My own school district is not immune to this:
In dramatic, urgent language, K-12 schools across the country – both
public and private – professed solidarity with Black Lives Matter and
vowed to dismantle white supremacy, as they scrambled to introduce
anti-racist courses and remake themselves into racism-free zones...
The nation's K-12 schools have been incrementally adopting multiculturalism and ethnic studies
for decades, but such courses have been the exception rather than the
rule. This summer’s Black Lives Matter protests have sparked new level
of commitment, a newfound urgency, and a new trend: anti-racist
pedagogy...
“What’s really different now – and this has been decades in coming –
is talking explicitly about whiteness,” Doucet said, citing a term that
academics and activists use to critique the cultural, political and
economic dominance exercised by Europeans and their descendants.
Doucet, who’s on leave from NYU and working as a program officer at
the William T. Grant Foundation in New York, acknowledged that some of
the content of anti-racist pedagogy may seem militant to those hearing
it for the first time. But, she said, it serves an important purpose:
chronicling the nation’s history from all perspectives, even if those
perspectives conflict with one another.
When you single out one group of people for criticism--we used to call that bigotry, or bias, or dare I say it, racism. But that was then, this is now:
The rapid and radical changes in public and private schools have
triggered a backlash among some parents who find the anti-racist message
to be anti-white and anti-American, and those who say it’s historically
inaccurate, inflammatory and divisive...
Their concern is that the edgy, new educational materials
indoctrinate pupils with identity politics and leftist ideology, and
leave no room for discussion.
“They are using very positive words like diversity, equity and
inclusivity to mislead you, but the message behind these words is
horrifying,” said Elana Yaron Fishbein, a suburban Philadelphia mom who
created the No Left Turn in Education organization. "They
are grouping and stereotyping human being by skin color, and they are
attributing characteristics to your personality based on skin color.”
You know who else groups and stereotypes by skin color, so I hear? The KKK. Just sayin'.
Some parents say that immersing students in the concepts of white
privilege, structural racism and whiteness should be balanced out with
“viewpoint diversity.” They want their kids not only to be exposed to
multiple perspectives but also to be able to freely critique anti-racist
materials, and to form their own opinions
Jerome Eisenberg, a Los Angeles developer of apartments whose
middle-school daughter attends the Brentwood School, said it’s
irresponsible to introduce American history to uninformed students from
the single perspective of race.
“It’s just wrong to present this [material] as true to children who
have no other background in U.S. history,” Eisenberg said. “It causes me
consternation that bright line American heroes like Jefferson and
Lincoln are cast as bad guys.”
Huh, you think?
Anti-racist materials present a mix of themes – an emphasis on
liberation and resistance movements, critiques of whiteness and systemic
racism that come from critical race theory, and an introduction to
other social justice causes. At times, the readings and lessons can take
an unapologetic, even confrontational, stance toward America’s past and
present. But unlike Black History Month, there are few if any mentions
of African Americans who defied the color barrier as athletes, artists,
inventors, scientists or soldiers.
"Critiques of whiteness". Just call that what it is--racism.
This pedagogy runs counter to the educational philosophy of Ian Rowe,
who has run single-sex charter schools in New York City for the past
decade and is the co-founder of Vertex Partnership Academies, which is
opening charter schools in the South Bronx in 2022 that will primarily
attract black and Hispanic students.
Rowe, who is also a resident fellow at the conservative American
Enterprise Institute, said that anti-racist pedagogy glosses over
inconvenient facts, like Africans’ role in the global slave trade, and
promotes a defeatist philosophy fixated on racial oppression,
subjugation and injustice.
“It taps into white guilt and black people’s sense that someone else
is responsible for these problems that I have,” Rowe said. “The way this
stuff plays out, if you are a low-income black kid, after a while you
really start to believe it. You develop a very skewed version of the
country, where you believe everyone is hostile to your efforts and that
white supremacy is so strong that you don’t have the ability to control
your own destiny.”
He is correct. I can imagine that life would be crushing if you felt you had no agency--that's part of the reason I'm a conservative, because people, not government, should have control over their own lives. Lefties like compulsion. Democrats liked owning slaves, Democrats called their party "the white man's party" for decades, and now they want to pretend none of that happened and force conservatives to pay the penance that Democrats should pay. The hypocrisy is almost stifling.
