Back in the before times, the waaayyy before times, Atlanta, as it was called in those days, was known as "The City Too Busy To Hate." There was a lot of truth to that. There are still some pretty busy folks, but the impact on hate seems to have diminished.
Case in point? Druid Hills High School.
There a lots of problems here and the least is the raw sewerage bubbling up all over the place, because what is happening at the Palace is equally odious. That stench is bubbling out the mouth of the Board Chair Vickie Turner and the racist overtones are unmistakable. Especially if you actually are color blind.
Does that mean you intend to trash Mount Arabia? As Diversity Inclusion and Equity sweep through academia, academic rigor is being swept aside to "close the gap" between high performers and "students who have not achieved their academic potential." Arabia shines and yet DHHS falls off the task list and we are treated to this statement:
Now that is bold and brash. So...DHHS deserves no maintenance, no money, no consideration because the neighborhood exceeds her acceptable level of McMansions? Really? That is a level of animus that exceeds justification as identity politics. This is bad to the bone.
There are a couple of problems this exacerbates, more significant than turning a playground into a hockey-chopper.
If you were trying to encourage that community to break away, falling into the more comforting arms of APS then this is a job well done. If the goal is to incite and support a referendum to increase the prohibition on adding new school districts these are the sound bites that will resonate loudly throughout the entire state. You cannot buy this level of political capital.
The most appalling issue gets back to what everything gets back to: race. But with a twist. Turns out DHHS is not a lily white school nestled in an exclusively rich, lily white community to be used as an effigy for venting pent-up anger. Just so happens that DHHS is quite diverse, just not that kind of diverse acceptable to those currently in power. Apparently not enough Blacks and it is equally apparent that Asians and Hispanics are considered "white adjacents" and undeserving of an equitable allocation of resources. It smacks little of leadership and more of what was foreshadowed in A Man In Full: "We got the power. Now we want the money."
This is bad now. It could get worse if "get even, get ours" becomes the standard practice of politics going forward. What DHHS foreshadows is a future where it isn't about just Black and White. A future where others take the reins of power. And should they follow suit and exclusively support their demographic, at the expense the others, then the policy espoused by the Board Chair will prove to have been a societal carcinogen.
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