RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-people-vs-critical-race-theory/

There won’t be a second chance to take back hijacked American schools.

With a speed that has astonished ordinary Americans, a vocal minority of “critical race theorists” has blitzed K-12 education with sweeping changes of law and policy. The New York Times’ 1619 Project has been the tip of the spear of their movement to put anti-American narratives of race and power at the heart of American curricula.

Even at the very highest levels of prestige, the examples now are legion. At the Dalton School in New York City, faculty signed a letter with a long list of recommendations, including: yearly anti-racist training for employees, an expanded diversity bureaucracy with at least 12 positions, and employee anti-racism statements. Prestigious exam schools predicated upon admitting excellent students and outstanding staff have been pushed to abandon entrance tests in the name of equity (not to be confused with equality).

Not to be outdone, the Illinois Board of Education recently amended a rule to establish “culturally responsive” teaching standards. The regulations require educators to recognize that there is no one “‘correct’ way of doing or understanding something”; to acknowledge that “systems of oppression…in our society…create and reinforce inequities”; and to “work actively against” those systems in order to “understand how the system of inequity has impacted them as an educator.” The amendment mandates that teachers adopt a narrow political ideology that includes a view of American history, society, and law that most citizens reject. The prioritization of this agenda comes at a time when many students are not even in the classroom.    

Majority Report

The spirit that moved the Illinois Department of Education saturates social media and is omnipresent on elite college campuses. But there is also good news. Despite what the media and the academy would have you believe, the American people think that free speech, equal opportunity under the law, and the principles of the founding should still govern the day-to-day lives of citizens. A recent survey of 800 Illinois residents sponsored by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) strongly suggests that efforts to politicize public education do not align with the values of the majority of citizens. Rather than imposing a partisan agenda through rules and regulations from an agency, citizens should have an informed debate about public school curricula and teaching standards.   

To judge from Illinoisans’ assessment of their K-12 schools, the conversation is overdue. Forty-eight percent of respondents think that schools are doing a “worse than good” job (6 percent answered “excellent”). To improve that number, schools would be well served by focusing on preparing students for lifelong success rather than imposing policies and advocating a socio-political position that is at best controversial. 

https://thefederalist.com/2021/08/04/scoop-california-ymca-hosts-pornographer-to-teach-children-art-holds-youth-only-events/

This article features explicit material unsuitable for all readers.

On July 20th, the Burbank, California YMCA’s Social Impact Center, which also hosts “youth only” events, hosted an all-ages event called “Pop Art,” where Blake Rodriguez, whose work features pornographic depictions of characters from popular children’s shows, delivered a “painting workshop.”

The Social Impact Center, which touts itself as “Burbank’s first and only LGBTQIA+ Resource Center, posted an advertisement for the event and directly tagged Rodriguez’s art account @blakerodart, which prominently displays a number of deeply disturbing images, including a painting titled “Disney Orgy” that features various Disney characters engaged in group sex. 

One piece of Rodriguez’s work depicted characters from the children’s show “Teletubbies” viewing pixelated pornography. Another painting featured a young boy holding a condom and the words “Fuck Boy” above him. 

All of these disturbing images, as well as many more that also depict nude characters from children’s shows, some of them engaging in sexual acts, were posted before the Social Impact Center tagged his art account and organized this event, indicating the YMCA was completely aware of the type of “art” Rodriguez specializes in before deciding to host him for an event with children. 

https://www.city-journal.org/african-american-viewpoint-diversity-in-academia

Has this ever happened to you?

You proudly embrace your individuality and freedom of speech, but you work in an environment in which people who neither know you nor agree with your viewpoints are responsible for representing you solely because they look like you. The world treats these “spokespeople” as the de facto experts on what you are all about; when you express a viewpoint that does not align with theirs, they and their listeners see you as an aberration or a misguided soul. Then people start to see you as inauthentic or a cautionary tale of what can happen when someone does not abide by the rules and mandates of the spokespeople.

It is currently happening to me. I’m black, a professor of rhetoric, my environment is academia, and the aforementioned spokespeople are those who insist that they speak for all black academics, if not all blacks, generally. Though such keepers of black authenticity can be found in many places, they present themselves in my field, rhetoric and composition, as proponents of “black linguistic justice.”

What is “black linguistic justice?” It’s the idea that making black students write in standard English is inherently racist. Black students should be allowed to write in “black English.” A manifesto, titled “This Ain’t Another Statement! This is a Demand for Black Linguistic Justice!” seeks change that it insists will liberate black students from the tyranny of thesis statements and the third-person point of view. The manifesto declares:

As language and literacy researchers and educators, we acknowledge that the same anti-Black violence toward Black people in the streets across the United States mirrors the anti-Black violence that is going down in these academic streets.

