Atlanta Teacher Instructs Students Not to Call Each Other 'N***a,' Gets BLM'ed in Media Frenzy

At first glance, if one were to take the media framing and headlines at face value, this story is about a racist white teacher named Mr. Chestnut who used the king of all racial slurs against helpless, diverse high school students, thus perpetuating the scourge of White Supremacy™ that pervades every facet of American life. One would also assume, based on intentional framing, that this is a heroic tale of the brave and stunning community that banded together to fight for racial equity in the tradition of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Running with the headline “‘Not a white people thing’ | Students call for policy after teacher uses N-word,” Atlanta News First explains:

On Wednesday night, parents, students, school leaders and The Beacon Hill Black Alliance for Human Rights in Decatur held a community forum after a teacher used a racial slur in a classroom among students at Decatur High School.

The students said there needs to be a policy in place to ensure teachers are held accountable for using racial slurs in the classroom.

Hundreds of students held a walkout last week after students said their physics teacher, Mr. Chestnut, was suspended from class for one day without pay for saying the n-word three times in front of students.

Three times! It only gets worse! Mr. Chestnut sounds like a real monster.

But when you dig a little more, buried in the seventh paragraph, you get the actual context:

“Two students were saying it back and forth to each other, two Black students, and he was just like… oh you can’t say that, while he was saying the word. Then another student says ‘what did you say?’ The student pulls out the phone and Mr. Chestnut says it again two more times, ‘you can’t say n-word, you can’t say n-word,’ while he was being filmed,” Decatur High School student Lindsey Davis said [member of the Black Student Union].

So, Mr. Chestnut, white patriarch, found himself in the middle of a lesson trying to teach his students physics, when they probably should have had their mouths shut and their ears open, and was interrupted by students calling each other “n***a” (presumably with the soft a). He then reasonably told them that they shouldn’t be calling each other racial slurs – or, at the very least, not to do it while they’re supposed to be learning science. Then some kid pulled out a phone in the middle of class (another violation of classroom decorum) and recorded Mr. Chestnut providing this instruction.

Then, instead of the students getting suspended for disrupting the class by calling each other racial slurs, or for filming on their phones in class, Mr. Chestnut found himself in the middle of a George Floyd-style protest as the perpetrator of a hate crime.

Brave, and stunning.

Black Student Union member Davis explains that black students are totally fine with calling each other “n***a” but when the exact same word escapes white lips, no matter how innocent the context, it’s a travesty of justice:

There’s some Black people that don’t like to say it, there’s some people that find it offensive, and there is some people using it and reapplying it. It has a negative history but they are using it in a positive light to build their community. That’s fine, many people have their relationship with this word. My thing is, this is not a white people thing.

You see, black students interrupting class to address one another with racial slurs is about “building community.”

I went to public school in DeKalb County. If I had a nickel for every time I overheard my black peers “building community” among themselves, I’d be retired at 35 on a French Polynesian private resort. With all that community building going on, you’d expect to see something to show for it, like a modern-day Pantheon or a Magna Carta or whatever.