RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.thecollegefix.com/black-law-scholar-explains-how-critical-rac

The following is written by Dr. Carol Swain, former political science and law professor at Vanderbilt University. Her essay is adapted from her contribution to the 1776 initiative, which aims to counter the flawed and divisive narrative put forth by The New York Times’ 1619 project.

I reached my formative years before critical race theory and cultural Marxism gained a dominant foothold. Even though I was born and grew up in rural southern poverty during the era of segregation, I was not taught to hate white people or to hate America. Instead, my black teachers stressed our need to work hard and excel. I grew up to be a proud American who never doubted she lived in the greatest country in the world. No one around me encouraged me to see myself as a victim. I never fixated on the fact that I was black, poor, and female. Had I done so, I doubt I would have achieved anything.

The 1619 Project is a misguided effort to keep open historical wounds while telling only half of the story. It is flawed because it is connected to critical race theory and the diversity-inclusion grievance industry that focuses on identity politics and division. Blaming today’s families for the mistakes of our ancestors is not a prescription for unifying the country or empowering racial and ethnic minorities.

Critical race theory is an analytical framework to analyze institutions and culture. Its purpose is to divide the world into white oppressors and non-white victims. Instead of traditional forms of knowledge, it uses personal narratives of marginalized minority “victim” groups (blacks, Hispanics, Asians) as irrefutable “evidence” of the dishonesty of their mostly white heterosexual oppressors. The ultimate goal of this theory’s proponents is to remake society so that the victim class eventually displaces the oppressors and becomes the new ruling class.

Within this framework, white privilege and its unearned benefits are responsible for economic, health care, and social disparities in minority communities. It advances a narrative of blame that declares white America guilty for the plight of blacks. When it comes to education, members of the victim classes do all the teaching. It is a worldview and narrative that commands white people to sit in obedience and listen quietly to the arguments about their unjust gains as well as their obligation to provide a remedy for — in this case, black Americans, whether they are descended from slaves or not.

http://mit.imodules.com/controls/email_marketing/view_in_browser.aspx?sid=1314&gi

To the members of the MIT community,

I am delighted to share the news that Melissa Nobles, the Kenan Sahin Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) and a professor of political science, has agreed to serve as MIT’s next chancellor. She will begin her new role August 18th. 

After earning her undergraduate degree in history from Brown – where she somehow found time to host a jazz radio show on the college station – Melissa headed to Yale for graduate school in political science. Shortly after earning her doctorate, she joined the faculty at MIT. In the years since, she has established herself as a sought-after teacher with a gift for making history come alive; a pioneering scholar on questions of racial and ethnic politics and retrospective justice in society; and a widely respected leader both in her professional associations and in many different roles at MIT.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/blm-bds-bigotry-not-new-ucla-lloyd-billingsley/

“Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, will deliver the 2021 Commencement address for the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs,” the prestigious UC campus announced back on March 30. According to UCLA dean Gary Segura, “Patrisse Cullors is at the heart — and the foundation — of a movement for human rights, social change and genuine equality under the law.” So Patrisse Cullors “is the ideal person to deliver a message of mission to our 2021 graduates.”

What Cullors told the graduates in her June 11 virtual address is hard to find. On the other hand, the Black Lives Matter co-founder drew attention for her 2015 statement at Harvard Law School that “Palestine is our generation’s South Africa, and if we don’t step up boldly and courageously to end the imperialist project that’s called Israel, we’re doomed.” As it happens, a call to abolish the state of Israel is not out of step for UCLA.

Under “Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion” Jerry Kang, UCLA became a safe haven for Jew-hatred.  Groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) enjoyed free reign – and even encouragement – by faculty and administrators. The strongest response to this hatred came not from within UCLA but  from “outside provocateur” David Horowitz.

Posters reading “Students for Justice in Palestine” and “#Jew Haters” began appearing at UCLA. Horowitz called on UCLA to remove campus privileges and funding of SJP because they are a hate group and as such violated UCLA’s “Statement of Principles Against Intolerance.” On April 19, 2016, Jerry Kang responded with a letter to the entire UCLA community.

“Back in November 2015,” Kang wrote, “someone put up hostile posters accusing two student organizations – the Muslim Student Association (MSA) and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) – of being murderers and terrorists.” These were posted anonymously but “an outside provocateur named David Horowitz eventually took credit.” This harkened back to the days when reactionary administrators blamed “outside agitators” for activism they didn’t like.

As the provocateur explained in a letter to Kang, the posters targeted only Students for Justice in Palestine, not the Muslim Students Association. The posters did not accuse SJP of being murderers and terrorists. Horowitz described them as Jew haters “because they support the murderers and terrorists of Hamas, which they do.”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/17/the-inevitable-fruits-of-critical-race-theory/

A black man went on a multistate shooting spree over the weekend. The suspected gunman, Justin Tyran Williams, said he specifically targeted white men in his rampage that left five wounded. “Basically, [Williams] explained throughout his life, specifically white males had taken from him, and also what he described as military-looking white males had taken from him,” Columbus (Georgia) Police detective Brandon Lockhart testified Monday. 

