Middle School Teacher Ramona Bessinger On Racialized Curriculum: “I’ve Never Seen Anything Like This”
Ramona Bessinger is the Providence, Rhode Island, middle school teacher blew the whistle on the destructive racialized new curriculum, and then went public about the retaliation that followed, all in posts by her at Legal Insurrection:
- I’m A Middle School Teacher And See How Critical Race Curriculum Is Creating Racial Hostility In School (July 13, 2021)
- Ramona Bessinger: I’m A Middle School Teacher Facing Retaliation After Blowing The Whistle On Critical Race Curriculum (October 3, 2021)
The intensifying retaliation, culminating in a decision to suspend her for 5 days without pay and transfer her to a new school, has been documented here:
- Harassment Of Providence Anti-Critical Race Whistleblower Teacher Ramona Bessinger Intensified
- Providence Anti-Critical Race Whistleblower Teacher Ramona Bessinger Taunted In Troubling Schoolyard Incident
- Providence Anti-CRT Whistleblower Teacher Ramona Bessinger Hit With Suspension And Transfer
Tonight Bessinger appeared on the Tucker Carlson show:
TRANSCRIPT
(AUTO-GENERATED, MAY CONTAIN TRANSCRIPTION ERRORS)
Tucker Carlson: Ramona Bessinger is a middle school English teacher in Providence, Rhode Island. Over the summer, she wrote a series of very insightful blog posts exposing her school’s openly racist and divisive curriculum. For doing that, for daring to be honest, Ramona Bessinger was hauled in front of a disciplinary committee and suspended by the school district. Now the school district claims the suspension is unrelated to the blog post because obviously they lie. Ramona Bessinger joins us tonight. Ramona Bessinger, thank you so much for coming on. So give us just a quick example of what the school district was teaching that you objected to.
Ramona Bessinger: Well, first of all, I would just like to say that in all my years as being an educator, I’ve never seen anything like this. And sometime around last January, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of books rolled into my classroom as well as educators all throughout the district. And immediately I knew something wasn’t right. The covers of the books were bizarre. They were cartoon-like. They were pamphlet style, very thin. All of the books had the same sort of narrative, the oppressor versus oppressed narrative. It was just strange not to mention the quality of the books, the rigor wasn’t there.
So the moment I started asking questions, the moment I started probing and asking why we’re teaching these books, as opposed to vetted, literary material, boom, that was it. I was public enemy number one. Um, you know, I w every single I could not do anything, right. Everything was, uh, I was brought to task on absolutely everything. It was just ridiculous. And rather than sort of cower and be silenced, I decided I was going to get louder. And that is exactly what I did. Someone told me about this political blog, Legal Insurrection. I emailed them and I explained that this was going on in my school. You know, there are these very strange books and this odd curriculum rolling out, and I was concerned, I didn’t quite know exactly what was going on, but by the time I wrote the blog, I had a pretty clear idea, but more importantly, it was the students, the reaction of the students and seeing the sort of mistrust and the overall you know, devastation I was feeling it was having on the students in my classroom, but I was also making connections to other teachers and students all around the country.
And certainly in my own districts district, we were all talking about this kind of strange collection of books that seem to be very racially divisive. I don’t like to say critical race theory. I call it racialized curriculum because that’s in fact what it is. So I wrote about it in that blog, and that was met with you know the mob descending on me when I went back to school in September, with some very strange attacks by some colleagues, because God forbid you can have, you can have a reasonable discourse or an argument with any of these people. Not at all. No, you know, what they have to do is cower and hide and attack and make public displays. So, that led to my getting louder and writing yet another blog about the harassment. And when I did that, then they upped the ante and involved children. You know, it’s always impressive when you use children as a political shields or political weapons to fight your bad health.
Tucker Carlson: Yeah. Just like the Khmer Rouge. I’m so grateful. You pointed out that a lot of these materials, these so-called books were stupid and badly written because they are because the people who write them are stupid and no one ever says that. So thank you for saying that and, and, and good luck. Thank you for being honest, Ramona Bessinger. Thank you.
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