When former Lowell School Committee member Bob Hoey uttered an egregious anti-Semitic slur on local TV last Wednesday, the calls for his resignation were swift and numerous. They came from seemingly every political leader in the city.
Notably absent from the list however was Superintendent Joel Boyd, who released a statement condemning the use of the slur, but not asking for Hoey to resign.
Boyd’s inexplicable failure to demand full accountability from a prominent member of the school system’s leadership did not go unnoticed. So Friday, Boyd joined WCAP’s Teddy Panos to explain his reticence.
Boyd was clear that this was not an oversight or a poor choice of words. He had deliberately chosen not to call for Hoey’s resignation, saying that he was “expressing first and foremost the damage that is caused, as opposed to trying to gravitate towards the headline that people want.”
Rather than focus on Hoey’s openly anti-Semitic language, and the need for him to resign, which Boyd called “an easy out,” Boyd would apparently prefer to point the finger at other racism he sees in the community, which he believes is more important to address.
“I’m unwilling to yield the platform that I have,” Boyd continued, “by simply signing on to a message of resignation without having the more important conversation. … I think what we do as a community post-resignation is even more important than the actions of what one person does.”
Regardless, Boyd said: “If you are someone who believes that … you need to come forward and out yourself, because that’s what’s right to do.”
In fact, anyone who so much as thinks that Boyd’s bizarre defense of Hoey might be in any way self-serving is engaging in an anti-Semitic trope according to Boyd, and that “individuals that have that belief, as I would say, it would be hypocritical of them to call on him to resign if they don’t resign themselves.”
It seems clear that for whatever reason, Boyd would like to deflect criticism from Hoey’s blatant, public use of a slur while serving as a leader of the city’s public schools, by redirecting the conversation to other, more subtle forms of bias that he sees in the broader Lowell community.
Boyd is transparently weaponizing anti-racist terminology against his critics in an effort to create a distraction from Hoey’s flagrant anti-Semitic language and his own lukewarm reaction to it.
Even more disturbing was Boyd’s behavior at the end of the interview.
Before Panos could end the show, Boyd made a point to get personal about a Lowell Sun reporter covering the events, drawing scrutiny multiple times to her Jewish heritage, and suggesting she is potentially being used as a token, saying: “Let’s make sure we’re allowing her to use her voice as a Jewish writer, without tokenizing her as a Jewish writer to Jewish issues.”
Aggressively putting an unsolicited spotlight on the personal ethnic or religious background of a reporter who is covering him does precisely nothing to heal the damage done by his friend Hoey’s words, or move the school community toward justice and resolution.
Moreover, in a time when anti-Semitic hate crimes are at an all-time high and Boyd himself acknowledges in the very same interview how widespread such dangerous attitudes are, making a public show of calling out a journalist’s Jewish heritage on the radio and questioning her news coverage on that basis can only be perceived as an intimidation tactic. How can such language, in what Boyd describes as one of the “the most racist corners of America” not expose a reporter to potential harm?
It is certainly admirable to call for the tough conversations that need to happen to fully address systemic racism and anti-Semitism. However, such conversations cannot take place in an environment where there is not accountability for the most appalling examples of bigotry and casually racist language, and where prominent individuals feel empowered to distract from their own failings by targeting others.
