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It’s not uncommon for Republican officials to treat schoolteachers as villains, but it’s less common to hear U.S. senators suggest that certain educators are lazy and possibly illiterate.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville sat down with Donald Trump Jr. last week, and the Alabama Republican reflected on what he perceived as Covid-era revelations about public education:
“The Covid really brought it out how bad our schools are and how bad our teachers are — in the inner city. Most of them in the inner city, I don’t know how they got degrees, to be honest with you. I don’t know whether they can read and write. ... They want a raise, they want less time to work, less time in school. We ruined work ethic in this country.”
It’s not clear how much time the far-right senator has spent with inner-city educators or in inner-city schools. Perhaps Tuberville drew these conclusions as a result of lengthy scrutiny and extensive research, or maybe the former football coach simply assumes that his hunches about lazy and borderline-illiterate teachers are true.
Historian Heather Cox Richardson responded soon after, “This is literally the language former Confederates used about Black Americans during Reconstruction to justify white supremacy.”
It’s easy to imagine the senator and his allies responding that Tuberville didn’t explicitly refer to race, and that there are educators working in inner-city schools who aren’t Black. That’s true.
But the Alabaman hasn’t exactly earned the benefit of the doubt.
Last fall, for example, Tuberville made a campaign appearance in Nevada, and said in reference to Democrats, “They’re pro-crime. They want crime. They want crime because they want to take over what you got. They want to control what you have. They want reparations because they think the people that do the crime are owed that.”
An Associated Press report explained soon after, “Tuberville’s remarks about reparations played into racist stereotypes about Black people committing crimes. ... Tuberville is falsely suggesting that Democrats promote crime and that only Blacks are the perpetrators. In fact, crime has slowed in the last year and most crimes are committed by whites, according to FBI data.”
More recently, the same far-right Republican criticized efforts to kick white nationalists out of the military. Pressed for some kind of explanation, Tuberville’s office said the senator is “skeptical of the notion that there are white nationalists in the military,” despite a Trump-era report from the Pentagon documenting the threat of white supremacists inside the military.
It’s against this backdrop that the GOP senator thought it’d be a good idea to suggest inner-city educators are lazy and may not be able to “read and write.”