The hyperbolic statements and dramatic metaphors (academic streets?) don’t stop there. In a separate preface, a prominent black scholar in my field writes about black linguistic justice immediately in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd:

For too long, our field has tolerated and even supported (tacitly or worse) writing programs and literacy teaching, particularly writing instruction, that accede to linguistic racism, to white linguistic supremacy, a supremacy that has kneed the necks of Black speech and Black writing forms through such pedagogies as code-switching or contrastive analysis or write-this-way-here and yo-own-way-there.

 https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2021/08/04/americas_re-education_camps_788419.html

We rightly criticize and condemn China for sending more than one million Uighurs – Muslims – to “re-education” camps. At the “camps” the Uighurs are “educated” in a process their Chinese elders describe as “washing brains, cleansing hearts, strengthening righteousness and eliminating evil.”

Again, this is sick and wrong, a human rights abuse, something that should disgust us all.

But we have our own, milder, version of “re-education” camps that indoctrinate, all for a supposed good, evolved cause. We call our re-education camps public schools.

Here is one example, from Evanston, right outside of Chicago, of what first and second graders are now “taught” in school:

DEEMAR V. BOARD OF EDUCATION OF THE CITY OF EVANSTON/SKOKIE

This is not a one-off or a rogue teacher. This is the curriculum, endorsed by the superintendent and school board. 

Likewise, teachers are forced to acknowledge that “white identity is inherently racist.” They are actually separated by race during training. And if teachers object or question the practice, the district brands them “racists.”

Students are also separated at times by race. During “Black Lives Matter Week,” the science department is required to teach a lesson called, “Black Women and Unapologetically Black.” Fifth grade teachers are even required to indoctrinate – I mean “teach” – that “color blindness helps racism.”

Teachers are instructed “to disrupt the Western nuclear family dynamic as the proper way to have a family” and instead to promote the “Black Village,” which is a “collective village that takes care of each other.”

Again, this is the curriculum for teaching seven year olds. It covers more than 7,000 kindergarteners through eighth graders attending 15 schools.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/01/when-antiracist-manifestos-become-antiracist-wrecking-balls/617841/

After George Floyd’s killing last spring, protests have flowered on many campuses, and so have manifestos demanding that the schools fully commit themselves to an anti-racist agenda. More are likely as the school restarts and we move into spring. Some may feel that the enlightened course is to simply satisfy these demands out of a commitment to America’s ongoing racial reckoning. However, just as many will see a mismatch between actual conditions on these campuses and the nature and tone of the manifestos, as well as the protest actions usually accompanying them. Administrations must decide where racial reckoning becomes racial wrecking ball, even amid a sincere commitment to addressing racism both open and systemic.

At Princeton last summer, 350 faculty members signed an anti-racist manifesto that described the school as founded upon the pillars of its oppressive past, requiring an overhaul of faculty, curriculum, and admissions procedures to fumigate the campus of an all-permeating racism. Its nearly 50 demands included “exponentially” increasing the number of faculty of color; mandatory anti-racist training focused on identifying participants’ “vulnerability” and fostering “productive discomfort”; rewarding the “invisible work done by faculty of color with course relief and summer salary;” and most controversially, the formation of “a committee composed entirely of faculty that would oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors, incidents, research, and publication on the part of faculty.”

At Bryn Mawr College, anti-racist activists accused of intimidating students and faculty not actively involved in the protest essentially shut down the school last semester. Here, the claim was that Bryn Mawr is infested with a climate of racism that threatens Black students’ survival, and the “strikers,” as they titled themselves, demanded additional funding for the Black student center, a halt to evidently systemic “violence” against disabled students, and payment (as well as grade forgiveness) for protesters’ anti-racist “work” during the “strike.” President Kim Cassidy gave the “strikers” leeway, allowing some professors to cancel their classes or reformulate them into tutorials on anti-racism. Cassidy apologized for characterizing the strikers and their actions in a negative light.

At New York City’s Dalton School, an elite private K–12 prep school traditionally a conduit to the Ivies, 129 faculty and staff members this summer signed a letter circulated among faculty, staff, and parents that was later leaked to the Naked Dollar blog. The letter recommends, among other things, redirecting 50 percent of donations to New York City public schools; the hiring of 12 full-time diversity officers, as well as a full-time supporter of Black students with complaints; the elimination of tracked courses by 2023 if Black students don’t perform as well in them as white students; public anti-racism statements from all employees; and an overhaul of the entire curriculum to reflect diversity narratives.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/04/private-schools-are-indefensible/618078/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

This article was published online on March 11, 2021.

Updated at 7:42 p.m. ET on March 26, 2021.

