarian, the outlier, the problem versus here's a differing point of view. And let's pause for a moment and listen. Well, I would jump in by saying that in case anyone has a doubt about this, this is all insane, okay? All of this is insane. In case you were sort of trying to think, well, you know, it's the law of this and it's insane. And so just let us start from that point of view. I want to encourage. The second thing is that I push a lot on the idea of academic freedom, which would mean that when even in K, all the way up to grad school, right? Where what I understand is that for certain books like we take the whole mouse thing, right? That there were teachers who had students of a certain age, maybe grade, middle school or high school, whatever. And in deciding what they were going to use as materials in that classroom for whatever pedagogical goal there is, they thought that was an appropriate book to use. And so now you'll have people trying to second guess that and saying, no, you can't use it because it has this word or that word or something. I have a real problem with that idea of that you can second guess. I know that you can intimidate people by passing these kind of laws and you threaten people with their livelihoods. I understand all that violence, okay? I stipulate, I know what you're doing. You're trying to do violence on teachers so they quit, which a lot of them are doing, or they, you know, toe an insane line of whatever the subject is. And I just think that people ought to recognize this is insane. And even though it is happening that you have to at whatever point you can counteract, for example, when they talk about parents talk calling out or denouncing teachers, okay, about what they taught their students, I think teachers should ask, can you please give me the employer of that parent too, so I can denounce them to their parent, to the parent's employer. Because I've been in situations where people called my employer about something I said about it. And, you know, I had freedom, academic freedom was no big deal. I was doing as a private citizen anyway. And I, when I went in and talked with the dean about what he was getting, I said, can you, next time somebody call, ask them who their employer is? Because, you know, I'm going to state school and everything's out in the open. So I can call their employer and call out that Karen or that Tim or something like that, who's trying to block me from doing the task that I think that I need to do. And if I sound a little virulent here, it's because I'm just sick of it. I'm just, I think it is insanity. And just because there are people who have power, we're talking about insanity, doesn't mean that it's anything that we have to accept. And on the contrary, it's, and I know it's hard, but as teachers, you have to use that freedom in that classroom and see where the chips fall. Or I hope you don't leave because the teachers are so important to what all our kids are trying to get through and learn and all. But, you know, these are nonsense people. These people who are doing this or whatever the rationalization, whatever the language they're using, it's nonsense. It's nonsense because it's impinging on the notion of a teacher in a classroom like we all had, making decisions as to what they think we can deal with. And trust me, I had books to deal with that were difficult when I was a kid. In fact, I talked about it the other day in class, I was teaching. Yesterday we were teaching about South Africa. I told him a true story, which was, I met the president of South Africa after Monday, I was getting tabloom and back. And I told him, when I was in sixth grade, we had to do scrapbooks. And I did a scrapbook, we're doing one in Africa, then you had to pick a country. And I picked South Africa. And I went to the library and got books out. And I made little things cut out with, you know, that scrapbook paper and made little pictures of gazelles and got all that stuff. And then I read this book. Wait a minute, I got read this book and the last chapter was about apartheid. And I'm trying as a sixth grade to understand apartheid. I had no clue what was going on with this weird word I'd never heard. And I told that the president of South Africa, he told me they never understood it either. Okay, so, you know, that I told about that in class, you know, is that critical? Disagreement we had that I had with you before, because I think you think teachers have a level of academic freedom that they don't. That it may be good if we want to give teachers academic freedom, I'm not disagreeing with that. But in fact, teachers ain't had that level of academic freedom for 50 years, that and it's been being eroded constantly as we've been trying to get teachers to teach to pass exams. And so over the years, school districts have controlled what, when, where, and how teachers can teach, including what materials they can teach. And we didn't pay attention to it before. It's really not that that I don't think teachers have that level of academic freedom by law. I don't think they have. Yeah, you know, Ben made the comment that we don't have to accept this. You have to probably be a little stronger, we can't accept it. The Carnegie Endowment for Industrial Peace said a really interesting article about polarization and what we can do about it, and made I thought a really astute observation that partisanship has been equated with patriotism. That's a really strong statement, but I think it's a really accurate statement that we are living in a period now on partisanship equals patriotism. And we've got to kind of deconstruct that and tear it down. And, you know, one thing we can do is encourage people to call out. And when Ben would say we don't have to accept it, we can accept it. And one thing we can do to address that is call out our own parties. And when we're here, people in our parties doing extreme