ACLU

by Jeremy Leaming

While a large public school district in Minnesota has taken steps, prompted by legal action, to combat discrimination against LGBT students, the U.S. Department of Education has released information, which perhaps not surprisingly, reveals persistent discrimination against black students in public schools nationwide.

Reporting for the Pioneer Press, Sarah Horner details the Anoka-Hennepin school district board’s vote, with one member resigning in protest, to “accept a settlement agreement with [Dylon] Frei and five other former and current district students who had filed two lawsuits over a policy requiring staff to remain neutral when the topic of sexual orientation came up in the classroom.” As Horner notes Frei and the other students had repeatedly faced sexual harassment and gender stereotyping. Frei, Horner reports, told a crown outside the school board offices that his peers had repeatedly called him “fag,” and physically harmed him.

The school board voting 5-1 approved a consent decree that will resolve the students’ lawsuit brought by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and the National Center for Lesbian Rights. The decree also resolves a separate complaint lodged in Nov. 2010 by the U.S. Departments of Justice and Education.

The consent decree filed with the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota includes a number of requirements that Anoka-Hennepin school officials will have to undertake to ensure they comply with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which bar harassment of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students.

For example the school district, the largest in Minnesota, must retain a consultant to review the district’s policy on harassment, create and implement “a comprehensive plan for preventing and addressing student-on-student sex-based harassment,” and improve “its system for maintaining records of investigation and responding to allegations of harassment.”

By Inimai Chettiar, policy counsel for the ACLU’s Center for Justice, and Courtney Bowie, senior staff attorney for the ACLU's Racial Justice Project

Professor Derrick Bell, who passed away on Wednesday, was a racial justice pioneer and teacher who enlightened many. His actions spoke as loudly as his words and influence the work we do today at the ACLU. He was the first black law professor at Harvard Law School, yet in 1990 he vowed to take an unpaid leave of absence until the school hired a black woman for its tenured faculty. That didn’t happen until 1998, and by then Bell had moved on to NYU Law School, where he remained until the end of his career.

It is groundbreaking scholarship like that of Professor Bell that gives life to the ACLU’s current work. In his book, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism, he described, among other things, the forces that prevented Harvard from hiring black women as tenured law professors. Professor Bell (pictured) was not afraid to state the truth: that structural and insidious racism pervades our society, institutions, and thinking. He pioneered the development of critical race theory – which recognizes that racism is embedded deep beneath the surface of our laws and legal institutions. He explained that, even where there is no de jure segregation or explicit racism, there are often far more harmful subtle forces that hinder access to equality and result in de facto segregation.

In order to understand the structural nature of racism, we need to follow Professor Bell through the proverbial “looking glass.”  Things aren’t always what they seem. The work of Bell and other scholars showed that, in order to achieve true racial equality, it’s insufficient to eliminate de jure segregation laws if the majority of our institutions continue to be created by, for, and around heterosexual white men of privilege. When our societal or legal “norm” automatically leaves out women and people of color, it may look like these groups are asking for a handout or an “unfair advantage” when what they are really asking is to be included in the creation of our institutions and laws.