Carmel, Indiana. An affluent majority-white suburb just north of Indianapolis,
it's known for its idyllic neighborhoods, low crime rates and some of the country's
best public schools, but recently there's been tension in the air.
Comment suspended at today's Carmel Clay school board meeting.
The superintendent made that decision after several contentious meetings over the past few months involving debates over
diversity and inclusion.
In early 2021, Carmel Clay schools brought in diversity, equity and
inclusion initiatives known simply as DEI, a program that seeks to combat structural racism.
Since then, a battle has erupted
between those that welcome the changes and others who see
it as leftist indoctrination of their children.
You have lost sight of your responsibilities to educate our children.
Parents are learning, watching and taking action.
I think what's most troublesome was the harassment teachers and specific board members were getting at their homes.
It's a conflict that has spread from local school board meetings to a culture war dividing parents
across the country.
They don't care what we think, they don't care what we say, they don't care how we feel.
These are government schools to indoctrinate children against their parents.
In the quiet enclaves of Carmel, one man is leading the fight against these progressive changes.
Alvin Lui came to Indiana to escape the leftist indoctrination he claims was taking over
his home in California.
He leads Unify Carmel, an organization working with local parents to fight
against DEI, something that he believes might sound neutral but is in fact associated with
critical race theory,
a concept that sees racism as an indelible part of American society and law.
You have these activist teachers that bring this stuff in, you're literally taking
hostage, you know, a captive audience of children.
Hi! I'm Amudalat. – I'm Alvin Lui, nice to meet you.
Nice to meet you too.
Come on in. – Right, thank you.
What evidence do you have that children are
being indoctrinated in the schools now?
Well, a couple reasons. Number one is the way they
have the materials that the teachers read, they have them read books that are very critical
race theory, critical race theory authors, there's a ton of LGBT gender indoctrination ...
What they're doing is that they're changing the culture of the schools and changing the way children
think about race, themselves, America, the values ...
So you sent me this image. So we have Karl Marx,
we have Tupac, we have a meme ... what's indoctrinating about this in a classroom?
Well, it's the idea that
activist teachers are taking upon themselves to put up things like glorifying Marxism.
Critical race theory is a Marxist ideology
Is that not just history though? Because he is a
famous figure in history.
Ironically they don't put pictures of anybody else that is pro-America.
They're changing the values and the morals of children to hate the country, that's the problem.
That's not an education.
Do you know that they're doing that though?
Yes, 100%. – How?
Because we have whistleblowers, teachers and
administrators in the schools telling, showing us that when they teach they only teach one direction
instead of telling them to love the country you live in.
Do you think teaching kids to love the country that they live in is another form of indoctrination though?
Why would you not want your citizens to love the place you live in? That's like saying I hate my house.
Why would I not want to love the house I live in?
Alvin sees these changes as fundamentally anti-American,
a tool to make children overly aware of their racial identities and critical of their country.
But some of the evidence he cites, highlighted sections from textbooks, were actually teaching
students about injustices in America's history, like the Chinese Exclusion Act and Jim Crow laws.
The Carmel Clay school administration has a very different viewpoint.
Though they weren't willing to give us specifics, they told us that they've retrained teachers to be more sensitive to
the backgrounds of students and have prepared children to be a part of the global community.
But they claim they haven't changed the academic syllabus itself.
They've also brought in social emotional learning, role-playing lessons which help children understand
and regulate emotions, set positive goals and feel and show empathy for others.
Jennifer McWilliams, a local teacher
and parent, posted an article highlighting her opposition to this and was subsequently fired
from her school.
What did the role playing look like? What did it consist of? What were the topics?
So we would give children a scenario and a lot of them were not scenarios
that were real serious but it was to influence these children, how to make decisions going
forward in all situations.
It may be something like, if it was a birthday and everybody got
a cookie in the classroom but there wasn't enough for two people, right, is it OK? What would you do?
As we were influencing these children, I began to see this culture shift within the school.
The ideology behind that is that it's because they believe that the country is systemically
racist or oppressive and so they believe that everyone is in some way traumatized.
It's about ideology and the ideology they want to push.
Jennifer's example didn't strike
me as pushing an ideology but rather a way to teach students to be kind to each other but for
both Alvin and Elizabeth teaching anything outside of traditional academia crosses a line.
They don't believe that institutional problems, particularly structural racism, are prevalent here so they don't
see a need for institutional change in schools.
But I wanted to understand what schooling was
like for a student who'd actually been through the system.
Hallie Watson graduated from Carmel high school in 2016
and was one of an estimated 60 black students at a school of over 1,000.
Carmel is in huge denial that racism is even a thing here.
There’s like: ‘No, that doesn't happen here, it happens in the world but not in Carmel'.
