RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/revisiting-classics-at-princeton

I have written recently about the Princeton classics department’s decision to eliminate the requirement that students engaging closely with Latin and Greek texts be able to … read them in Latin and Greek. The new idea is that the department will attract more majors by opening up to ideas from students who may be full of beans but just not inclined to tackle complex, ancient languages. And sub rosa, the idea is clearly – as we can see from words in the official statement like underrepresented, perspectives, and experiences – that of especial interest will be black students, especially in light of today’s racial reckoning which the department openly acknowledges was the primary spur for this change.

My disappointment with this decision is because it is part of a tradition of arguments that we do black people a favor by exempting them from certain kinds of faceless, put-up-or-shut-up challenges to entry. Back in the aughts, the classic example was brilliant, fierce black lawyers confidently arguing that because black firefighter applicants don’t do as well on the entrance exams required for the job, the exams are racist and should be eliminated. More recently there has been the idea that if black kids are rare at top-ranked public schools in New York City like Stuyvesant because few excel on the standardized test one must ace to be admitted, then the solution is to eliminate the test as “racist.” The Princeton decision is a variation: to get black kids into classics, it’s supposedly immoral to expect them to master the intricacies of Latin and Greek, languages which I suppose we can see as foreign, “white” to them as well. Rather, they must be admitted in shining expectation that their class comments will be bracingly “diverse” in good old English.

* * *

My Atlantic colleague Graeme Wood is more sanguine about the Princeton decision. He argues sagely that a certain kind of student happens to enjoy working their way through languages like Latin as a kind of puzzle (I openly admit being that type), but that there are others who don’t go in for that particular task and yet are itching and well-equipped to engage and analyze classical texts regardless. Graeme notes that we do not consider it an educational tragedy that specialists in English history are not required to be able to read Old English. (Although I wonder if this analogy would hold if the idea were someone specializing in England of the first millennium, where all of the relevant linguistic matter was in Old English [and Latin].)

I can go with him here to an extent. On the one hand, as I have argued here, to engage work only in translation is, of course, to lose a lot. Yet, in making that argument here, I was referring to my own reading War and Peace in English, as I myself was not inclined to hack through it in Russian (although my being black was not the reason for this disinclination [couldn’t help it!]). The question is how important we consider that loss to be.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/tonight-social-media-blitz-exposes-campus-racism-sara-dogan/

A cutting-edge social media campaign conducted in April and May by the David Horowitz Freedom Center targeted and exposed the racist and segregationist actions and programming of prestigious colleges and universities taken under the guise of “anti-racism” and Critical Race Theory. Ten prestigious institutions of higher education including Harvard University, the University of Southern California, Georgetown University, and the University of Minnesota were outed for their racist leanings and decisions.  

The universities targeted by the Freedom Center’s campaign were included among the “Most Racist” for varied reasons, but the unifying theme was their allegiance to the new philosophy of Critical Race Theory (CRT), a radical revision of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream that each American be judged “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” While Dr. King and the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s promoted “colorblindness,” CRT pushes the opposite view, that our character and our place in society is predetermined by our skin color.

As Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher Rufo explained recently in an interview with The Atlantic, “Critical race theorists believe that American institutions, such as the Constitution and legal system, preach freedom and equality, but are mere ‘camouflages’ for naked racial domination. They believe that racism is a constant, universal condition: it simply becomes more subtle, sophisticated, and insidious over the course of history. In simple terms, critical race theory reformulates the old Marxist dichotomy of oppressor and oppressed, replacing the class categories of bourgeoisie and proletariat with the identity categories of White and Black. But the basic conclusions are the same: in order to liberate man, society must be fundamentally transformed through moral, economic, and political revolution.”

Guided by this ahistorical revolutionary subtext, America’s colleges and universities have increasingly promoted racially-segregated classes and “anti-racist” training programs which actually endorse racist tropes and promote racial conflict.  To combat this return to Jim Crow, the Freedom Center published a report and created a new website, TopTenRacistUniversities.org, exposing the Top Ten Most Racist Colleges and Universities in America. The social media campaign served to highlight this report and its conclusions and bring them to a wider audience.

