RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/16/laws-against-critical-race-theory-are-only-the-first-step/

Several state bills and laws working to ban critical race theory (CRT) have excited heavy breathing from the see-no-evil allies of the radical educational establishment. Even purist free-speech advocates such as FIRE have expressed some qualms. So, is every bill working to ban critical race theory perfect?

No, of course not—I say with regret, because what America desperately needs is to evict CRT from its schools and from every private and public institution. The National Association of Scholars and the Civics Alliance have endorsed Stanley Kurtz’s model Partisanship Out of Civics Act (POCA), the source for Texas’ new law H.B. 3979, not just because it also bans the vocational training for community organization known as “action civics,” but precisely because its language to ban CRT is carefully crafted to respect free speech and survive the inevitable legal challenges. 

Notably, the Partisanship Out of Civics Act applies to public K-12 schools rather than to higher education, where constitutional precedent has established a larger sphere of academic freedom. We recommend the model legislations’ language to our colleagues throughout America who wish to rid our public schools of CRT because we believe that its precise language has the greatest ability to achieve real and lasting change.

That doesn’t mean we’re fussed by other bills that were introduced using broader language. The legislative process is supposed to improve bills by thoughtful amendment. So we think it is perfectly reasonable to amend a bill banning the racism of CRT to clarify that a teacher can still teach about racist figures from America’s past, such as eugenicist and founder of Planned Parenthood Margaret Sanger, as well as assign their writings to students. We also think it is wise to amend the scope of blanket prohibitions of CRT to protect academic freedom in higher education. These are reasonable changes in themselves—and they will allow these bills to survive predictable challenges from the CRT advocates.

What this heavy breathing really illustrates is the need for far greater reform of our schools and universities—indeed, of all our public and private institutions—than can be achieved simply by these bills to ban CRT. America confronts institutions whose members are devoted to subverting the spirit of the Civil Rights Act, which long ago declared that “No person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” The latest bills to ban CRT amount to saying, we really mean it, now practice nondiscrimination in good faith. Since the radical establishment that has seized hold of our institutions wishes to discriminate, by CRT, by so-called “anti-racism,” by “diversity, inclusion, and equity,” or by whatever jargon is in fashion, policymakers must face the fact that the radical establishment, to the greatest of its abilities, will treat these laws as dead letters.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/07/strangely_nazilike_talk_at_a_pennsylvania_college.html

Franklin and Marshall is a private college in Lancaster, Pennsylvania whose annual tuition exceeds $63,000 a year.  If the recent “Franklin & Marshall Faculty Statement in Solidarity with Palestine,” as signed by two dozen F&M professors, is in any indicator of the school’s quality, students should look into public universities whose tuition is one third of this or even less.  More to the point is the fact that Godwin’s Law ceases to apply when somebody really does talk like a Nazi.

The letter’s first paragraph refers to “refugees expelled and driven from their homes during the Nakba (1947–49) that accompanied the creation of the state of Israel.”  “Nakba” (catastrophe) does not refer to Israel’s well justified seizure of land in the 1967 war — the third war that its neighbors started or provoked in less than twenty years followed by the one in 1973 that could have started the Third World War.  The Anti-Defamation League explains that pro-Palestinian sources use “Nakba” to depict the creation of Israel as a catastrophe and deny Israel’s right to exist.  That, as opposed to arguments over the subsequently occupied territories, is anti-Semitic.

The truth is that while some Arabs were driven from their homes by Israelis, most fled at the behest of the countries that invaded Israel in 1948 with the openly expressed intention of driving all the Jews into the sea.  “Israel maintains that it is not responsible for the Palestinian refugee problem since it is the result of a war forced on Israel by invading Arab armies.”  The ADL adds accurately that the countries that started the war and were therefore responsible for most of the displacement refused, with the exception of Jordan, to accept their fellow Arabs.  The signatories also leave out the inconvenient fact that roughly 800,000 Jews had to flee nearby countries still in possession of the property they stole from the Jews in question.

