Last Tuesday, the Prince William County Board of Supervisors and Prince William County School Board were holding a routine joint meeting, when all hell broke loose about 24 minutes into the meeting. See below for video, in which two Republican County Board members – Pete Candland (R-Gainsville District) and Jeanine Lawson (R-Brentsville) – expressed *outrage* that the topic of implicit bias was going to be discussed. Here’s a sample of the freakout.
Supervisor Candland (R): “I don’t think it’s your place to tell the Board of County Supervisors what sort of training we need…Have you seen evidence that you think that this implicit bias is a problem on the Board of County Supervisors?…I think this is frankly highly insulting because you’re insinuating that somehow members of the board of County supervisors hold these implicit biases against different racial groups…I think is highly offensive and inappropriate. The fact that we’re talking about this when we’ve got a global pandemic happening…I find this very disturbing and I object to this type of training in this meeting.”
Supervisor Lawson (R): “So frankly, Ms. Williams, I have a hard time taking you serious that you truly want to work together with people that don’t look like you or think politically like you when you file a DOJ complaint about me because of a vote that I took So I’m not going to sit in a training session. I agree with supervisor Kayla, and I find it offensive that during this historic pandemic, when we’ve got families and teachers and everybody in the school division that are doing everything they can to survive this that you find this a priority when our boards maybe meet twice a year. So I’ll object. Matter of fact, I’m gonna pack up and leave because I’m offended that you find that I need to be trained and that this is also a priority to you…I don’t need the school board to tell our board how we need to be trained any more than I have plans to train you guys on table manners. It’s just, it doesn’t work that way.”
P.S. For more information on Jeanine Lawson, see Video: Prince William County Supervisor Has No Idea Who the Great African-American Sociologist, Civil Rights Activist, Writer, etc. W.E.B. DuBois Was.
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