It’s hard to decide whether to move on from last week’s Rod Dreher tirade in the Morning News against what he describes as racist white Woodrow parents or to keep feeding the monster by writing about his further comments.
In this case, I guess I’ll feed the monster at least one more time.
We’ll talk about the Morning News’ Sunday story questioning various DISD volunteer leaders — including our neighborhood’s Craig Reynolds — for dipping their hands in the public cookie jar in another post. For this one, we’ll stick with Dreher.
Late last week, Dreher posted this anonymous rant from what he describes as a "Hispanic reader" who apparently didn’t enjoy his experience at Woodrow 10 years ago. Dreher worded the intro to his excerpts from the guy’s email curiously: "E-mails keep coming in about the Woodrow column. I keep hearing from Hispanic readers like this guy, a Woodrow grad." The headline on the post was curious, too: "Woodrow Wilson HS = Preston Hollow Elem?", no doubt a reference (from Dreher, but not any letter-writer as far as I could tell) to the lawsuit by several Hispanic parents claiming their students were essentially segregated into "low-performer" classes at Preston Hollow Elementary while white students at the school spent all of their class time together in supposedly advanced classes.
It seems odd, first of all, to say that he’s hearing from "Hispanic readers" but then only post one of the comments, and an anonymous one at that. Plus, where are all of the responses from black parents, who presumably are equally offended by Woodrow’s racist overtones, one wonders?
Second, what the anonymous emailer has to say sounds like the same kind of racism, pure and simple, against white parents and students at the school that Dreher identified as going the other way in his original column.
Check out this quote on Dreher’s latest post from the anonymous Hispanic grad: "We literally were second-class citizens at Woodrow. All the major roles in the yearly musicals went to the Lakewood kids as well. What I still to this day fail to understand is how the teachers and administration didn’t only allow but condoned such attitudes. I myself would not send a child to Woodrow … I honestly don’t blame Ruth Vail for sending her child to a private school."
One thing to keep in mind: When we flash back to high school, is there anyone out there who didn’t feel looked-down-upon by at least one group in the school? I’m not belittling the guy’s claims, and if he felt mistreated by any group at Woodrow it’s too bad. But anonymous complaints about how bad high school was wouldn’t be hard to drum up from any high school in the country; for the most part, middle school and high school are two things I wish we all could pass through without actually having to physically attend classes.