The letter continues, “The story of children killed in the most recent Gaza attacks alone reveals the absurd inaccuracy of the ‘evenhandedness’ narrative.”  The story of the children killed in Gaza is the story of Hamas’s use of its own civilians as human shields with the intention of getting them killed so Hamas’s dupes and useful idiots can bleat about how the Israelis murder children.  Some were even killed by Hamas rockets that fell short of Israel.  The Germans (not Nazis, however) behaved far better during the Second World War.  General Frido von Senger took particular care to avoid looking out the windows of the Abbey at Monte Cassino lest he see Allied troops, which would technically turn the Abbey into an “observation post” and therefore a legitimate military target.  He also kept his soldiers and weapons off the premises, entirely in contrast to Hamas.

The letter continues, “The brutal system that controls Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories is ideologically founded upon Jewish supremacy,” which is where it really talks like a Nazi.  “The phrase ‘Jewish supremacy’ can be traced back to Nazi Germany and has been retreaded for use in today’s conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, writes Gil Troy in Newsweek.”  Nobody needs to pay $63,000 a year to learn about Jewish supremacy at Franklin & Marshall when he can get it for free from the Stormfront White Nationalist Community where a Google search brings up more than a thousand links for this topic.  One of the Stormfront pages cites David Duke’s “My Struggle Awakening” (Ku Klux Klansmen can get “woke,” too!), which covers Jewish supremacy in extensive detail, according to the table of contents.  I did not buy a copy because there is no longer a shortage of toilet paper.  Here, meanwhile, is a free online lecture on Jewish supremacy that makes just as much sense.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/14/confronting-teacher-union-twaddle/

Randi Weingarten, the gaffe-prone president of the American Federation of Teachers has outdone herself, and that isn’t easy. In a series of seven open letters over the years, I have playfully chided the union boss about her trove of inane and bizarre musings. But now she has jumped the proverbial shark.

Immediately following the National Education Association’s annual meeting, the American Federation of Teachers held an online conference, which began July 6. As the keynote speaker, Weingarten kicked things off, and most of her 74-minute talk was typical rah-rah teacher union blather, including praise for Joe and Kamala, and the obligatory swipe at The Donald. But late in her talk, the bushwa really kicked in.

At the 60-minute mark, she described a “new culture campaign” that 

some lawmakers (and Fox News) are using to distort history, limit learning and stoke fears about our public schools. 

Let’s be clear: critical race theory is not taught in elementary schools or high schools. It’s a method of examination taught in law school and college that helps analyze whether systemic racism exists—and, in particular, whether it has an effect on law and public policy.

I wonder how Weingarten can make such a bone-jarringly stupid statement when there is a boatload of evidence to the contrary. Just a few of the myriad examples from across the country:

In Buffalo, students are told that “all white people” perpetuate systemic racism, and kindergarteners were forced to watch a video of dead black children, warning them about “racist police and state-sanctioned violence” which might kill them at any time.

The Arizona Department of Education has created an “equity” toolkit, which claims that babies show the first signs of racism at three months old, and that white children become full racists—“strongly biased in favor of whiteness”—by age five.
In Cupertino, CA third-graders are forced to deconstruct their racial identities, then rank themselves according to their “power and privilege.”
The principal of a school in New York City sent white parents a “tool for action,” which tells them they must become “white traitors” and then advocate for full “white abolition.”
In Seattle, there was a training session for teachers in which schools were deemed guilty of “spirit murder” against black students.

The San Diego Unified School District orders their students to “confront and examine your white privilege” and to “acknowledge when you feel white fragility.” Additionally, children are told to “understand the impact of white supremacy in your work.” 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/07/neas-radical-agenda-public-education-richard-l-cravatts/

One positive aspect of the vigorous current debate over critical race theory (CRT) being taught in public schools is that parents and other interested parties have a new awareness of what is being taught in their children’s classrooms. The criticism has also resulted in educators closing ranks against a questioning of their perceived role in promoting a leftist, radical ideology that many think has no place in public school systems.

