By Steve Woodward
The history of disingenuous editorials published by The Pilot‘s editorial board (which can fit in a golf cart) is a long and checkered one. Note we did not elude to a SmartCar.
A recent July 24 screed dismissing the war on hijacking public education — particularly in the realm of American history — seems to have sunk the paper’s editorial standards to new depths. The intensity of wrist-ringing must have a necessitated calling on a team of physical therapists.
“If you’ve fallen behind the ‘radical leftists’ or the ‘racist right wing nuts,’ you’ve left no room for a rational and critically important discussion about race, American history and how it should be taught to our children,” scolds the author.
The editorial addresses a recent 6-1 Moore County school board vote to reject race-based curricula. The Pilot says it’s fine with this outcome because it never quite understood what all the fuss was about. You know, because … racism! It’s systemic. Who doesn’t know that?
In fact, this probably explains why the editorial crescendos with a cautionary note suggesting too much objectivity in the classroom might send this debate back to square one someday. There is, after all, “danger” if the citizenry holds (or, clings to, to quote the unifier Barack Obama) a presumption of American exceptionalism. Can’t be teaching that to kids.
If, however, the board’s policy is “used to sanitize, gag or in any other way hinder teachers from presenting a fair, honest and sober assessment of this nation’s history with race, then we will be one step closer to a dangerous nationalism (emphasis added) and an agenda that cultivates an unnatural exceptionalism (emphasis added).”
In other words, you racist right wing nuts have been given fair warning by the radical leftists, who reside down the middle in the Pilot’s newsroom.