A racially motivated mass shooting would be the number one news story on CNN . . . were the races reversed. But a black man intentionally shooting white men is just not that interesting to those outside of conservative media. 

One could dwell on the lack of coverage or how it’s closer to the average mass shooting than the stereotype pushed by the media. (The majority of mass shooters are actually black.) But the most heinous aspect about this crime is the shooter’s motivation. It would be easy to dismiss it as the fixation of one deranged individual. Antiwhite resentment, however, is actively encouraged by the prevailing ideology in our schools and institutions. Critical race theory wants all of its adherents to think the same way as Justin Tyran Williams. 

Most likely, Williams didn’t learn his violent hatred from critical race theory or in school. But it can’t be denied that CRT teaches that white men take everything from nonwhites and the reason why minorities fail is due to white supremacy. It encourages its adherents to hate whites and possibly even wish violence upon them.

Just take a gander at the latest examples of antiwhite racism promoted by our institutions. The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, a respected outlet in the field of psychology, published an article that claimed “whiteness” is “a malignant, parasitic-like condition” that effectively turns its white hosts into “perverse” monsters who attack non-whites. The article grimly concludes that there is no “permanent cure” for this condition. 

Last week, a Fairfax County, Virginia school board member told graduating high school seniors that they must wage “jihad” against the world of “white supremacy” that surrounds them. 

The prestigious Spence School in New York City shows middle schoolers videos that humiliate and mock white women as racist “Karens,” further encouraging racial animus among minorities and racial guilt among whites.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/17/counterfeit-civics/

The National Association of Scholars opposes the proposal, “Educating for American Democracy.” The proposal has attracted some well-meaning supporters, but they are mistaken about what Educating for American Democracy—EAD—would bring into being.

Roadmap to Educating for American Democracy is a “framework” that prescribes how American K-12 schools should teach civics. That word “framework” is part of EAD’s official self-description, and it deserves a closer look. In this case, the so-called “framework” is really a well-developed plan to impose a politically progressive program of instruction on almost all American students. The framework determines the ideas to be taught and the means by which these ideas would be conveyed and enforced. The content of EAD is antithetical to how the vast majority of Americans understand our country.

Precedents

We have been here before, several times. In the early 1990s, the academic Left hijacked the National History Standards. Under the Left, those “standards” projected a dismal view of the nation’s past, but a public outcry, led by former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Lynne Cheney, prompted a retreat. In January 1995, the U.S. Senate voted 99 to 1 to repudiate those standards.

Though they were officially shelved, the National History Standards retained a strong following among college history professors and a hefty number of high school history teachers. Those educators helped the National History Standards to become a kind of stealth curriculum in many of the nation’s schools, which goes some distance toward explaining the formation of political attitudes among people who attended school in that era. It also contributed to the popularity of works of pseudo-history such as Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.

Among the successors to the National History Standards was the 2014 revision of the College Board’s Advanced Placement U.S. History Standards (APUSH). Twenty years after the 1994 standards were officially set aside, the College Board imposed essentially the same partisan view on the nation’s most important (and most popular) secondary school history curriculum and examination. The National Association of Scholars blew the whistle on this capture-the-flag maneuver, and the College Board officially backed down—though once again, more in appearance than in substance.

Lately, the New York Times’ “1619 Project,” reconfigured by the Pulitzer Center as the centerpiece of a new history curriculum, has been introduced into tens of thousands of classrooms around the country. Controversy has rightly erupted over teaching this body of false premises and fake facts. The National Association of Scholars has been in the thick of this with our “1620” rebuttal.

-https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2021/06/16/biden-doe-

The Department of Education (DOE) under President Joe Biden announced that it would reverse the Trump administration policy on Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. The Biden DOE will effectively flip the meaning of “sex” on its head, determining that “discrimination on the basis of sex” includes discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. This means the DOE sanctions transgender invasions of women’s private spaces and women’s sports in schools, which arguably violate Title IX.

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona defended the new policy by referencing the Supreme Court case Bostock v. Clayton County (2020), in which the Court ruled that discrimination on the basis of “sex” in a 1964 civil rights law included discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. Justice Samuel Alito condemned this notion — which Congress and the president could not have even conceived in 1964 — as “preposterous.”

“The Supreme Court has upheld the right for LGBTQ+ people to live and work without fear of harassment, exclusion, and discrimination – and our LGBTQ+ students have the same rights and deserve the same protections,” Cardona said in a statement on Wednesday. “I’m proud to have directed the Office for Civil Rights to enforce Title IX to protect all students from all forms of sex discrimination. Today, the Department makes clear that all students—including LGBTQ+ students—deserve the opportunity to learn and thrive in schools that are free from discrimination.”