Dalton is one of the most selective private schools in Manhattan, in part because it knows the answer to an important question: What do hedge-funders want?

They want what no one else has. At Dalton, that means an “archaeologist in residence,” a teaching kitchen, a rooftop greenhouse, and a theater proscenium lovingly restored after it was “destroyed by a previous renovation.”

“Next it’ll be a heliport,” said a member of the local land-use committee after the school’s most recent remodel, which added two floors—and 12,000 square feet—to one of its four buildings, in order to better prepare students “for the exciting world they will inherit.” Today Dalton; tomorrow the world itself.

So it was a misstep when Jim Best, the head of school—relatively new, and with a salary of $700,000—said that Dalton parents couldn’t have something they wanted. The school would not hold in-person classes in the fall. This might have gone over better if the other elite Manhattan schools were doing the same. But Trinity was opening. Ditto the fearsome girls’ schools: Brearley, Nightingale-Bamford, Chapin, Spence.

How long could the Dalton parent—the $54,000-a-kid Dalton parent—watch her children slip behind their co-equals? More to the point, how long could she be expected to open The New York Times and see articles about one of the coronavirus pandemic’s most savage inequalities: that private schools were allowed to open when so many public schools were closed, their students withering in front of computer screens and suffering all manner of neglect?

The Dalton parent is not supposed to be on the wrong side of a savage inequality. She is supposed to care about savage inequalities; she is supposed to murmur sympathetically about savage inequalities while scanning the news, her gentle concern muffled by the jet-engine roar of her morning blowout. But she isn’t supposed to fall victim to one.

In early October, stern emails began arriving in Best’s inbox. A group of 20 physicians with children at the school wrote that they were “frustrated and confused and better hope to understand the school’s thought processes behind the virtual model it has adopted.” This was not a group with a high tolerance for frustration. “Please tell us what are the criteria for re-opening fully in person,” they wrote. And they dropped heavy artillery: “From our understanding, several of our peer schools are not just surviving but thriving.”

Shortly after the physicians weighed in, more than 70 parents with children at the lower school signed a petition asking for the school to open. “Our children are sad, confused and isolated,” they wrote, as though describing the charges of a Victorian orphanage. They were questioning why “everyone around them gets to go to school when they do not.”

Parents at elite private schools sometimes grumble about taking nothing from public schools yet having to support them via their tax dollars. But the reverse proposition is a more compelling argument. Why should public-school parents—why should anyone—be expected to support private schools? Exeter has 1,100 students and a $1.3 billion endowment. Andover, which has 1,150 students, is on track to take in $400 million in its current capital campaign. And all of this cash, glorious cash, comes pouring into the countinghouse 100 percent tax-free.

https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/34/2/social-justice-101-intro-to-cancel-culture

The term “cancel culture” has hurtled into popular use as a way of identifying instances of social justice mobbing—essentially, the attack on a person, place, or thing that is perceived as inconsonant with “woke” ideological narratives. When a “cancel culture” event takes place the complainants demand—and often get—offenders fired, shut down, silenced, or otherwise removed from the public eye.

The students at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, for example, are calling for the removal of a statue of President Lincoln for his apparent mistreatment of Native Americans.1 The San Francisco public school board is making the same accusations against Lincoln, and are attempting to expunge his name from any of their school buildings.2 A long list of examples of cancel culture on campus—the epicenter of the mobbing maelstrom—is provided in Campus Reform’s “Burned: ‘cancel culture’ claims multiple victims in 2020.”

So what’s driving this cultural movement? Where has this new ethic and sense of morality come from? Almost all the modern iterations of leftist ideology we are dealing with in the present come from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who once conveniently summarized the essence of his thought:

The fundamental principle of all morality, upon which I have reasoned in all my writings and which I developed with all the clarity of which I am capable is that man is a being who is naturally good, loving justice and order; that there is no original perversity in the human heart, and the first movements of nature are always good.3

The most important clause to this quotation is “that there is no original perversity in the human heart.” The word original is an allusion to the concept of “original sin,” derived from the biblical Adam and Eve, who committed the first sin by eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil against God’s instructions, thus staining all of humanity thereafter from the moment of conception. Rousseau doesn’t just invalidate original sin, he attributes natural goodness to all human beings, affirming “that man is a being who is naturally good,” that human beings are born pure and are corrupted by society.