things, we've got to call it out and say what it is and then how has Ben would say how insane it is. And don't just quietly let it pass. It's really important that people are encouraged to call out their own tribe, because when that happens, I think it's much more powerful than when somebody on the other side calls it up because it just gets dismissed. So people can take responsibility for their own colleagues and their own party or click or own organization. I think that could be a real helpful move towards trying to reduce this polarization. That's a great idea. And I love Tina's idea. Well, what about rewarding parents for pointing out to schools and teachers, things that teachers do that increase the growth, the understanding, the humanity of those students and those groups, rather than the opposite. We now have people who are exactly, as you've said, trying to not just prevent dialogues to share understandings and build understandings, but to penalize those dialogues. And Professor Randall, you make a really good point. That's been out there for years. A lot of it under the line, under the table, but teachers know that. They know what they can go in the room and be comfortable with. But now, all of that's being taken away. Teachers have very little say over bringing up anything about which there is any controversy. Except that the thing is, is that bringing up anything that which there's a controversy is not because, you know what, we could go in and complain to the school board about stuff and the controversy that comes from not teaching it. That would be an alternative to say, hey, when you teach it, don't teach that my child is hurt. They sit in the classroom and you talked about X, Y, and Z. And you never mention how many people died on the Trail of Tears. You never mentioned how the United States was involved in the overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom. So, my child is sitting in that room hurt because of that. And maybe thinking out loud now, that might be a great response to start calling, going up to school districts and complaining about what is being left out and saying, you know, my child is hurt too. And Lord knows I've seen over the years with various parents that I've known who have been on the case at the school every day almost trying to make sure that their kid gets treated properly from every aspect of it from whether it's in the classroom for content or disciplinary stuff or anything like that. You know, there are these background problems that certainly in the K through 12 era in terms of who gets disciplined and who, you know, I think their racial disparities and all that stuff, that's a problem in schools. You know, that's there already. That is part of what people are fighting against. So now, in addition to that, in the classroom, you're going to have this kind of insane history being taught, this insane English being taught. It's the kind of thing that creates at least in my head a contradiction that's so enormous for ordinary person that they have to find a way to counteract it. I noticed one thing is that I've seen these students in some place, I can't remember what it was, they created their own band book club, right? All the books are being banned. They created a book club to read them, you know, and there's nothing that the school can do about it, you know, and teacher could go and teach them there. With this mouse thing, there's a bookstore in I think Knoxville is giving away free copies of mouse to get a student and has a parents teaching guide for how to teach mouse to like eighth graders for all the nonsense that's being said. And I want to emphasize something too, is that I like to call this the charming bigotry. There's this soft bigotry that goes into these kind of presentations that say, oh, we're not against that. We just have a concern about this word or that word. That's an old game that's been played a long time, kind of called of a charming bigotry could be charming semitism, anti semitism, charming racism, you call it charming anti Native American stuff like that. You know, we're so used to that kind of stuff being allowed to go under the screen because the person seems so sweet and nice. But, you know, it's unacceptable. It's just not acceptable and it has to be called out. I myself was told the Department of Education years ago, when they were presenting at the UN about the Committee on the Illumination and Racial Discrimination, I asked them, we're at point blank. Why are you dumbing down our kids? I mean, let's get real, why? We can't dumb down our kids. And this kind of effort to dumb them down, it's appalling. It's, to me, it's just appalling. And whether that's Kate all the way up to grad school, it's appalling, you know. And we want inquiring tough-minded kids. We got teachers that help stimulate people to grow. Still thankful for the eighth grade teacher who got my daughter to understand math. And she became a math whiz. It was magical. She was having this trouble before him, but a boom, found a way, you know. It's a particularly dangerous time because we're in a pandemic. So people are preoccupied and we've got state legislatures taking advantage of that preoccupation. So they're doing things quickly as quickly as they can, as quietly as they can, hoping that people won't notice. So one thing we have to do is bring those things into the light and make sure everyone understands what's happening and what the consequences are. That's our responsibility. And, you know, getting back to the idea of polarization and what we can do about it. One thing we can do about it, and we've seen this recently, is people using cartoons and humor in violent ways and using cartoon figures to kill people. And not sufficient response to that to say, this is absolutely unacceptable. And what you're doing is when you do that, you're really dehumanizing people. And maybe you're really