That parts not actually noteworthy. WaPo claims the image "showed him and his wife, who is White, in an embrace, celebrating their wedding anniversary," which makes it sound like they were at an anniversary party hugging. The actual picture comes from a beach photoshoot they paid to have done for their anniversary, where they were professionally photographed doing romantic things on the beach in beach appropriate attire. The picture is a closeup of him in a black sleeveless undershirt moving in for a kiss on top of his wife who is laying beneath him in a denim tube top. It's a sexual image, not to condemn it, but to say if I worked at a middle school, I would not want that picture of the principal somewhere the students would find it. Middle schoolers are trouble. The news tries to imply through vagueness that the district was against a picture of an interracial couple, but leave out that they're in the missionary position. Our fantastic news media at work again.
For those curious:
That doesn't take away from racists getting a black man suspended through silly accusations. I went on a fact finding mission to see if there was any basis to the claims. Even in Texas, I don't expect "that black guy teaches CRT" to gain traction without something to support it, so I found what they were using to support it. I'm not sure if he was principal at the time, but he was the third speaker in
this teacher training program, and you can see a pdf of the presentation slides
here. Some of that is CRT adjacent, I wouldn't want my kids school district listing Ta-Nehisi Coates as recommended reading for teachers, but what people did is they pulled out things like the slide of "good vs bad" people to make it look like this guy was teaching that old southern white people are bad and young progressives are good, which is super dishonest and really far removed from reality. Like:
a) They removed context from the content. That slide is the most egregious example, as in context the slide of good vs bad was showing how not to talk about racism.
b) They removed context from the training. There's no way in hell that man decided spontaneously to make this training, this is the same corporate BS racial awareness training infecting every sufficiently large organization in the country, and I guarantee the school was made to do it by higher authorities.
c) They put the entire thing on this guy, but there were two white women also presenting, and that presentation has "white women" written all over it. If I may put my racial and gender prejudice to work here, I don't think handsome black man made a powerpoint about the book "White Fragility" with a prominently positioned picture of the author. I imagine a white woman did that.
d) None of it is explicitly CRT. Some of it, I would call gateway drugs to CRT, but they're showing these slides to middle school teachers who probably all loath this type of pre-semester teacher trainings and would rather not be there.
e) None of that information was presented to a single student. This was all to help teachers interact with students, not information to pass onto them.
In conclusion, the people attacking this principal are basically blaming him for the state of the world today. They're probably just racists.
