Education

How and why Loudoun County became the face of the nation’s culture wars

By Hannah Natanson
July 5, 2021 at 7:26 p.m. EDT

Angry parents battling over critical race theory at rallies, outside school buildings and in rival Facebook groups. A teacher suing the school system after he was suspended for refusing to use transgender students’ pronouns. A raucous school board meeting that began with dueling protests over transgender rights and culminated in an arrest.

Loudoun County, a wealthy and diversifying slice of purple-turning-blue suburban Northern Virginia, is fast becoming the face of the nation’s culture wars.

“It’s unsettling to say the least, especially because it seems everybody is armed to the teeth these days,” said longtime resident Tom Mulrine, 77, who is White. “This could spark something.” ... “It’s shameful,” said Wendall T. Fisher, 67, who said he was the first Black elected member of the Loudoun County School Board — and the only to date. “It’s just shameful.”

Loudoun is not the only place where furor over critical race theory, or CRT, is taking off. Conservative activists and pundits across the United States have weaponized the theory — a decades-old academic framework that holds that racism is woven into the country’s past and institutions — to claim that equity-conscious school systems are teaching children to hate one another, and White children to hate themselves.

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Fox News has made a habit of reporting on the events at almost every Loudoun School Board meeting, sometimes generating several headlines from one session. It’s part of a larger focus on critical race theory at the network: Fox has mentioned the theory at least 1,860 times in 2021, up from 132 times in 2020.

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By Hannah Natanson
Hannah Natanson is a reporter covering education and K-12 schools in Virginia. Twitter https://twitter.com/hannah_natanson