In a July 6th speech at an American Federation of Teachers (AFT) meeting, Randi Weingarten, the organization’s left-leaning president, defended the teaching about race and pushed back against critics who questioned the educational and moral validity of CRT being part of a school curriculum.

“Let’s be clear,” Weingarten proclaimed, mendaciously, however, “critical race theory is not taught in elementary schools or high schools.” And answering back defiantly to anyone who questioned how the current teaching about race may be divisive rather than educational, she further claimed that “. . . culture warriors are labeling any discussion of race, racism or discrimination as CRT to try to make it toxic. They are bullying teachers and trying to stop us from teaching students accurate history.”

Weingarten and other educators, including local boards across the country, have been walking back their previous vigorous defense of CRT, claiming instead, as she did, that teaching about race and white supremacy is merely “accurate history,” and not part of a campaign to indoctrinate students with an ideological mishmash of racial justice, activism, white police brutality, social and economic disparities between whites and so-called “people of color,’ and a culture of white supremacy in which the privilege of the majority disadvantages and oppresses black victims.

But Weingarten’s protestation aside, the National Education Association (NEA) — with some 1,680,000 members — and other educators groups are not only actively engaged in promoting CRT but are creating learning environments in which students are bombarded with an increasingly radical set of lesson plans, some taught in conjunction with Black Lives Matter at School Week and some part of regular instruction, that teach children a one-sided view of race, law enforcement, class, family structure, crime, and economics—topics that have not heretofore been a central, or even appropriate, part of K-12 education.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/07/14/research_used_to_justify_californias_racial_equity_math_doesnt_add_up_784966.html

Part 1 of a Series on ‘Social Justice’ Research (Part 2 here)

The push to create “equity” and more “social justice” in public schools in America’s largest state rests on this basic premise: “We reject ideas of natural gifts and talents,” declares the current draft of the California Math Framework, which also states that it rejects “the cult of genius.”

Are blacks and girls filtered out of high-end math? Or are students just different?
Katerina Holmes

Informed by that fundamental idea, the 800-page Framework calls for the elimination of accelerated classes and gifted programs for high-achieving students until at least the 11th grade.

It’s a major departure for the Framework, commissioned every seven years by the Department of Education to provide guidance to the state’s 10,315 public schools serving 6 million students. Some California teachers describe it as a misguided “one size fits all” approach to reversing long-standing discrimination against girls and students of color in math instruction.

But the Framework, which could be adopted next year, claims its recommendations are based on the latest, seemingly unimpeachable findings of advanced social science research. Phrases such as “researchers found,” “the research shows” and the “research is clear” are sprinkled through the Framework, which states unequivocally: “The research is clear that all students are capable of becoming powerful mathematics learners and users.” If true, this evidence would provide a powerful rationale for adopting the Framework’s proposals, which, given California’s size and prestige, is commonly seen as a model for other states.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/07/the_end_of_critical_race_theory.html

Critical Race Theory is liable to end for reasons very similar to the reasons the Salem witch trials ended.

In January 1692, nine-year-old Elizabeth (Betty) Parris and 11-year-old Abigail Williams (the daughter and niece of Samuel Parris, minister of Salem Village) began having fits, including violent contortions and uncontrollable outbursts of screaming. After a local doctor, William Griggs, diagnosed bewitchment, other young girls in the community began to exhibit similar symptoms.

A special court, the court of Oyer and Terminer convened in Salem to hear the cases; and based on spectral evidence the first convicted witch, Bridget Bishop, was hanged that June. Eighteen others followed Bishop to Salem’s Gallows Hill, while some 150 more men, women, and children were accused over the next several months. 

Opposition to the trials grew as the family and friends of more and more villagers were accused of witchcraft, including the wife of Governor William Phips.  Governor Phips saved his wife by dissolving the Court of Oyer and Terminer and moving all trials to a higher court. This superior court did not allow “spectral evidence” and, since most of the earlier accused witches had been executed due to this evidence, any remaining witches were all ruled innocent.

