Missouri teachers told ‘white supremacy’ includes ‘all lives matter,’ calling police on blacks Open records release of Springfield, Mo., training materials shows what prompted teacher lawsuit.By John Solomon
Training materials for the Springfield, Mo., school district told teachers they could be engaging in white supremacy simply by insisting the English language be used or calling police on a black suspect, according to records released under a freedom of information request.
The materials, provided to Just the News, include a 40-plus slide training deck that proclaimed its goal was to train teachers on how to address “systemic racism and xenophobia” in the school district and to understand the difference between oppressors and the oppressed. Critics say the slide deck is part of a larger Critical Race Theory curriculum that parents are increasingly rejecting.
It included an “oppression matrix” that identified privileged social groups capable of oppression as including “white people,” “male assigned at birth,” “gender conforming CIS men and women,” “heterosexuals,” “rich, upper-class people” and “Protestants.”
The victims of oppression, the slide stated, included minorities, gays, transgender people, working class and poor Americans.
Instructing teachers that “systemic racism” was a real phenomenon in America, the training defined systemic racism as a system characterized by “public policies, institutional practices, cultural representations, and other social norms that, while not practiced consciously, reinforce and perpetuate racial group inequity.”
“It identifies dimensions of our history and culture that have allowed privileges associated with ‘whiteness’ and disadvantages associated with ‘color’ to endure and adapt over time,” one slide declared.
The training also gave a broad definition of white supremacy as “a culture which positions white people and all that is associated with them (whiteness) as ideal.”
It listed examples of “covert white supremacy” as “calling the police on black people,” “education funding from property tax,” “English-only initiatives,” “mass incarceration,” the term “all lives matters” and “treating kids of color as adults.”
One of the training decks said the preferred term to use for black Americans was “Black” and an acceptable term was “African American” but that a “not acceptable” term was “Negroes.” President Biden recently used the term negro in reference to baseball great Satchel Paige.
The materials, which were used in 2020 when Donald Trump was still president, appear to include a dig at the former president and his White House staff.
A video included in a training deck included a mock of a white supremacist magazine with a headline “now with White House allies.”
The materials emerged after two Springfield, Mo., teachers earlier this summer filed a lawsuit alleging the school district forces employees “to affirm views they do not support, to disclose personal details that they wish to keep private, and to self-censor on matters of public interest,” in the pursuit of becoming “anti-racist educators.”
Kimberly Hermann, general counsel for the Southeastern Legal Foundation that represents the teachers who sued, said the training materials affirm an effort by the school district to force educators to judge people by skin color and not merit.
”School districts like SPS are implementing critical race theory into required teacher trainings in an effort to condition individuals to see only skin color and then pit racial groups against one another,” Herman said. “It is illegal, wrong, and must be stopped.”
The training materials included a slide on cycles of oppression that listed institutions like churches, schools, television, medicine, business, mental health and the legal system as reinforcing oppression on “conscious and unconscious levels.”
You can review some of the materials here:
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