By dovetailing the invalidation of original sin with the natural goodness of man corrupted by society, Rousseau created a new ethic for interpreting right and wrong, moving responsibility for evil from the individual to society. As Irving Babbitt, a critic of Rousseau, once explained:

The old dualism put the conflict between good and evil in the breast of the individual, with evil so predominant since the Fall that it behooves man to be humble; with Rousseau, this conflict is transferred from the individual to society.4

Rousseau’s transfer of the struggle for good and evil from the individual to society creates an interesting wrinkle in liberal thought: perfectibility. Man’s flaws and fallen nature are removed and no longer a limitation. Arthur Melzer, a scholar of Rousseau, asserts that because evil comes from without and not from within, “then perhaps it could be overcome by reordering society. In principle, Rousseau opens up radical new hopes for politics . . . that it can transform the human condition, bring secular salvation, make all men healthy and happy.”5 Now that man is devoid of any evil inclination, “the appropriate manipulation of environmental factors can lead to human perfectibility,” and the perfectibility of society as well.6

https://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2021/08/02/the_lefts_crt_straw_man_shows_they_dont_trust_parents_to_teach_morality_110617.html

I taught history in Poland soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union. My students were eager to learn objective truth–something which the Soviet regime abhorred. When I look at the fight over Critical Race Theory (CRT), it reminds me of the party-approved curricula that my students’ parents remembered from the days behind the Iron Curtain. Like the Soviet Ministry of Education’s dogma, CRT is blatantly ideological. It’s no wonder CRT’s proponents are intent on muddying the waters with bad faith arguments. 

And that’s exactly what we saw from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s interview with CNN’s Don Lemon last week. When asked about the pushback against critical race theory, the New York City Congresswoman replied: “Why don’t Republicans want kids to know how to not be racist?”

Parents like myself are stunned by Ocasio-Cortez’s ignorance. Aside from sounding like an activist college student who has yet to reconcile with reality, Ocasio-Cortez reverts to a common straw-man argument. She contends that parents and Republicans don’t want their kids to learn about racism or the history of it in this country. What she is responding to, however, is an argument entirely different from the one reverberating across the country.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/07/teaching-school-children-evil-whiteness-richard-l-cravatts/

In a 1963 interview with Louis Lomax, Nation of Islam spokesman Malcolm X, commenting on white people, said that “The white devil’s time is up . . ,” and that “Anybody who rapes, and plunders, and enslaves, and steals, and drops hell bombs on people . . . anybody who does these things is nothing but a devil.” NOI’s Louis Farrakhan has often repeated the same slur about white people being satanic, and such language has long been part of the organization’s radical, anti-white discourse and ideology.

What is surprising, however, is that this same view—of whiteness being linked to the devil in a satanic pact through which white people are given supremacy, power, and wealth—has made its way into a children’s book used in school districts all over the country.

Written by a white woman, Anastasia Higginbotham, Not my Idea: A Book About Whiteness (Ordinary Terrible Things), at first appears to be an innocuous picture book about race, but its not-so-subtle “anti-whiteness” message is part of the race indoctrination being promoted in public schools as part of critical race theory (CRT) and the ideology which teaches children that white people are irredeemable racist oppressors and blacks are perpetual victims of that oppressive white supremacy and racism. Not My Idea tells the story of a white family in which the white parents shelter their child from the reality of police violence against black people, the suggestion being that white people turn a blind eye to this form of racial injustice and, in not standing up against it and teaching their children to do so also, they are complicit in that injustice and in perpetuating white supremacy.

Higginbotham (pictured above) clearly was inspired by her self-loathing at being white and presents her assumptions as facts for the young readers in her book. “Whiteness is the reason these killings by police happen,” she said in an interview, “the white cultural mindset that tells us white is good and innocent, while Black is bad and dangerous.”

She also has apparently bought into the false and dangerous view, promoted most notably by the Black Lives Matter movement, that white police officers frequently and maliciously kill unarmed black people because of systemic and prevalent racism, a belief, however, that is not actually supported by facts or reality. “Whiteness is the reason cops make split-second decisions to fire their weapons into the body of an unarmed person who is Black,” Higginbotham suggested, “while not even reaching for their weapon during interactions with armed and violent criminals who are white.”

CRT clearly has as its guiding intention to change what Higginbotham referred to as “the white cultural mindset that tells us white is good and innocent, while Black is bad and dangerous.” In fact, CRT and books like this one have as their express purpose to flip this paradigm on its head, so that children are now being indoctrinated with the idea that whiteness is essentially bad, negative, oppressive, cruel, and racist, and that blackness, because of its victim status and as a result of its oppression, is virtuous and innocent. CRT does not teach tolerance by urging school children to be kind to each other and treat each other as equals, which it purports to do, but instead elevates blackness by degrading whiteness, making white people seem to be regressive, intolerant, hateful, and perennially racist as part of their very nature. Thus, CRT is condemned by its critics for branding white children in this way while at the same time telegraphing to black children that they are perpetual victims in a society dominated by whites who are morally defective as a result of their racist core.