The tide is turning against Critical Race Theory as those who endorse it become its victims.  Most teachers and staff of New York schools went along with the CRT craze because they were afraid they would lose their jobs if they spoke out against it.  In fact, even George Davison, the headmaster of New York’s Grace Church school that teaches CRT did not dare admit that he had said in a private conversation with Paul Rossi, a teacher at his school, that “we’re demonizing kids, we’re demonizing white people for being born.”  Instead, Davison accused Rossi of misquoting him.  Rossi released an audio recording proving his account was accurate after which Mr. Davison, perhaps with some persuasion from his school, decided to retire.

https://www.city-journal.org/evanston-critical-race-theory-lawsuit-and-the-non-enforcement-of-civil-rights

Last week, a teacher in Evanston, Illinois, filed a landmark civil rights lawsuit against her school district. Her complaint: the district segregated staff by race for professional development, subjected students to race-shaming “privilege walks,” instructed teachers to take race into account in student discipline, and taught students that treating people equally “helps racism.”

Such practices are, unfortunately, no longer shocking. But even if the public has become inured to such stories of state-sponsored racism, policymakers have yet to grapple fully with the significance of why this lawsuit had to be filed: the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has given up on traditional civil rights enforcement.

The facts of the case are not much in dispute. They were investigated by OCR, which, in January, under the Trump administration, found that “the District engaged in intentional race discrimination by coordinating and conducting racially exclusive affinity groups,” that “the District appears to have deliberately singled out students and other individuals by their race, in order to reduce them to a set of racial stereotypes,” that “the District’s Policy to apparently impose racial discrimination in discipline has no part in federally funded education programs or activities,” and that the district’s “privilege” activities “may have created a racially hostile environment.”

But following President Biden’s Executive Order on Advancing Racial Equity, OCR took the perhaps historically unprecedented step of suspending its own decision. It’s hard to imagine that the Biden administration would have walked back the office’s decision if nonwhite students were being victimized. And it’s equally hard to evade the conclusion that the administration has all but formally decided that the anti-discrimination provisions of the Civil Rights Act do not apply to white students or teachers.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/07/ban-critical-race-theory-from-k-12-classrooms-a-response-to-the-new-york-times/

There can be no credible objection to prohibiting the racially based shaming of children.

O ne of the interesting lexical shifts that took place during the Enlightenment had to do with the way in which we speak about civil magistrates. As the manifold forms of classical liberalism espoused by Locke, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Rousseau began to supplant throne-and-altar autocracies across Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries, political figures ceased to be called “rulers” and began to be called “leaders.”

This change was not a coincidence. Rule, as Harvey Mansfield helpfully pointed out during a recorded conversation with Bill Kristol a few years ago, is the means by which a society is given its particular character by its political institutions. Rulers indoctrinate, enforce, and set the boundaries for acceptable beliefs and behavior in a given polity. It’s always the attempt of the ruler to take his or her country or people in a given direction, and, for that reason, rule is always partisan.

The early classically liberal theorists believed that rule was not a necessary or inevitable feature of human relations. They believed that a primal state of natural freedom and equality among all people could be imagined which preceded the division of people into rulers and ruled, and they thought it possible to construct a political system that would safeguard this primordial condition by allowing each individual to exercise an attenuated form of the natural liberty which he had enjoyed in this “state of nature.”

For these liberals, then, the starting point for thinking about human action was apolitical. Furthermore, they argued that politics should only be introduced voluntarily and always with an eye towards protecting the pre-political freedoms of men and women. This view was in contrast to the older, ancient notion of Aristotle’s that “man is by nature a political animal.” From this Aristotelian perspective, human freedom and equality are thought to be political achievements rather than natural facts. No “state of nature” that pre-exists politics is admitted into this scheme of thought. Politics is inevitable, and so, as a result, is the fact of rule.

All of this might seem needlessly abstract and far removed from the debates roiling the United States today over the bans placed by several states on the teaching of critical race theory in K–12 classrooms, but an understanding of how the ancient and liberal understandings of rule differ is actually indispensable to understanding this conflict.

