While the Committee at least pretended to listen to parents, they made it clear that they would not listen to the opinions of the children.  “We make the decisions, not them” said trustee Ron Carey, surprised at the notion that an adult might ever want to take the opinions of a child into consideration on matters that affect them personally and deeply.  If there was a lesson the children present drew that night, it’s that School Board members do not respect them.

A School Board member so racist that he even surprised me

I will say it from the onset, I don’t like Lance James.  He was the only candidate that the Teachers Union was able to find to run for his district so I supported him when he first ran in 2010.  However, I became weary of him when he expressed his profound dislike for the then-principal of the school my daughters had just started.  He accused the principal of hating men and discriminating against fathers.  While I didn’t know the principal well at that time, I did ask my husband and other school fathers if they shared that impression. They were all baffled.  There is nothing wrong, of course, with profoundly disliking a certain teacher or principal – I profoundly dislike Lance James and he is teacher in Hayward -, but his accusations against this principal, a gay woman, were troubling.  Since then, I have noticed other misogynistic or plainly creepy behavior by James – like when at a Policy Committee meeting on the dress code, he described how distracting a young girl’s shoulders could be in such a disturbing way that I actually interrupted him to ask him whether he felt distracted by his students.  In any case, his solution to boys’ interests in girls, was to have the girls cover up completely.

So I was not too surprised that Lance James completely ignored and even vilified the comments made by the mothers who had spoken out that night.  I was not prepared, however, for the level of outright racism that drooled from his mouth as he praised the police and indicted those who would not support them.    James first pontificated on how the parents and community members who saw a problem with police in the classroom were wrong.   He went on to explain how we should not blame police for the massive human rights violations committed by them which are at the basis of community distrust for police – he compared police officers to soldiers returning from war -, and rather, people in San Leandro should seek community with police officers.

James may not have used the “n”  word, as an elderly politician did not too long ago, but his analysis of what is needed in our schools, more police officers, is no less racist.  The system that James is upholding with such passion is one that disciplines children of color at several times the rate of their white counterparts, that has black students being arrested far more often, incarcerated at much higher rates and for longer than their white classmates. It’s a system that leads to one third of black men being incarcerated at some point in their lives and half of black men being unable to find jobs.

Let me be clear, both our educational and justice systems are racist to their very core, and combined, they are condemning millions of African American and Latino children to lives of virtual slavery.  The school-to-prison pipeline is set up to destroy whole communities and annihilate the dreams of possibilities of generations of people of color.  It would not take much legal creativity to draft an argument that its application constitutes a crime against humanity.  Any expression of support for this system, and in particular its law enforcement component, cannot be understood as anything but racist  The only way you can think it’s alright for children and people of color to suffer such treatment is if you think they deserve it – because they are not as worthy as you are.

When James tries to silence criticism of this system and calls for victims of police violence and discrimination to accept moral guidance from the same institution that brutalizes them and their communities, he shows the sort of contempt for the other that you would expect in someone wearing a white robe.

Black Lives Matter

I wanted to throw up.  Instead I yelled from the audience “black lives matter.”  He stopped, looked at me with fury, and went on on his deification of police, without even paying lip service to the fact that blacks lives do matter.

By the end, James was actually quasi-comical.  He tried to make the point that kids don’t feel threatened by police because he sees them flocking to the SROs at his school.  I wonder if, as a teacher, he ever heard of how Europeans brought shiny beads to present to Native Americans as they conspired to rob them of their lands.  SROs today use stickers, souvenirs and offers of photos on their shiny motorcycles to achieve the same effect.   There is a reason, after all, why we need to teach our kids to not take candy from strangers.

But I didn’t laugh at James,  I snapped.   Because there, in front of me, was the personification of everything that is wrong not just with our schools, but with our society.  Teachers and people with authority who don’t see children as humans, who have absolutely no understanding, no respect and no compassion for them.  Politicians who have no knowledge of the social issues involving the communities around them, and who simply don’t care.  Men who believe they know better, just because they are born with the privilege of a penis and white skin.

So I expressed my anger in the way of those who know this battle is lost, so it’s time to change the terms of the war: I yelled. Loudly. Passionately.

