Good morning, RVA! It's 72 °F, and today you can expect cloudy skies, a small chance of rain throughout the day, and temperatures just under 90 °F. That sounds like an improvement over yesterday’s hot, humid, and hazy cocktail of sweaty sadness.
Water cooler
Dawnthea M. Price Lisco at VPM reports on the Virginia Department of Education’s newly issued “Model Policies on Ensuring Privacy, Dignity, and Respect for All Students and Parents in Virginia’s Public Schools.” You can read the 18-page PDF for yourself here, but, as you might expect from the Youngkin administration, the intent of the document is mostly opposite the document’s name—a classic Republican technique used to obfuscate their actual, usually evil, intentions. For example, the policies require that “School Division personnel shall refer to each student using only the pronouns appropriate to the sex appearing in the student’s official record” unless parents provide written instruction otherwise—which sounds exactly the opposite of protecting privacy and dignity. This disrespect of students, specifically trans students, is, of course, one of the guiding lights of the contemporary Republican platform. It’s cruel and mean and exists for no other reason than to rile up their base and make their political opponents furious (Lisco notes that the policy “does not appear to include an enforcement mechanism, a time limit or obvious penalties”). Equality Virginia’s statement (on Twitter, ironically) reads, in part, “The Governor is showing what his priorities are through this policy: disregarding expert opinion, harming students and eroding trust between parents, educators and school personnel.” Stay tuned for how local school districts react and how—if at all—they’ll work on implementation.
Quick side note on the previous paragraph: Reporters and news organizations desperately need to come up with a better way to describe these hateful Republican policies. “Parental rights” is a partisan Republican talking point; is incredibly unclear; and does not, in anyway, help the reader understand the news. While I don’t believe reporters are unbiased, by using “parental rights” without giving context, they casually promote right-wing propaganda—something that I doubt any of them want to be associated with!
The Richmond Times-Dispatch’s Eric Kolenich reports on something I missed from Planning Commission’s agenda: “Local developer Hourigan Group plans to raze the Southern States silos and build in their place a mixed-use development..” The dumb, resistant-to-change part of me is shocked and wants to write about how iconic and important the silos are to Richmond’s riverside skyline. The smarter part of me knows that this is valuable land currently unusable by humans in any way at all. Maybe, in a different timeline, we could have ended up with something like Seattle’s Gas Works Park (featured in 1999’s 10 Things I Hate About You), but that’s a much bigger, much different piece of land.
Also in the RTD, the Editorial Board takes aim at Richmond’s School Board, saying “their dysfunction is bordering on a crisis.” I agree with the headline and a lot of the sentences in there, especially these two: “But this School Board prefers stoking conflict over problem-solving, playing a dangerous game at the worst possible time.” and “Turning Richmond schools into a political punching bag, and a lab experiment for Republican-led alternative schools that drain needed resources, is a recipe for disaster.” However, the editorial misses big time on the cause for the Board’s dysfunction, pointing to “the simple fact that 68% of the district's students qualify as ‘economically disadvantaged,’ according to the Virginia Department of Education.” I couldn’t disagree more. The School Board’s dysfunction is solely due to the behavior of its members. It has nothing to do with the students or the communities that the Board represents. To suggest that those communities do not deserve or could not produce functional, successful candidates is offensive and false! Of course RPS’s School Board faces greater and different challenges than their peers in Henrico and Chesterfield, but there are bright, hardworking, amazing people living in Richmond right now ready to tackle those challenges...we just need some of them to run for School Board in 2024.
Ned Oliver at Axios Richmond ate a $20 milkshake from Coco+Hazel and lived to tell the tale. What’s the appropriate occasion for a $20 milkshake that’s topped with two full-sized brownies? Oliver’s suggestion: “First, this is obviously a special occasion shake. Like, maybe you wronged a child and need to make it up to them somehow.”
This morning's longread
How the former Confederate capital slashed Black voting power, overnight
While I was out on vacation, the Washington Post ran this great article about Richmond’s final annexation. Out of all of Virginia’s weird and wooly state-level policies and practices, the ban on all future annexation probably has the biggest detrimental impact on Richmond (and the rest of Virginia’s tiny independent cities). While the General Assembly could theoretically restore this power, I don’t see it happening in my lifetime or, honestly, in the Commonwealth’s lifetime. But, on an infinite time scale, anything’s possible!
But civil rights historians say Richmond’s annexation of Chesterfield County was different, a moment steeped in the particular brand of racism that was then characteristic of the former Confederate capital: polite, sugarcoated and rooted in a fear of Black power. It was “racism with a velvet glove,” Rutledge Dennis, a professor of sociology at George Mason University, said, who was teaching at Virginia Commonwealth University at the time of the case. Dennis and his colleague John Moeser spent several years in the 1970s conducting a detailed study on the annexation. Richmond had long served as a hub for the South’s slave trade, and by the mid-20th century, old money still ran the city and much of Virginia. Whites wanted to keep it that way. “After all, Richmond was the Queen of the Confederacy,” Dennis said. “Richmond was special. And, for many Whites, that specialness did not include having Blacks attain political power.”
If you’d like to suggest a longread to show up here, go chip in a couple bucks on the ol’ Patreon.
Picture of the Day
This is stuff you actually see at the ocean! Wild!
