I just read a letter to the editor in last week’s edition about the racial equity training being offered to our educators and children. The writer posed the question of whether or not such training being available (and to whatever degree, mandated) was the institutionalizing of racism in the schools.

Now, I’m not always the brightest bulb on the tree, so maybe that’s why I don’t understand that logic.

How is training people to be sensitive to the various ways racism already shows up in our society be institutionalizing something? It seems the antithesis of that to me.

It seems to me that insensitivity to the impact of the ways racism does exist, and the over-sensitivity to even the barest suggestion that racism exists at all, are the baselines such training is designed to address.

The training in question merely opens up the opportunity for us to examine our own relationship to racial equity and has us look for ways of behaving that leave all parties respected and with the same opportunities regardless of race.

How exactly is this a problem? Sounds like the very thing I want my kids, and their teachers, to be looking at today more than ever.

Any candidate supporting that thinking has my vote.

— Aaron Hendon