‘The Kids Are Afraid to Be Themselves’

In addition to the CRT ban, the board’s rapid-fire edicts included a ban of all flags — including the Pride and Black Lives Matters banners — except the American and state flag; a policy requiring teachers to tell parents if their child is transgender or using new pronouns; and an aborted effort to remove the name of Harvey Milk, California’s first openly gay politician, from a social studies curriculum. 

The CRT ban forbids any classroom discussion of several basic pillars of anti-racism, including “racism is racial prejudice plus power” and “the incentive to move away from racist policies depends primarily on the self-interest of the oppressor class.”

Cox, who in 1998 became the first Black woman hired to teach at Chaparral High, said that as a woman raised by sharecropper parents in the segregated rural South, she is no longer able to discuss the systemic racism she endured growing up.

“It didn’t matter what the kids had to say, what the public had to say, what I had to say. The school board created a whole lot of chaos,” Cox said.

In 1999, Cox began teaching Brooklyn’s mother, Shayla. The following year, Cox created and began supervising a chapter of the Black Student Union at Chaparral. She said she felt that Black students in Temecula were disconnected from their culture. “Black kids in the suburbs do not get that sense of culture and pride because you’re a Black kid in a white space,” she explained.

In those days, the club was called the African American Student Union. Shayla was an inaugural member. 

“We couldn’t call it the Black Student Union because [the principal] said it would be too aggressive,” Shayla said. 

As today, the high school saw frequent incidents of racism in the late 1990s. “Everybody was touching my hair, asking me, ‘Do you shower?’” Shayla recalled. “We didn’t realize we were going through all of these microaggressions growing up until we started discussing these things as we got older — until the CRT ban came around and we started to discuss our feelings about things that we went through.”