Mike Hixenbaugh had been a journalist for years, reporting on a variety of topics ranging from education policy to healthcare, the military and other subjects, when one day he discovered a potential story literally in his front yard. It was the summer of 2020, and in response to a local Facebook thread spreading false information about antifa operating in his neighborhood, Hixenbaugh and his wife, who is Black, put up a Black Lives Matter lawn sign in their front yard. The response was prompt: “Every weekend for two months after my wife put the sign up, someone drove their four-wheeler into our yard and did donuts in it, churning up deep divots in the grass.”
At that point, Hixenbaugh realized that something had been happening in his quiet suburb, something that was probably very big – unraveling just what was afoot would be the journalistic work of years, and would ultimately result in his new book, They Came for the Schools.
Looking at the wider phenomenon of conservative pushback against recent cultural movements meant to address things like systemic racism and the rights and inclusion of LGBTQ+ individuals, Hixenbaugh focuses on public schools as a flashpoint. Speaking with one Black mother from Dallas suburb Southlake, he reports that “in exchange for an elite public school education, her children had dealt with near-daily insults – some subtle, some less so – which she said they’d been conditioned to accept as a normal part of life.” The mother, he states, was extremely upset to watch “members of her community rise up in recent months to oppose efforts that she believed would make Carroll safer and more welcoming for children like hers”.
Much of Hixenbaugh’s book focuses on giving voice to the very human toll of this backlash and trying to understand what would motivate people to come out so vigorously against educators and policies intended to make schools a safer place for all. “These are proxies for a much bigger clash in society and what America stands for and is,” he told me via interview. “Groups that have been lobbying for their world view for decades have hitched their wagon to this battle.”
One case that he looks at in detail is that of Em Ramser, who in January 2021 was a 25-year-old, teaching in her first year at Grapevine High School. Prior to writing his book, Hixenbaugh reported on Ramser’s story in great detail, and he came to know her well. “As a queer person who grew up in a community where she was not validated,” he told me, “she wanted to create a classroom that was welcoming.”
Trouble arose for Ramser when one student in particular, who has been assigned male at birth, asked Ramser to identify her as a girl and to go by her chosen name of “Ren”. Soon thereafter, Ramser was shocked to find that Ren had gone missing, choosing to run away from a very religious mother who for years had told Ren her identity was immoral, and who had rejected Ren when she tried to come out.
Ren was eventually returned to her mother, who accused Ramser of attempting to indoctrinate her child with a book titled The Prince and the Dressmaker, a graphic novel that deals with cross-gender themes. After Ren’s mother told her story to a far-right newspaper, Ramser’s inbox began to fill up with hate-laden messages.
“You have this beloved teacher, who is painted as perverted radical political actor,” Hixenbaugh told me. “It was just so far from the reality. When you apply these strategies to a school, you end up harming teachers and students who aren’t playing a political game.”
Ren’s father, who lives in Oregon, was eventually granted custody of his daughter, who eventually began a gender transition via hormone replacement therapy, and according to reports is now living happily as a young woman. Meanwhile in Grapevine, the issue lives on, Ren’s mother becoming a folk-hero of the right; riding her story, far-right candidates had captured control of the school board and had introduced harsh policies meant to curb actions designed to make the school more welcoming for Black and queer students, as well as those from other marginalized groups.
After having her classroom stripped of many of the things that had felt so meaningful to her, Ramser felt terrible. “She was advised not to comment, so she felt voiceless,” said Hixenbaugh. But after talking with the reporter for his story, things changed. “She said this was her chance to reclaim her voice, and this was something she emphasized for her kids, not being silenced. She felt good to have her side out there.”
Hixenbaugh shared that, at times, he could also find himself the victim of the political forces that he reported on. He said that while working on a story on book bans, he interviewed a 17-year-old queer student whose story he included in his piece. “The next day, my phone was blowing up with bullshit messages,” he told me. “They wanted to file a police report against me for soliciting a minor, and they accused me of being a sexual predator. I’ve got a thick skin for the most part, but these accusations of being a child predator, and of calling the police, this was beyond the pale. It knocked the wind out of me.”
In addition to reporting from the front lines of these battles over schools and libraries, They Came for the Schools also goes deeply into the history of these movements, and how contemporary campaigns against things like LGBTQ+ inclusion are reminiscent of earlier battles. “In yearbooks in the 1980s, you can see kids in blackface. Thirty years ago there were these same complaints,” he told me. “Battles over sex ed, integration, and secular humanism were such a powerful wedge in the ’70s and ’80s. You could literally swap ‘critical race theory’ for ‘secular humanism’ into those stories, and it would sound like a current story.”
After years of reporting on these battles, Hixenbaugh and his family eventually made the choice to relocate to an environment that felt safer for them. Their story mirrors many others – according to one estimate, the explosion of anti-LGBTQ+ laws in recent years has led to hundreds of thousands of internal refugees, possibly the largest such involuntary migration in the US since the Dust Bowl. Hixenbaugh fears that if Donald Trump is elected president, his agenda will be “to make America Southlake”, essentially a nationalization of the policies pioneered in states like Florida and Texas. If that were to come true, perhaps there would be nowhere in the US for Hixenbaugh and his family to find a home that feels safe.
They Came for the Schools is published in the US by HarperCollins