Harvard University, #1 on the Freedom Center’s list of most racist universities, was sued for blatant discrimination against Asian applicants in spite of their superior academic achievements, made possible by characterizing their personalities as “lacking” and “one dimensional.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/gender-studies-faculty-side-hamas-richard-l-cravatts/

Seeming to give proof to Orwell’s observation that some ideas are so stupid they could only have been thought of by intellectuals, yet another group of academics—this time faculty in some 120 Gender Studies departments—has, after the latest conflict in Gaza, followed the lead of various student governments, faculty, and other academic organizations by launching yet another attack in the cognitive war against Israel.

With the characteristic pseudo-intellectual babble that currently dilutes the scholarly relevance of the social sciences and humanities, a “solidarity statement” issued by the Palestinian Feminist Collective (PFC) pretentiously announced that “as gender studies departments in the United States, we are the proud benefactors of decades of feminist anti-racist, and anti-colonial activism that informs the foundation of our interdiscipline.” 

“We center global social justice in our intersectional teaching, scholarship, and organizing.,” these moral termagants continued.  “From Angela Davis we understand that justice is indivisible; we learn this lesson time and again from Black, Indigenous, Arab, and most crucially, Palestinian feminists, who know that ‘Palestine is a Feminist Issue.’”

Palestine may be a feminist issue in the addled minds of these academics, but, tellingly, they conveniently make no mention in their statement of the terrorist group Hamas which is singularly responsible for initiating this latest clash with Israel and which commits a war crime each time its militants launch a rocket toward civilian neighborhoods with the intention of murdering Jews. And while these gender studies activists seem so concerned for the emotional and physical welfare of Palestinian women, they do not mention any Israeli women in their statement or commiserate with the reality of living with a genocidal enemy at one’s border. They do not mention mothers of children in southern Israeli towns like Sderot, a frequent Hamas target, where bedrooms have been converted to bomb shelters, residents sometimes have only 15 seconds to seek cover from incoming rockets, and over 40 percent of the town’s children suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of living with the specter of terrorism and possible death clouding daily life.

And, apparently, their virtue-signaling mission to realize “global social justice in [their] intersectional teaching, scholarship, and organizing” has not enabled these gender studies faculty to notice the injustice and violence currently being meted out against Israelis, either as a result of the shower of some 4300 Hamas rockets launched from Gaza in the latest assault with the intention of murdering Jewish civilians, or as part of an ongoing intifada which has claimed the lives of  Israelis who have been injured and murdered by psychopathic Palestinians wielding knives, guns, rocks, incendiary kites, and even automobiles used as weapons.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/critical-race-theorys-marxist-roots-bruce-thornton/

The expanding influence of Critical Race Theory and its Black Live Matter “praxis,” as Marxists call applied theory, has raised concerns about its incoherent pronouncements and illiberal aims. The origins of this ideology is an important question, for CRT has nothing to do with civil rights, or improving black lives or making them “matter.” It’s about increasing its practitioners’ power in our institutions in order to “fundamentally transform” the United States from a country of ordered liberty and limited government, to a “soft” despotic, intrusively regulated technocracy at best, or an illiberal socialist tyranny at worst.

CRT has its roots in Marxism, as one of the founders of BLM has bragged. And, like the Soviet version of Marxism, BLM’s growing influence over our social, educational, political, and corporate institutions––already compromised by a century of progressive ideology, itself a kissing-cousin of Marxism––is an existential danger to the Constitutional safeguards of our political freedom and unalienable rights.

The first Marxist feature is the dubious habit of thought often called the “hermeneutics of suspicion.” This intellectual grift also defines postmodernism in general, and ideological movements like poststructuralism, radical feminism, and postcolonialism, all of which are fellow travelers of Marxism.

This method of analysis assumes that the reality of all social, political, artistic, and other cultural phenomena cannot be known from the public words and actions of social and political institutions, but rather must be found in the deeper, subterranean ideologies of the power elite that runs them.  This “ruling class” shapes political and institutional “discourses” and “knowledge regimes”––the “epiphenomena,” as Marxists call them–– in order to benefit their tyrannical, selfish interests by oppressing others, whom they keep imprisoned in a “false consciousness” that hides from them the true agents and causes of their oppression.

