interesting facts about mountain brook alabama

Right now we’re in a manufactured national panic over what happens when students are given an anti-racist education, often and insidiously mislabeled as “ critical race theory.” But I know from experience that we should be far more worried about what happens when students aren’t given anti-racist education. My education was stellar in all ways but one. By the time I graduated, I knew my sines from my cosines, could read music by sight, had a solid grasp on the theory of relativity, and possessed almost all the academic tools I’d need to function in the world and succeed in college, where roughly 98 percent of my classmates were headed. It is one of the top-performing public high schools in the country and currently the second-highest performing public high school in the state. If it had been, it would certainly have been treated as a bygone of the past because now, I was instructed, we lived in a colorblind society, one in which the erasure of race and ethnicity was passed off as a virtue.Īll of this was intentional because Mountain Brook High School is a place where intentionality is expected.

To be fair, there were one or two teachers who tried to push back against this false narrative (I did read Toni Morrison), but I don’t remember racism ever being named explicitly. Somewhere along the line, I was told that Abraham Lincoln was the worst president America has ever had. I was taught that the Civil War was about “states’ rights” rather than slavery and that slavery would have been a silly thing to fight a war over anyway since most slaves were treated kindly by the people who enslaved them. I’m sure I read Truman Capote, but I wouldn’t have been told he was gay. I didn’t read “Letter from Birmingham Jail” until I no longer lived in Birmingham. I was never taught about Emmett Till or Ruby Bridges. I don’t believe I ever heard their names in any class I ever attended. The 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama - where Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, and Denise McNair were murdered in a 1963 bombing before any of them got to see their 15th birthday - is a 10-minute drive from where I grew up.

Interesting facts about mountain brook alabama