LIKE MANY PEOPLE in my Oregon hometown of Newberg, I was shocked when in May 2021 a slate of Far-Right candidates received enough votes to take over the local school board. The Newberg schools seemed stable — thriving, even. But then the candidates’ successful campaign turned on the politicized promise to “take politics out of schools.” Once elected, they rewrote the district’s equity and diversity policies and instituted a ban on Black Lives Matter and Pride flags in classrooms.
“Getting back to the basics,” “fighting for liberty,” “restoring God in schools”: In the last two years, I’ve learned how often this language is used to justify discrimination. Shortly after the new school board instated a flag ban, Newberg became a toxic sludge of racism and division. Emboldened Proud Boys showed up to wave flags from our town square. High school students “slave traded” their Black peers on a Snapchat group. An educational assistant turned up at school in blackface, protesting vaccine mandates. It felt as though the school board’s policy decisions opened a door and hate-filled elements tumbled through.
Nearly two centuries ago and only 20 miles from my hometown, a newly established Oregon government crafted laws to exclude Black people from settling in the state. Jacob Vanderpool, a hotelier in Oregon City, was the first and only person formally expelled from my state because of his race. Sarah L. Sanderson’s new book, The Place We Make, narrates Vanderpool’s story, revealing how he was tried and convicted for transgressing Oregon’s Black exclusion laws, the first of which was instituted in 1844, followed by others. Vanderpool was exiled after a fellow hotel owner charged him with being a “mulatto,” and thus illegally in Oregon.
As I read Vanderpool’s story, I began viewing my state, my hometown, and our school board rancor through the lens of Vanderpool’s 1851 exclusion. Some people are still trying to craft exclusion laws — not only here in Newberg, but also in the many other places where school boards have become the predominant battlefield for our country’s cultural wars. Until 1926, Oregon’s Black exclusion laws made it nearly impossible for Black people to live in the state. The ramifications of this policy still linger, as less than 3 percent of the state’s population is Black.
Some in my hometown turned to school policies as one way to assure that marginalized people remain in exile: denied access to an equitable education; denied representation in curricula; denied the message that their lives matter, too. Of course, this is not the first time U.S. public schools have been a site of exile. After the Brown vs. Board of Education decision of 1954 deemed segregation in public schools unconsitutional, many white evangelicals chose to create private schools for their children. In his 2023 book, Preparing for War, religion scholar Bradley Onishi argues that what “motivated” white evangelicals in the 1960s and ’70s was “race — and the right to remain segregated from people of color — not preventing abortion. In fact, racism is the foundation of White Christian nationalism, the load-bearing portion that supports the structure and weight of the entire project.”
Exclusionary policies persist today. State legislatures continue to ban critical race theory — between 2021 and 2022, 241 anti-CRT rules were passed nationwide — and school boards have honed in on “protecting children.” In September 2021, Newberg school board directors passed a policy to “protect the kids” from the “political and social opinions of educators.” Proponents gave public comments at board meetings about teachers “indoctrinating kids, stripping away their identities” and “making them transgender.” A school board director, Renee Powell, noted at a September 2022 meeting that the flag ban was intended to make kids feel safe, and without it, teachers could display anything they wanted, including Nazi and Confederate flags as well as symbols of Satan.
Newberg’s “flag ban” was ruled unconstitutional by the Yamhill Circuit Court the next year, but schools nationwide are testing similar policies. Other school board battles have focused on banning books deemed too provocative. According to PEN America, 41 percent of books banned in the U.S. during the 2021-22 school year featured queer characters and 40 percent featured characters of color, statistics that say a great deal about what kinds of books are considered dangerous. Curricula are also targeted: For instance, starting in July 2023, new Florida educational standards began including language suggesting that enslaved people learned useful skills that “could be applied for their own benefit.”
These efforts, argued under the banner of “parents’ rights,” are founded on the idea that the Bible itself provides the moral principles upon which education should be built. Powell, the school board director in Newberg, made this connection explicitly, reading scripture during meetings and reminding parents that their children could carry their Bibles at school. Others might be savvier in how they package parents’ rights; Moms for Liberty promotes principles such as liberty and freedom on its website while actively campaigning for nationwide bans severely limiting the availability of books that don’t reify white, heteronormative ideals. Attending a Moms for Liberty national conference this year, writer and former president of Goshen College Shirley Showalter noted, “What I heard loudly and clearly at the summit was a call to theocracy in the guise of democracy — asserting conservative Christian values as normative for all. God’s name came up often, his blessing invoked, and his guidance proclaimed.”
These policies are attempts to codify white supremacy in the name of Jesus. Sanderson reminds readers that repenting of racism is always personal, because those of us who have benefited from white supremacy are complicit in its sin, by what we have done and, just as often, by what we have not done. In Newberg and elsewhere, the work of repentance might mean assuring that Black voices, Black stories, Black lives really do matter and that this affirmation is reflected in classrooms with a curriculum that accurately tells the history of Black people in the United States.
In May, my hometown elected five new school board directors, restoring bipartisan leadership in our district. Because of this, it could be easy to forget white supremacy’s stranglehold on our community, but moving on is impossible when more than 200 educators have left our schools for nearby districts and hateful rhetoric lingers in the air. Forgetting the past is not what we’re called to do, at any rate, if the places we make are to be safe for all of God’s children. Instead, Sanderson writes that “forgiveness is not forgetting the past” but affirming “that we are pursued by a love that is larger than space and older than time — a love that surrounds us and whispers we are safe enough to begin to remember.”
Melanie Springer Mock, a professor of English at George Fox University, is author of Finding Our Way Forward: When the Children We Love Become Adults.
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