Hence for CRT, all the progress in race relations––the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Brown vs. Board of Education, the growth of the black middle class, the elimination of legal segregation, and the increase in black office-holders including the presidency––are mere “epiphenomena” that have not eliminated the underlying “systemic racism.” According to CRT, this occult “racism” keeps racism alive and accounts for all the “disparate impacts”  that deny “equity” (i.e. the equality of result) to blacks and other minorities, but benefit and reward “white privilege” and “white supremacy” at the expense of black well-being.

Correcting that “false consciousness,” especially “white fragility,” the denial of white “privilege” and “racism,” explains the efforts to include CRT in school curricula from pre-school to university, and in training programs for employees of corporations and the federal and state government agencies so that they interpret their functions from the CRT perspective. The goal is to expose and reform these institutions’ true oppressive nature that is obscured by their duplicitous, self-serving public claims and motives. Hence the “1619 Project,” which has revolutionized and deformed the discipline of American history from grade school to university.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/06/the-coming-backlash-against-woke-public-schools/

Parents have had enough of the politicization of their local schools.

The reports coming out of the school systems of Portland, Ore., and its suburbs are simply terrifying. Children are being taught the narrative that America is fundamentally evil, and the rioters who continue to wreak havoc on that once-beautiful, quiet city are held up as heroes. As Christopher Rufo has reported, “The schools have self-consciously adopted the ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’ as their theoretical orientation, activated through a curriculum of critical race theory and enforced through the appointment of de facto political officers within individual schools.”

And it is working. The schools have become, Rufo notes, “a school-to-radicalism pipeline.”

But it is not just in radicalized Portland or Seattle where these forces hold sway. In my own home county of Loudoun County, Va., the radicals have seized control and plunged with abandon in a radical direction, leaving much of our community gasping at the temerity of their tactics and shuddering at the implications for the future of our community and our nation should they succeed.

Loudoun is the school district that suspended its teacher, Tanner Cross, for having the audacity to speak for one minute at a recent school-board meeting in opposition to a proposed sexual/political mandate. Let that sink in. Before the policy was in place, a highly regarded teacher was suspended for simply disagreeing with a proposed policy.

The legal organization I lead, Alliance Defending Freedom, represents Tanner. I was astounded when, in the midst of a hearing seeking a temporary injunction to reinstate him, which the court granted Tuesday, the school district’s lawyer volunteered the fact that he was the eighth employee in the past two years who has been suspended for out-of-school speech. Apparently, consistently violating the First Amendment rights of its employees makes everything all right in the minds of this school district.

Parents know that the curriculum has recently turned hard to the left. Racial and sexual politics are the prime directive of the school system. Every child will be immersed. And every teacher will recite the party line. No dissenting allowed.

The school district seems oblivious to the fact that they are losing not just conservative parents, but the great bulk of the middle-of-the road families who simply want their children to get a quality academic education.

The leadership of the Loudoun County Public Schools may be woke, but they are blind. They do not seem to see the growing signs of an educational revolution that is stirring in communities all across the nation. Parents have simply had enough of the politicization of their local schools and the attempts to turn their children into young but full-throated activists for the progressive movement.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/06/09/critical-race-theorys-poisonous-roots-trace-back-to-harvard-university/

In the past several months, multiple state legislatures have made moves to ban critical race theory — the latest hot-button issue in contemporary American politics — from their public schools. Activists have opined that critical race theory is either the cure for racial injustice in America or the most dangerous force threatening our democracy.

Plenty of writers have explained the main tenets of the theory, some in great detail. But where did it come from? How did an obscure academic theory come to dominate the national political conversation in only a few years?

The answer to these questions lies in the origins of the theory. Critical race theory emerged from one of America’s foremost institutions: Harvard University. Tracing the history of critical race theory reveals just how intimately connected it is with America’s most prestigious university.

In the wake of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, legal scholars grappled with how the sweeping legislation would affect America’s racial struggles. By the 1970s, it was clear that anti-discrimination law and racial integration had not fully healed the nation’s race relations. This frustrated many civil rights advocates, who after Martin Luther King Jr. died in 1968 lacked a moral lodestar to underpin their faith in American democracy to solve racial problems.

