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Fairfax (VA) Foofaraw [1]

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Date: 2023-01-10  

By Max Sawicky

The newest trumped-up education scandal in Northern Virginia is brewing in Fairfax County. The attack line is that county high schools failed to inform recipients of academic awards out of misguided concerns for equity, thereby diminishing the awardees’ chances of getting accepted at favored colleges and receiving scholarship awards. True to form, Trump-adjacent Governor Glenn Youngkin has bigfooted his way in, instigating another grand jury to harass local Democratic public officials.

The evidence for any equity motive is thin, but the accusation enforces a disguised racist appeal. The illusion of a real story is reinforced by different right-wing outlets referring to each other’s stories, but you have to drill down to find any actual facts or lack thereof.

There are different questions. One is whether notifications were in fact delayed. This seems incontrovertible. Fairfax school authorities have acknowledged as much. But further questions are politically crucial: was any delay founded in some kind of potted “equity” concern and was this concern the personal view of some individual bureaucrat or a policy instituted at a higher level? That’s where the innuendo replaces honest reporting.

A leading example of the MAGA screeds circulating is this piece in The Fairfax County Times by Asra Q. Nomani and Heather Zwicker. Again, there is no dispute that notifications were delayed. Fair enough. The political dynamite is in why.

Note that Fairfax is a Democratic stronghold in Virginia, and what happens in Fairfax is noticed in neighboring jurisdictions, including my own fast-growing, Loudoun County. Both counties are among the richest in the U.S. (Loudoun is #1, actually.)

Youngkin sent his attorney-general to cook up a “civil rights investigation” into the notification blunder, stirring in the issue of anti-Asian discrimination in admissions to the county’s flagship high school, the prestigious Thomas Jefferson School for Science and Technology (TJSST). The latter has a student body that is 70 percent Asian, so if there has been a policy of discrimination against Asian-Americans, it has evidently been a failure. Still and all, the specter of an African-American or Latino student displacing an Asian one is the vile, racist political message here.

Nomani and Zwicker make their bias obvious by including a bit that is utterly irrelevant to the questions noted above, namely that Fairfax has hired a consultant, one Mutiu Fagbayi, in the pursuit of DEI (diversity-equity-inclusion). They include some loopy out-of-context quotes from Fagbayi.

I have looked at other DEI material and found that it can be dodgy stuff, not to say rubbish. Grifters are among those selling their wares. I know nothing about Fagbayi. The dilemma for local public schools is to somehow compensate for Virginia’s lurid history of segregation and white supremacy. It’s hard to do, but saying you took on a contractor provides CYA. It also opens up the schools to criticism if anybody inspects the dubious DEI materials in use.

At any rate, juxtaposing the DEI contract with the notification lapse conveys the implication that the failure to notify is motivated by a deliberate policy of reverse racism in the guise of equity concerns. The article provides zero evidence for this implication.

What we have here is a replay of the deeply dishonest provocation of moral panic over Critical Race Theory that jumped off in Loudoun County, Va., and got us a Trump-adjacent failed-account-manager Republican governor and a gun-toting lieutenant governor in 2021.

What happens in Fairfax will not stay in Fairfax. Every local office in Virginia is up for election this year, including the one that I am running for, House of Delegates District 30. To make matters worse, some Democratic politicians are taking the Republican side in the attack on our public schools. Somebody has to stand up to these bastards.

You can donate to my campaign here.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/1/10/2146513/-Fairfax-VA-Foofaraw

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