The December of my senior year in high school, I sat in a biology class taught by a teacher who had just written me a letter of recommendation for my college applications. We were reviewing for final exams when the subject of genetic diseases came up. A consummate overachiever, I raised my hand to ask a question that hadn’t been covered in the material we’d been given.
“Why are Black people more likely to be born with sickle cell anemia?”
My teacher replied, “Karma.”
It was clearly intended as a joke, and after six years in Texas spent inuring myself to the sting of such comments, I took it as such. He answered my question in earnest, and we moved on to another topic. Later that night, I recorded the interaction on my Tumblr, where I tagged it with “my life” and “funny as hell.” Sometimes I wonder what might have happened if I hadn’t — if that moment would have faded, sun-bleached like the rest of my recollections of my Black Texan adolescence.
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Instead, that moment returned unbidden as I read Mike Hixenbaugh’s “They Came for the Schools: One Town’s Fight Over Race and Identity, and the New War for America’s Classrooms.” Hixenbaugh, along with his NBC colleague Antonia Hylton, was among the first journalists to take note of the battle fomenting in Southlake, an ostensibly idyllic North Texas suburb. This razor-sharp book is the masterful culmination of years of reportage.
Over the course of 16 propulsive chapters, Hixenbaugh lays bare the journey that took Carroll Independent School District from one of the most highly lauded public school districts in the nation to one now facing eight civil rights complaints. The U.S. Department of Education is negotiating with Carroll ISD over four of those complaints, which, as Hixenbaugh recently reported, “signals that the department has substantiated the students’ allegations of racist and anti-LGBTQ discrimination.”
The controversy began, as most do these days, on social media. In 2018, a video of White high school students from Southlake chanting the n-word went viral. The video was recorded on the night of a homecoming dance at which students reported hearing “all these white kids just jumping up and down screaming slurs.” The video became a source of embarrassment for the town, and residents hoped it would blow over quickly. But when the school board called a special meeting to allow members of the community to express their feelings, it became abundantly clear that wouldn’t be the case.
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“One after another that morning, parents of Black students came forward with painful stories of their own — like a dam had broken under the weight of decades worth of unaddressed grievances,” Hixenbaugh writes. “By the end of the meeting, many in attendance were in tears, including some white parents.”
In a move that would come to seem inconceivable just three years later, the district, along with a board of volunteers, came up with what they called the Cultural Competence Action Plan. It was released in the summer of 2020, just a few short months after students organized a protest at Southlake Town Square in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. The CCAP called for “mandatory cultural sensitivity training for all Carroll students and teachers; a top-to-bottom review of district curricula to embed culturally responsive lessons at every grade level; a formal process for reporting and tracking incidents of racist bullying; an audit to ensure student clubs were welcoming and inclusive regardless of race, gender, or sexuality; the creation of a new LGBTQ focus group to foster dialogue at the high school; and changes to the code of conduct to more explicitly spell out consequences for acts of discrimination.”
In the midst of a post-George Floyd racial backlash, the CCAP, Hixenbaugh writes, “landed like a bomb.”
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From here, the story takes on a shape now familiar after three years of conservative reaction against “critical race theory” and “gender ideology” in public school classrooms. A murderer’s row of the conservative right’s favorite culture warriors made appearances in the ensuing conflict that Hixenbaugh methodically documents, including Southlake resident Dana Loesch, Tucker Carlson, Chris Rufo and Ron DeSantis.
But Hixenbaugh also spotlights lesser-known figures like Leigh Wambsganss, the wife of a former Southlake mayor and a co-founder of the Southlake Families political action committee, which promised to defeat the CCAP. With a war chest of nearly a quarter-million dollars and a slate of handpicked hard-line conservative school board candidates, Southlake Families developed a strategy that would soon be replicated across the country.
According to Hixenbaugh, nearly a dozen local PACs were formed in the Dallas-Fort Worth suburbs in 2021 alone — “so many that a liberal Fort Worth newspaper coined the phrase ‘the Southlake Playbook’ to describe the surge of conservative organizing around local nonpartisan school boards.”
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The public high school I attended is a 15-minute drive from Southlake. My parents still live in the area and occasionally shop at a Trader Joe’s a stone’s throw from the town square where Southlake students chanted: “Say his name! George Floyd!” Hixenbaugh briefly mentions a private school my parents considered when my family first made our move from Chicago to North Texas. My mother recently told me that the school wanted to hold me back a grade. She was confused, or perhaps insulted, given that the elementary school I had previously attended had instead allowed me to skip fifth grade. Hixenbaugh writes that in 1972, that same school’s headmaster told the Associated Press, “We have had some Blacks apply from the area but the pathetic situation is that they cannot make the preliminary testing.”
“They Came for the Schools” is full of private ghosts like these, phantasmic half-images of my Texas education, rendered in spare prose. Describing what he calls “a common example” of a microaggression at Carroll, for example, Hixenbaugh alludes to “a white student telling an academically gifted Black classmate that she’s ‘the whitest Black girl I know.’”
There’s a specificity in the racism that’s as native to Texas as bluebonnets. It’s perfectly captured in that refrain, which is most often, in my experience, deployed as a compliment. That strain of racism makes room for what Lawrence Wright once described as the “cowboy individualism” that the state was founded on. It allows individuals to escape the overt malice of racial terror, as long as they simultaneously subvert the stereotypes — and divest from the communities — they are measured against.
The school where the n-word sat so comfortably in my White classmates’ mouths is the same school that performs a haka, a Tongan ritual from the other side of the world, before every football game. In a way, it’s the bastardized fulfillment of the promise of the American melting pot. We will take what serves us and demand you leave the rest behind. The cognitive dissonance this creates is as jarring as the slurs.
The nature of that racism, of that dissonance, might address one of the only questions that Hixenbaugh leaves unanswered: How did neighbor so quickly turn on neighbor? How did a town go from openly admitting to and promising to rectify its history of racial discrimination to suggesting that anyone who attempted to do so was a traitor to their country? And perhaps, most important, can that process be reversed? Not without outside guidance, if the Education Department’s recent intervention into Southlake Carroll is anything to go by.
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All the Southlake students who filed complaints with the Education Department have already graduated. It’s unclear how many other children’s high school years will be shaped by these same traumas, how many of them will be subject to refrains that are far too familiar to older ears.
But perhaps here too Hixenbaugh can be instructive. At its core “They Came for the Schools” is a work of compassion, one that never fails to center the vulnerability or the dignity of students like Mia Mariani. One of the students whose civil rights complaints formed the basis of the recent negotiations between Carroll ISD and the Education Department, Miriani said she was surprised that her concerns had attracted official attention. “She’s worked to move on from her experiences in Southlake,” Hixenbaugh wrote, “but hopes her case leads to changes for current and future students.”
“Any change for them,” Mariani told him, “is healing for me.”
Rachelle Hampton is a culture writer for Slate and host of the internet culture podcast “In Case You Missed It.”
They Came for the Schools
One Town’s Fight Over Race and Identity, and the New War for America’s Classrooms
By Mike Hixenbaugh
Mariner. 288 pp. $32.50
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