'No, no, no and especially not in our schools. No, no, no, no, no.'
Could you talk about some of the instances of your blackness being pointed out by teachers and
students?
I was in history class and this was my junior year and I don't know how we got
on the topic but somehow we did, of talking about welfare, a kid asked like, what exactly is
that, asked the teacher, what is welfare? I've heard it, I don't know what that is and the teacher
is like, well, kind of hard to explain.
She turned to me and she goes, goes: Hallie, you can explain that, right?
Can you explain what welfare is?
Only black kid in the class and I was like ... I was so caught off guard
and shocked that she just so casually expected me to explain it.
Was hearing racial slurs something that was normal at the high school?
Yes. It was, it became ...
I realised that it was going to be a norm very quickly and people would say that all the time here.
That's another thing that I'm the one being sensitive if I’m like: Hey, don't call me that, don't say that.
Like, I don't see like why that should be a normal thing for a kid to be like, I hate myself because
of my skin color but yeah, it took a lot, like, I had to build myself up.
No one else was going to do it for me.
Hallie's experiences are far from rare here.
A local organisation, Communities Allied
for Racial Justice, collected stories from local students and parents of colour that reflect a
systemic failure to combat racism.
I remember seeing these two white kids in blackface and it was just
black paint that was just on their face, they were dressed up as if they were in north central gear.
Ashten Spiker co-founded the organisation and was instrumental in pushing for progressive
change in Carmel.
What is your reaction to the parents that didn't really know that this
was an issue and kind of feel shocked that this is being pushed in the schools?
So yeah, when we started this work in Carmel last June, we realised that Carmel was not at the point
that people around us are and understanding that racism even exists.
When you have a student that's experiencing racism from their peers or from their teachers,
they are struggling to focus,
they're struggling to do their work.
DEI and SEL and all of that, it's not some boogeyman,
it's just genuinely caring about students and wanting them to succeed no matter their background.
What would you say to people from Unified Carmel that call these DEI efforts anti-American?
Yeah so, that's something that we've heard and that's something I don't understand.
So something that we look at other countries and we talk about and we look down upon are when leaders ask people to
follow them blindly and that's not what we should be doing here in America.
I love America but to
love something, to truly love it, is to want it to succeed and to want it to be better and it's not
teaching kids to hate America, it's teaching them the truth about what history actually looks like.
While the dividing line between those for and against these changes are clear,
there is also a large group here that define themselves as somewhere in the middle,
uncomfortable with the tactics of Unify Carmel but unsure of how DEI may be affecting their children.
These local parents are concerned about the politicisation of schools
and a lack of transparency from administrators.
I recognise we need to deal with racism,
bias and sometimes just ignorance but we need to make sure it's a constructive approach and not a
destructive approach and I see lots of cultural generalisations that just aren't necessarily true.
The way to know my children, what they need is by getting to know them and talking to me
as their mother.
I don't think we have systemic racism, I think we have racist people and I think
people aren't helping to enforce the systems that we do have.
I don't want to challenge you but I would just say I talked to a student today who said it was normal for her to hear slurs
in her classrooms and for teachers not to say anything and that's why in her mind it was systemic because
that was like almost the culture.
I'm not doubting her experience whatsoever but my point would be,
where's the accountability? The system doesn't allow the school teacher to be that way,
they don't know what's going on in their own hallways and they're spending money on all the wrong things.
I'm here for my kids to get an education, I don't need my kids taught how to rally, how to protest,
how to march. Not my kids from their upper middle class home in their idyllic suburb.
Word carries quickly in Carmel and before I left, a local organisation sent me an email
containing screenshots and videos collected by local students from social media.
It was difficult to ascertain the identity of those that posted these clips but it was clear that
they were of high school age and from this area in Indiana.
I'm really nervous, I don't know why.
OK, I'm gonna look at the first thing.
Well, there's only two ...
Stop filming me, you [N-word]
I hate [N-word]
But I just wanted to say,
Black lives don't matter.
These are like, white students who are just ...
Even watching this and not going to the school, I’m, like, disgusted.
'I wish slavery never ended.'
'George Floyd deserved to die.'
'If you go out at the wrong time you will be lynched.'
'All black people need to die.'
It's like, they're not afraid of getting in trouble for this. This is a culture, this isn't,
'oh, I might say it behind closed doors but I know in public I shouldn't be engaging in this.'
I think I've seen enough.
That's so disgusting.
Carmel is a microcosm of the debate surrounding how we talk about race in America's schools.
But people here can't even agree on the nature of the problem, never mind the solutions to it.
DEI feels like an imperfect but necessary solution to combating racism within our education system.
But the fight over the school's role in solving that problem
and how and what we teach our children looks set to continue.