I am a proud Parkview HS Viking who graduated from Springfield Public Schools, deep in the beautiful Ozarks of southwestern Missouri. It’s part of the Bible Belt area, deeply conservative. Former President Donald Trump last fall carried Greene County (Springfield is the county seat) by a whopping 59 to 39 percent. He won neighboring Christian County 75 to 24 percent and Webster County 79 to 19 percent.

So it was a shock to read reports that Springfield Public Schools is instructing teachers that they are white supremacists for requiring use of the English language or calling police on a black criminal suspect. SPS teacher training also listed such examples of “covert white supremacy” as “education funding from property tax,” “mass incarceration,” “treating kids of color as adults” and the phrase “All lives matter.”

The stated purpose of the more-than-40-slide training deck, obtained by investigative journalist John Solomon (my former boss), is to combat “systemic racism and xenophobia.” It features an “oppression matrix” identifying “privileged” oppressors including “white people,” “male assigned at birth,” “gender conforming CIS men and women,” “heterosexuals,” “rich, upper-class people” and “Protestants.”