EDITORIAL: The trials of Mark Robinson

Greensboro’s own Mark Robinson is a lesson in fallacy.

By riding a three-minute, poorly-informed diatribe at a Greensboro City Council meeting into the North Carolina Lieutenant Governor’s office, he exemplifies the Peter Principle, by which a person rises to their level of incompetence.

Robinson, a Grimsley graduate who dropped out of UNCG before becoming a driver for Papa John’s pizza, is the current president of the NC Senate. He sits on four state boards: education, community colleges, economic development and military affairs. He is on the Council of State.

In this role, he has exhibited classic symptoms of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which basically stipulates that stupid people think they’re smart, while smart people know how stupid they are. Robinson’s last brush with formal education was likely a corporate training video for new hires, and yet he’s convinced — and is trying to convince others — that our public schools are hotbeds of leftist indoctrination, especially when it comes to race and even the barest acknowledgement of the LGBTQ+ community.

Robinson, who has meme-ed himself brandishing a Desert Eagle handgun while drinking “leftist tears” from a Trump mug, initiated the FACTS Task Force, basically a snitch form for anyone to report examples of indoctrination in our schools..

Some great reporting by Jeffrey Billman explored the 506 complaints generated by the task force and found that just 3.7 were actual accounts of issues raised by the task force. And just 20 percent were complaints about the teaching of race in schools. But that’s not stopping Robinson, Senate Majority Leader Phil Berger and others to use the data as support for HB324, which forbids teaching the racist history of the United States, among other restrictions.

Here, Robinson illustrates the conundrum of the Black Republican.

Robinson has entrenched himself deeply in the North Carolina GOP. This is the party which has been outwardly hostile to Black voters — even going so far as to gerrymander Black voting districts “with surgical precision” as one federal judge put it, which has attempted to enshrine Confederate monuments, which is actively attempting to whitewash state history with HB234 and other measures, by protecting police who shoot Black people with restrictive body camera laws and dozens of other measures that not only disenfranchise Black people, but at times seem deliberately designed to make Black folks’ lives more difficult.