(Disclosure: I belong to the Charleston Moms for Liberty chapter, I’m friends with its president, and I am friends with Carlton Walker, who took the community meeting video used in this post. I have not relied on any of these relationships for the facts below. Instead, everything I’ve written is based upon publicly available information.)

A knock-down-drag-out battle revolving around a school superintendent’s being put on leave in Charleston, South Carolina, highlights how Democrats are still successfully using the race card to keep blacks from focusing on the real issues plaguing their communities.

Under British aegis, the South Carolina colony relied upon slaves to labor on their plantations. The British originally wanted to use indentured Irish in the fields, but the Irish kept dying from malaria, making them economically unprofitable. Therefore, the British turned to the thriving African-fed, Arab-run slave trade (which previously served only Africa and the Ottoman Empire) to provide labor that could survive the brutal Southeastern climate in Britain’s American colonies.

When the United States of America came into being, founded on the principle that “all men are created equal,” entitling them to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” slavery came into focus as an institution inconsistent with American values. The only way to address the problem was to identify blacks as people of lesser humanity so that they could not lay claim to the inherent rights with which the Creator endowed them.

This was a manifestly dishonest and completely untenable position, as growing numbers of Americans recognized. The Civil War expended 600,000 lives to put the slavery question to rest, once and for all, but the Democrat party wasn’t going to let that racism go. It’s relentlessly relied on race ever since, whether to marginalize blacks or use them as reliable votes to advance policies that have often been detrimental to blacks.

Image: Eric Gallien. YouTube screen grab.

In Charleston, South Carolina, though, it seemed as if the black community, one with an incredibly long and honorable lineage, wasn’t going to buy into the left’s most recent racial madness. Sure, they voted Democrat (a trend that started with Franklin Roosevelt, but escalated under John F. Kennedy, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama, all of whom realized that you could buy votes with federal largesse), but they didn’t revel in hatred.

Never was that clearer than after Dylann Roof’s unspeakably evil slaughter of members of the Emanuel AME Church who welcomed him to their Bible study. Then, the black community’s leaders rejected BLM’s invitation to use that crime to stoke further racial division. Eight years later, things are different, and the fight revolving around the Charleston County School District is a microcosm of larger issues involving race and family values.

Typically for all schools across America, which get administrators and teachers from the same pool of leftist colleges, Charleston County schools started bringing LGBTQ ideology, Critical Race Theory, Social-Educational Learning, DEI, and other leftist, post-modern ideas into the classroom. Actual education was less important. The district, although slightly better than the state average, is pretty pathetic in reading, writing, and arithmetic. For teachers, it's more fun and rewarding to talk about their and the students’ pronouns than teaching fractions.

Parents who care whether their children are being trained into weird sexual identities or told their skin color means they are irremediably victims or bullies pushed back. Moms for Liberty was on the front lines of this fight—and the parents won, electing a school board with a conservative 5-4 majority.

On July 1, the school board named Eric Gallien, who is black, as the new school superintendent. In September, a complaint was filed against Gallien, alleging that he had “created a hostile work environment and violated several policies, including two regarding employee conduct.” The complaining employee said Gallien “left me marginalized, disrespected, and unsupported.”

During an executive session on September 25, held privately so that the allegations against Gallien would not be bandied about in public, the board unanimously agreed that the matter should be investigated. They then voted on that matter during the public session. However, a dispute arose about whether Gallien should be put on leave. The leftist board members objected and left the room. The remaining five conservatives (a majority in any event) voted to place Gallien on leave, again during a public session. (Gallien, confusingly, also seems to have resigned.)

Leftists instantly contended that Gallien had been put on leave because he is black. They contended that the executive committee meeting was private for nefarious reasons. Carlotte Bailey, a board member, took to Facebook to explain that the meeting complied with district policy—and, sadly, to say that she was subject to racial attacks and called a pawn of Moms for Liberty:

A few days later, the five board members who put Gallien on paid administrative leave issued a formal statement explaining why some matters must be kept private—and that district policy allows for board members to have private debates.

Wise heads would say that the independent investigation should go forward unhindered. Hot heads—leftist heads—are excited at the chance to stir up racial hatred. Carlton Walker, who is running for the state assembly, attended a community mass meeting at the Charity Missionary Baptist Church to find out what was going on:

To Carlton’s surprise, the person bringing meeting attendees up to date about Gallien’s firing didn’t focus on current events. She cited the Negro Act of 1740 (put into place following the Stono Rebellion, a famous slave revolt) and a law of 1835, both of which made it illegal to educate blacks. She then took listeners through Jim Crow-era laws.

She’s certainly correct that South Carolina’s pre-modern history vis-à-vis blacks was wrong, both practically and morally. But it’s as if, for her and the people in the room, the Civil War, the 13th and 14th Amendments, the Civil Rights Movement, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Obama’s election, and all the other differences between America in 2023 and a British colony in 1740 or an antebellum slave state in 1835 don’t exist. As with all leftists, the past is a tool to be used or ignored as need dictates.

The reality is that the fight shouldn’t be about a closed meeting. For the black community, it should be about the fact that their children’s teachers aren’t willing or able to teach them the basics for functioning in the world. Instead, they want to sexualize them and tell them that their skin color is the only determinative factor in their lives. Democrats are relentlessly focusing them on racial issues to give the Democrats the freedom to continue to use and abuse the black community, as they have done since 1828.

Corrections: Carlotte Bailey is a board member, not the board chair. And while there was some private debate, all board actions occurred during public sessions. Nothing was done secretly.