Franklin High Schooler’s Presentation Stirs Debate on Race in Ohio

An Ohio student’s controversial presentation made waves at an Ohio high school this week, with community members decrying that it used racist and sexist language to illustrate a point about animal cruelty.

“The Franklin City School District is aware of a student presentation that was recently shared on social media and the internet,” Superintendent Michael Sander said in a statement Tuesday. “Regardless of the intent, the presentation includes some offensive slides that the District does not condone. Although state and federal privacy laws prohibit the District from discussing the specific actions we have taken with respect to the student and staff member involved, we want to assure the community that we have taken appropriate action to address the issue and prevent similar actions from occurring in the future.”

The Franklin High School student’s Monday presentation—which The Daily Beast has reviewed—focused on the issue of animal cruelty and attempted to argue that modern society may look back in horror on its cruel treatment of animals, as it has with enslavement and denying women the right to vote.

The first slide of the presentation was titled: “Do women deserve the right to vote?” It then read: “No, they don’t. They deserve to stay at home in the kitchen, taking care of our children, cleaning, cooking, and pleasing me (the man of the house). We can’t [have] a…woman deciding on what man runs the country.”

The second slide posed the question: “Was slavery OK?” and went on: “Yes!!! I mean, Black people are inferior in every way. It’s only fit that they do our bidding. I mean, just look at them. Those hairless monkeys. The fact that I get near them every day disgust[s] me.”

After the first two slides, the student went on to make a point about contemporary society disagreeing with concepts that were once widely believed, comparing that to society’s current treatment of animals.

“It’s pretty hard to listen to the few sentences I said, but that’s just history for you,” the next slide reads. “We, as humans, have made decisions based on our bias[es] and beliefs. For the bad decisions, we look back and think of how dumb we really are.”

The presentation goes on to discuss animal cruelty and abuse.

“The first two slides are absolutely revolting. It’s just horrible,” Superintendent Sander told The Daily Beast. “Unfortunately, nobody can get to the message that the individual was trying to say because you can’t get past those first two slides just being so offensive.”

Images of the presentation popped up on social media, where community members were quick to blast the slides—and insist the “context” shouldn’t matter given the ugly language shared in the classroom.

“As someone whose kid goes to FHS and saw the slides, context doesn’t matter when you see what the kid actually wrote/said in his presentation and the teacher’s reaction/non-reaction,” Toni Ierace wrote in response to a photo of the presentation.

“The problem here is if the student was trying to equate eating meat and dairy products with being a racist or not allowing women to vote,” Lauren Schmidt wrote. “I get that the student was trying to make a point about animal cruelty, but I don’t think that was the best way to go about it.”

Others slammed online critics for not fully understanding the intent of the presentation.

“I don’t know what was on the slides, but [it] sounds like context was thrown out of the window here. Critical thinking is dying a slow death,” Brandon Rutledge posted.

Even the Democratic Party of Warren County, Ohio, weighed in, writing, “We haven’t seen the slides, so we don’t know the [context], but this looks like it’s teaching critical thinking.”

In a comment to The Daily Beast, Warren County Democratic Party Chair Bethe Goldenfield said the presentation compared enslavement and animal cruelty in the “context of a value system” and equated the outrage to the slides to the banning of so-called Critical Race Theory in schools.

“This is an issue that’s happening all over the country…suppressing people from discussing things that make people uncomfortable,” she said. “Talking about slavery is a reality. Talking about the Holocaust is a reality. Talking about women’s suffrage is a reality.”