I called Lance James a racist pig (maybe I didn’t use the word pig, but I definitely meant it).  I might have used other names, but my vocabulary on these matters is a bit limited.  I told him he should be ashamed of himself.  I accused him of being a lackey of the police, paying them back for past favors.  He spat back some of his own insults. He left.

More than drunk driving?

My accusation of James was not arbitrary.  Three years ago, a rumor started circulating around City Hall that a School Board member had been arrested for drunk driving.  The rumor did not come with a name and I first heard about it when people started calling my husband – who at the time was in the School Board – and asking him whether it was him who’d been arrested.  It took some tracking down, but finally and through a process of elimination it came out that the trustee in question was Lance James.

Back when this took place, the San Leandro Police Department was putting out press releases with gusto.  Someone steals a cell phone? Press release.  A street sweeper recovers an urn with ashes dropped by fleeing burglar? Yep, it’s a press release.  Police chase two men because one of them is holding to his waistband and then arrest them for resisting arrest? You got it, press release. So it is quite strange that this particular arrest was not followed by a press release announcing it.  Call me paranoid, but if it had been Mike who was arrested, I’m sure it would have gone out in 14 point font.

The lack of a press release meant that James could tell the story on his own terms – though it did take some convincing to get him to apologize publicly and to not seek the nomination for School Board President, as he was meaning to.  I originally suspected that James’ rabid pro-police public stance was payback for police not issuing a press released and this is what I accused him of after the Curriculum Committee meeting.  His response was to ask Police why they didn’t issue the press release, the police officers smiled but otherwise remained quiet on that.

But I think I was wrong.  It’s not gratitude that is motivating James.  When talking about his drunk driving arrest, he expresses bitterness both against police for having arrested him and against the world at large.  Indeed, his private attitude towards police seems quite different from the one he officially proclaims.  Perhaps, I’m left to speculate, James’ public obsequiousness towards police is not repayment for their not issuing a press release on his drunk driving arrest back in 2012.    The average driver has driven drunk 80 times before his first arrest, and around 1/4th of people arrested for drunk driving, will be arrested a second time within five years.  If James was stopped for drunk driving again, we haven’t heard about it.

Caught on Video, Oh My!

But of course, it could be something else altogether. We all have secrets and the police have many tools for finding secrets.  From license plate cameras that photograph cars in places they should not be in, to red light cameras that photograph drivers with passengers they shouldn’t be with, to surveillance cameras that record conversations thought to be private to cellphone interception devices that allow them to listen to private conversations, Police are entrusted with incredible amounts of private information that they can use, at the very least, to intimidate people into doing what they want them to do.

As we say in Spanish, a buen entendedor, pocas palabras.  You don’t need many words with someone who understands what you are getting at.  I thought of this phrase when a police officer asked me for the third time, after that night’s curriculum committee meeting, how I felt about having my outburst against Lance James recorded by their  body cameras.

I’ll be honest, at first I was just perplexed by the question. I didn’t know they had their body cameras on, as that didn’t seem to comply with the protocol for using the cameras I had read when they first got them, but I didn’t understand why they thought I would care.  This was a public meeting and anyone had the right to record it.  Indeed, my husband had been recording it until his battery ran out.  But it became apparent that the police thought I should be embarrassed about my outburst and would be doubly embarrassed if the video got out.  I tried to reassure them that I wouldn’t, but I think they may have to do a whole college course on women’s studies before they could figure out why this is the case.

Had the question been asked just once during our conversation, I would probably had concluded they had been taunting me in good faith.  But by the second or third time that Police asked me about my feelings on the recording, I was starting to suspect it wasn’t a question after all.   After all, if they followed proper procedures, the video would be destroyed and it would be immaterial whether it had ever existed.

With this realization in mind, I can now answer their question:

– I feel informed. If the police officers had their cameras on during that meeting, chances are they will have them on whenever they are in school property.  They’ll not only be eavesdropping in private conversations, they’ll be recording them.  Until the law on this is settled, they may very well be able to use anything they find this way against children, their parents or whoever these were talking about.