Earlier this week, the New York Times published a guest essay jointly authored by Kmele Foster, David French, Jason Stanley, and Thomas Chatterton Williams which argued against anti-critical-race-theory laws. The reasoning of the essay is fatally flawed. To understand why, it’s enough to understand the classically liberal conceptual framework within which its argument is made.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/07/keeping-up-with-nikole/

No sooner does the Nikole Hannah-Jones story turn in one direction than it veers in another. My wife has a name for roads in rural Vermont that behave like this. She calls them ziggles, a portmanteau of zigzags and wiggles. You can drive them safely, but it pays not to pick up too much speed between veering one direction and another.

It seems like only yesterday that the esteemed board of trustees at the University of North Carolina voted nine to four to grant tenure to Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the New York Times’ now infamous “1619 Project,” in order to quiet the controversy over the board’s previous decision to award the acclaimed journalist an academic appointment at the Hussman School of Journalism but not to award her tenure. 

Claiming racial discrimination, Hannah-Jones participated in a high-profile campaign demanding that the UNC board change its mind. And lo! It did. On June 30, the board conscientiously reviewed the case and decided, in the words of chairman R. Gene Davis, “to set the record straight.”

That’s an odd way for the road engineers to describe their plotting of a new ziggle. But let Chairman Davis explain: 

Let me be perfectly clear. Our motto is Lux et Libertas, light and liberty. We remain committed to being a light shining brightly on the hill. We embrace and endorse academic freedom, open and rigorous debate and scholarly inquiry, constructive disagreement, all of which are grounded in the virtue of listening to each other.

Academic freedom has been robustly vindicated at UNC by capitulating to a woke mob that threatened the trustees and the university if it didn’t get its way. That’s how things are set straight in Chapel Hill these days. The trustees apparently have been studying Vermont road maps.

Of course, that was last week’s news. This week’s news was Hannah-Jones’ decision, announced on CBS News’ “This Morning” on July 6, that she was declining the UNC offer of a tenured appointment in order to accept the position of the inaugural Knight Chair in Race and Journalism at Howard University.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/07/moral-narcissism-national-education-association-richard-l-cravatts/

On May 19th, the 6200-member United Educators of San Francisco teacher’s union passed a grotesque “Resolution in Solidarity with the Palestinian People,” committing its members to sign on with the anti-Semitic BDS campaign, stating “that UESF endorses the international campaign for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against apartheid in Israel,” thereby becoming the first K-12 teachers’ union in the United States to endorse the BDS movement.

Not to be outdone by its union brethren further north, chapter chairs of the United Teachers Los Angeles, an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers and the second largest teacher’s union in the country, also voted overwhelmingly in May in support of a statement, almost identical to the San Francisco version, that expressed its “solidarity with the Palestinian people and call for Israel to end bombardment of Gaza and stop displacement at Sheikh Jarrah . . , [called] on the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden to stop aid to Israel [and endorsed] the international campaign for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against apartheid in Israel.”

The engagement of public school teachers in activism against the Jewish state continued unabated in June when the 3-million member National Education Association proposed two anti-Israel resolutions, New Business Item 29, which committed the NEA to “publicize its support for the Palestinian struggle for justice and call on the United States government to stop arming and supporting Israel,” and NBI 51, which would create a campaign to “use existing digital communication tools to educate members and the general public about the history, culture, and struggles of Palestinians.”

The rectitude of the NEA educators pushing for condemnations of Israel manifests itself as what has been termed “moral narcissism,” the tendency of members of the well-meaning, intellectual elite to align with causes and ideological positions which are based, not on the actual viability or justice of a cause, but on how the moral narcissist feels about him- or herself by committing to a particular cause or movement.

So, apparently, vilifying Israel and focusing singularly and obsessively on the Jewish state make the NEA’s moral narcissists feel that they are standing up for something important and making a moral cause for a people they see as victimized and oppressed, even when so many much more pressing and tragic social upheavals are taking place around the world. But it is Israel that the NEA puts in its crosshairs.