“He Taught About White Privilege and Got Fired. Now He’s Fighting to Get His Job Back,” declared a recent EdWeek profile of Matthew Hawn, a tenured veteran teacher of 16 years and high school baseball coach, who was dismissed earlier this year by his local board of education after parents complained when he assigned his students a Ta-Nehisi Coates essay, “The First White President,” and a spoken word poem by Kyla Jenée Lacey, “White Privilege.” In EdWeek’s sympathetic account, it’s the story of an earnest and open-minded teacher who stood up against the forces of racism in his rural Tennessee town and got fired for his conscientiousness.
EdWeek is education’s paper of record and ostensibly non-ideological. But its Capra-esque profile of Hawn buries significant details about his case — and more importantly, his pedagogy — to paint a picture of Hawn as “an early casualty in this year's fight over how teachers can discuss with students America's struggle with racism.”
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