BLM is coming to a school near you: Before diving into introducing children to BLM, school boards — and parents — need to understand the factual and ideological premises behind this movement

School districts across America are voting to include Black Lives Matter in their primary and secondary school curricula. Because whether BLM is taught at all should largely be dependent on how it is taught, it's important to get a handle on the factual and ideological premises behind it.

In a February letter to his staff, Allen Bourff, the superintendent at Indiana's Hamilton Southeastern School, created a firestorm by instructing that BLM should be taught as a political issue, not as a social issue. Some BLM-supporters strongly objected. Indiana's Racial Equity Community Network released a statement: "The Black Lives Matter movement is not an extremist political group, as many white residents asserted in recent complaints to the school board and administration. The BLM movement isn't about politics; it's about humanity."

The BLM website directly contradicts that assertion, aligning with Dr. Bourff's take: "Black Lives Matter is an ideological and political intervention in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise."

Regardless of its counterfactual assertion that black lives are "systematically and intentionally targeted for demise," BLM describes itself as an ideological and political movement. Why should it be treated otherwise?

Some argue that BLM: the organization is different from BLM: the movement. This is a distinction without a difference. Are we, as reasonable, logical adults, to understand and define BLM as something different from how BLM defines itself? If there is a BLM lesson plan, who defines what BLM is, and from which source would he acquire information pertaining to the BLM movement?

Another difficulty in presenting BLM to students at the primary and secondary level is the idea of "systemic racism" that underpins BLM's reason for being. Although BLM does not define systemic racism on its website, we can look to other organizations to fill in the blanks.

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