The Road Leads Back to Harvard

Borrowing from Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, who posited a theory of “cultural hegemony” by the capitalist ruling class, a group of Ivy League law professors developed a school of thought called “critical legal studies,” synthesizing Gramsci’s theory of hegemony with racial classification. The most important thinkers of the group of critical legal theorists were all Harvard Law professors: Derrick Bell, Roberto Unger, Duncan Kennedy, and Morton Horwitz.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/author-1619-project-hails-stalinist-cubas-humberto-fontova/

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and fellow Republicans are demanding Pres. Biden’s Education Department block a planned history education proposal that invokes the 1619 Project. “Americans do not need or want their tax dollars diverted from promoting the principles that unite our nation toward promoting radical ideologies meant to divide us,” McConnell wrote. 

“In order to truly be antiracist, you also have to truly be anti-capitalist…the origins of racism cannot be separated from the origins of capitalism. The origins of capitalism cannot be separated from the origins of racism.” — Professor Ibram X. Kendi,  Big Kahuna of Critical Race Theory, which Biden’s Education Dept. wants force-fed to our schoolchildren.

“What Mitch McConnell and others like him want is for our children to get a propagandistic, nationalistic understanding of history that is not about facts…” — Nikole Hannah-Jones, author of The New York Times’ 1619 Project.

And speaking of propaganda vs facts—and of Nikole Hannah-Jones:

“’Education is the cornerstone of the (Cuban) revolution. Nearly everywhere among the magnificent Havana architecture signs speak of equality and liberation through education. An illiterate person is a person prevented from developing his human condition,’ Jorge Gonzales Corona (Cuban Communist apparatchik) told us.” — A euphoric Nikole Hannah-Jones after a Potemkin tour of Stalinist Cuba.

“Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” — Vladimir Lenin. Appropriately enough, Castroite Cuba’s most famous “elite” high school is named for Lenin.  

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/06/san_francisco_teachers_union_embraces_antisemitism.html

Last week, United Educators of San Francisco (i.e., the San Francisco public school teachers’ union) issued a “Resolution in Solidarity with the Palestinian People” and voted to boycott Israel. San Francisco’s Jewish community is unhappy and Jewish parents are worried. Not only is the resolution disgraceful, but it also reflects everything that’s wrong with government unions.

Let me begin by stating my bias. I don’t merely dislike teachers’ unions, I absolutely despise them. As a public-school student in San Francisco in the 1960s and 1970s, I saw how the unions worked to protect bad, even evil, teachers, without regard for students. And as the daughter of a public-school teacher, I got the inside scoop on the increasingly leftist politics driving these unions. (Even worse, back in the day, they didn’t even get a decent salary for teachers. It was all about the predecessors to today’s woke politics.)

I also believe that government unions are inherently corrupt. In the private sector, both management and the unions have skin in the game when they sit down at the negotiating table. They’re negotiating for their own benefit (profits versus wages and job safety), and both have an interest in ensuring that the company survives.

However, when it comes to government unions, the only people with skin in the game – the taxpayers – aren’t at the table. The government representative ostensibly speaks for the taxpayers but the reality is that both the union negotiator and the government representative want to funnel as much money to the union as possible, in exchange for the union funding Democrats.

The Democrats, in turn, ensure that government employees get salaries and benefits far greater than those available in the private sector. It’s a massively corrupt system that has kept Democrats in power even as their policies fail whenever implemented.

So, as I write about the disgraceful, anti-Semitic San Francisco teachers’ union, you know that I come from a place of pure loathing. But even without that loathing, one ask to ask why teachers, whose job is supposed to be teaching San Francisco students reading, writing, and arithmetic are, instead, getting involved in international politics:

The San Francisco teachers union turned its attention away from city schools and toward international conflict, calling for a boycott of Israel in a strongly worded statement that has angered some families and outraged Jewish organizations.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/06/free-speech-in-crisis-at-stanford-law-school/

Stanford University recently threatened a liberal law student’s ability to graduate over a satirical post to an email listserv aimed at the campus chapter of the Federalist Society. Fortunately, the school has now backed down. This is yet another story of academic disciplinary systems run amok against free speech. The hero of this tale is the indispensable Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which fights for student rights to free speech, religious liberty, due process, and freedom of conscience on campuses across the country. Given the political climate on today’s campuses, that means that a lot of FIRE’s work is on behalf of conservative students, but as this case illustrates, FIRE will take on the campus censors to protect speech from all different perspectives.