encouraging violence then. And, you know, I think these are the kinds of discussions we need to have and to have compassion and say, you know, we understand how difficult your life is and how you're struggling, but understand that things are happening out of sight that are going to have even worse consequences for you. And, you know, if you aren't paying attention and you aren't pushing back, that whatever struggles you're feeling today, they're going to be worse tomorrow. Well, yeah. And how about the child tax credit stuff? For example, all these families just lost in December, this child tax credit that apparently took a lot of kids out of poverty, right? And it's really hard on those families that had that, right? But instead, we're talking about banning this book or banning this thing and all this stuff as opposed to passing the legislation that keeps those kids having food and all the other things that they would need. It's this distraction games that are just boring, quite honestly, that these people think that that's the way that they can get into power by ginning up somebody's animosity towards other people. Well, people are suffering. You know, it's hard out there for people. I respect that difficulty that all kinds of people are going through, and we should be finding ways to help them to get through this and get on to the next thing, you know? But it said, we were having these nonsense battles about whether Mouse is a good book or the catcher in the ride. Man, I remember the catcher in the ride. It was like a revelation to me. It was like it talked to me as a 15-year-old in a way that no other book had done. You know, it's just, I see these parents all upset. First of all, I don't believe that this is just random parents getting upset. I think there's a financing political agenda behind them. And secondly, you know, I'm thinking of all these people who make comments about, oh, you're just upset about the fact that they're going to learn about what your grandfather did, you know? Or as this one student said, you know, she said, the only person to be upset by any of this stuff is that we're learning somebody who wants to have it come back. So let me ask a hard question here, which is in our last few minutes. And let me start with Tina on this one, because you directed us toward the effect on the kids, the students, the youth. What is the impact of this battle that's going on that you're talking about that we have to resist? What's the impact on the kids, on the youth, in your view? Tina, start us off and then Professor Enno? Sure. I think the impact, depending on the age, is feeling conflict. If they're young enough where mom and dad say go, they're going to follow along. The adolescents and college age, they're probably going to challenge because they know something different or their friends are telling them something different. I'm not positive to give others an opportunity to speak. Professor Enno, you were going to... Well, I'm not sure what the... I know what the impact of things going on with my children were in schools, but they are in their fifties. So that it's been a while since I've had kids and school age kids. But I know that a large part of the stress I had as a parent was negotiating and helping my children negotiate the racism in the school and the racism that came up against, that they came up against. And I think that that's going to be a huge problem. And it makes it harder when the parents themselves are undergoing racism and is stressed out because of the racism they're undergoing. Parents often don't respond appropriately to their children's problems. Not that they hurt the children, but they get mad at the school because they are trying to protect their children from the racism. So I think that the division, what may happen is more conflict that the teachers and schools are going to be called in more conflict between parents because why parents are complaining? Black parents are going to be complaining too. And so you're going to... And Asian and Native American and Hispanic parents and you're just going to get teachers and schools in more conflict. I think one consequence is that one thing I like to think that education does is that it introduces you to other realities in the world and perhaps concretes your compassion for other people. And literature can do that. And you can get, even though you're not traveling to certain places, you can learn about other experiences and other places and become sensitized to that. Well, the kids are going to be policymakers, not that long. And if they don't have that kind of holistic worldview, then I'm really afraid is what their legislation is going to look like. So I think one of the huge consequences of limiting the kinds of resources and books that children are exposed to, it's going to give them a very narrow, inaccurate perception of the world. And it's going to have tremendous consequences for the policies. That's fantastic. And we're out of time for today. But maybe we've come around to realizing there's another player on the stage who is severely impacted by this, which is the teacher that, like us as conflict resolution professionals, teachers are facilitators for learning. And if you take away the tools and the peace of mind and the confidence in being able to have those exchanges to support and encourage the students to have those exchanges to explore ideas and experiences that may conflict, but that may generate learning and understanding working through that conflict, we can't afford that for exactly the reasons that all of you have said, we can't afford that. We have to stand up to that. Thank all of you for your time today. Come back and see us in two weeks. We will be continuing on on dealing with hard questions, difficult conversations to make good trouble. Thanks so much, Professor Randall, Tina, David, Ben, and all of you who have joined us. Take care.