No one needed thousands of hours of Covid binge-watching to know that the formula for every good cinematic story includes a “Friday[i]” scene. The moment when every resource seems to be expended, when all the lights have gone out, when the enemy appears to be strong and supported and the hero is fatigued and empty and raw. In the best stories, there is always a moment when the chips are down, and everything is on the line.

he downtown street was dark and unfamiliar. There were deep shadows punctuated by yellow streetlamps. I wasn’t sure exactly where I was going, but the sidewalk was mostly empty save for a rather large man ahead of me. The clip of my heels echoed in the silence, and I began to think that leaving my hotel room had been a bad idea. But I wasn’t the only one who was alerted by the sound of my shoes in the dark.

Recently, a Texas school district temporarily banned the works of acclaimed children’s author, Jerry Craft, and canceled the author’s scheduled visit to the school because 30 parents accused the books of promoting Critical Race Theory (CRT) (Beals). The author is Black, and the school serves students in a suburb of the most diverse city in these United States (Alvord).

But why does this incident matter?

When my eldest son was in sixth grade, he ran with the cross-country team at his school. One afternoon, I was parked under the shade of the middle school parking lot waiting for practice to finish, the colors of autumn either creating dappled light above or skipping merrily on a breeze to the pavement below.