Contrary to Cardona’s rhetoric, however, extending this protection from alleged discrimination to transgender students does not come without a cost. The move merely shifts the burden away from one group and toward another.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/california-public-school-teachers-latest-dupes-richard-l-cravatts/

No sooner than Israel had initiated its campaign to suppress Hamas’s rocket fire from Gaza, resulting in some 3400 rockets targeting southern Israeli towns during the 11-day conflict, than students and faculty at universities around the country began their noxious, though predictable, effort to once again slander the Jewish state, issuing statements of solidarity with the ever-aggrieved Palestinians and denouncing Israel for its alleged aggression, continued ethnic cleansing, oppression, and immorality for the inevitable deaths of Gazan civilians, including children.

The cognitive war against Israel has been waged on university campuses for more than a decade, during which time activist groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine have promoted the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel and have sought to galvanize anti-Israel support—especially at those times when Israel is forced by Palestinian aggression to suppress hostilities in defensive military maneuvers.

But the liberal worldview in which there are oppressors like Israel and oppressed like the Palestinians has seeped into public school systems now, as well, where woke elementary and high school teachers are suffused with concepts of the intersectionality of oppression, post-colonial views of the world, and the Left’s perennial notion that victims are guiltless and hegemonic powers (such as Israel and the United States) are founts of imperialism, militarism, and racism.

On May 19th, as one troubling example, the 6200-member United Educators of San Francisco teacher’s union passed a grotesque “Resolution in Solidarity with the Palestinian People” which, in addition to calling on the Biden administration to end all aid to Israel, denounced Israel’s alleged “forced displacement and home demolitions” of Palestinian Arabs in Jerusalem and its imposition of “a regime of legalized racial discrimination.”  Like many other statements issued during this latest conflict, Israel was denounced as an aggressive, militaristic oppressor whose military capriciously murders Arabs, seemingly without provocation. “Since May 10 the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) has began [sic] an intense campaign of bombing and mortar fire on the territory of Gaza,” the resolution reads, and “nearly 200 people, more than a quarter of them children have been killed. Over 1,300 have been wounded, and 40,000 Gazans have lost their homes.” Conveniently missing from this language, of course, is any mention of Hamas, the terrorist group of psychopaths who have been lobbing rockets and mortars at southern Israeli towns for over 15 years now, some 20,000 of them (and 3400 alone in this latest skirmish), with the express purpose of murdering Jews. The fact that each time Hamas indiscriminately fires one of these rockets into civilian neighborhoods constitutes a war crime has seemingly never occurred to these woke educators, who only condemn Israel’s efforts to defend its citizenry, as any sovereign nation would do, from being murdered by terroristic foes.

https://www.realcleareducation.com/2021/06/14/the_backlash_to_critical_race_theory_is_on_the_way_50031.html

Michelle Goldberg complains in the pages of The New York Times about how it is the left wing that is currently a victim of cancel culture—thanks to the right, which is trying to destroy “critical race theory.”

Sounding alarm at the global counter-movement, she writes that

Critical race theory, the intellectual tradition undergirding concepts like white privilege and microaggressions, is often blamed for fomenting what critics call cancel culture. And so, around America and even overseas, people who don’t like cancel culture are on an ironic quest to cancel the promotion of critical race theory in public forums.

What are some examples of cancellations? Donald Trump’s order to cancel federal critical race theory propaganda, now reversed by the Biden administration, and the state-led fightbacks in Great Britain and France. 

Goldberg is not the only one being swept away in this narrative. Jeffrey Sachs is bitter in the pages of Arc Digital on why the left is the original victim. Apparently, government after government is legislating the woke out of academy. Not just right-wing regimes such as Poland, Hungary, or Brazil, but also Britain, France and, of course, state governments in the United States. 

But is that purge actually happening? Some differences can be seen in K-12 education and higher education, but the rejection of critical race theory, and the supposed threat this rejection represents, is vastly exaggerated. 

Sachs cites Republican leadership targeting critical race theory in the states, such as a proposed New Hampshire bill discussing “harmful divisive concepts,” similar bills in West Virginia and Oklahoma, and bills in Georgia that would bar schools from teaching about pseudoscientific concepts like oppression and privilege. 

Likewise in Arkansas, a bill might be introduced to stop any school from offering anything that foments division between races and classes. Missouri, Arkansas, South Dakota, and Mississippi have introduced bills banning the 1619 Project. Iowa is proposing a ban on the 1619 project, as well as informing parents whenever schools plan on asking pronouns from their children. Goldberg raises similar objections to these proposals. 

A few of those bills have become law, such as H.B. 3979 in Texas, but most have only been proposed, are currently being debated, or have died/been withdrawn.