The chief villain in the story is the university’s cowardly, brain-dead complaint system, the staff of which acted so unreasonably in this case that they even came under fire from the dean of Stanford Law School. The press, interested primarily in score-settling against the Federalist Society, has focused mainly on the involvement of the three law-student officers of the Stanford Federalists in triggering the disciplinary process. Those students did, in fact, have a legitimate reason to be aggrieved — but they crossed a line by invoking the disciplinary machinery of the university. There are lessons all around about how we should go about protecting free speech on campus.

The Riot Act

The controversy began on January 25, a few weeks after the January 6 Capitol Riot. Nicholas Wallace, a third-year student at Stanford Law, created a satirical poster purporting to be a Federalist Society event on “The Originalist Case for Inciting Insurrection.” The event claimed to feature Missouri senator Joshua Hawley (a Stanford alumnus) and Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, hosted by the Stanford Law student chapter of the Federalist Society.

The flyer promised to hand out “riot information” and give out Grubhub coupons, and explained, “Violent insurrection, also known as doing a coup, is a classical system of installing a government. Although widely believed to conflict in every way with the rule of law, violent insurrection can be an effective approach to upholding the principle of limited government.” The flyer took pains to imitate the design and cadence of a Stanford Federalist Society event, down to the logo and formatting. You can see it below:

A modestly careful reader would notice that the event was dated January 6, the date of the riot, rather than a date in the future. Sadly, many people these days are not modestly careful readers.

In a saner time, the flyers would have been posted around the campus. Instead, Wallace posted them to a Stanford email listserv, and the drama escalated from there. Judging from the negative comments he received that day, the people who were immediately offended were thin-skinned left-leaning law students triggered both by the satire and by the very existence of Federalist Society debates on the campus. One wrote, “If cannibalism were a real, widespread fear among people in your society, then I think A Modest Proposal would be inappropriate to email to everyone en masse, under the guise of a legitimate organizational proposal.” There was also discussion of “*why* so many students believed this was a real event.” Another: “To those of you made to feel unsafe by this fictional event, I invite you to likewise reflect on the actual events hosted by the Federalist Society that have threatened our classmates’ wellbeing,” citing speakers critical of DACA and DAPA:

For the sake of “academic freedom,” our undocumented classmates must bear the trauma of attending an institution that welcomes speakers actively working to remove their right to remain in the country…I hesitate to draw the line of what is acceptable discourse at pointing out the Federalist Society’s complicity in this issue, even if done so satirically and at our discomfort. Our policy, as recently reaffirmed by Dean Martinez, is to promote discussion despite discomfort. I ask only that you reflect on the momentary dread you felt as an example of the cost of “academic freedom” we impose on our BIPOC and undocumented classmates.

https://spectator.org/public-schools-gender-radical-reshaping/

Part one of a three-part series on extremist indoctrination in America’s schools.

Extreme ideologies are quickly taking root in U.S. K-12 public schools through new school policies, practices, and curriculums — with devastating effects on students. Unfortunately, Americans are mainly turning a blind eye instead of speaking up against political and social indoctrination that threatens our children’s education and the very fabric of our nation.

One radical development is in the area of sex/gender. Although the terms historically have been used interchangeably, a shift has occurred in recent decades, with sex primarily referring to a biological category or anatomy and gender referring to people’s thoughts or feelings about who they are. Over the past several years, schools have increasingly embraced the cultural redefinition of gender — from male and female to a host of created alternatives. Despite the biological reality of only two distinct sexes, schools embrace, and in some cases actively promote, students questioning and then self-selecting their gender based upon how they feel.

The Gender Unicorn

Starting as early as preschool and kindergarten, taxpayer money is funding radical sex education content. Just one example is the Gender Unicorn (an iteration of the Genderbread Person), a purple cartoon image featuring hearts and rainbows. Adopted in 2016 by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district in Charlotte, North Carolina, Gender Unicorn use has spread nationwide and into Canada. The Washington State ASCD Curriculum in Context Spring/Summer 2020 lists the Gender Unicorn as one of several “educational materials” for teachers. The Alberta Teacher’s Association includes the Gender Unicorn in their 152-page teacher toolkit aimed at cultivating LBGTQ-inclusive classrooms.