RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/should-public-schools-ban-critical?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoxNDc5

If you want to understand how Critical Race Theory functions you can’t do much better than watching this recently leaked clip of a teachers’ meeting in Portland, Oregon. Here, an eighth grade teacher (pronouns: “she, her, we and us”) tells her colleagues that “you can’t change your melanin, alright, but you can change your mind.” She compares teachers that don’t adopt “antiracism” to to sex offenders and warns them: “If you’re going to keep with those old views of colonialism it’s going to lead to being fired.”

Is it fair to call this an example of Critical Race Theory? Academics would say absolutely not. They will point out that CRT is, exactly as the name suggests, a theory — one developed in the 1970s by legal scholars to expose the way racism was baked into the structures and systems of American life. 

But the reason that moms and dads across the country are discussing Critical Race Theory at their dinner tables is not because they’ve all just discovered critical theorists like Derrick Bell. It’s because that academic idea — or worldview, really — has captured schools across the country. It’s because it is affecting what their children are taught about America and about themselves.

If you’re new here — welcome! — let me catch you up on a few flashpoints that will give you a sense of what I mean:

An elementary school in Cupertino, California, instructed third graders to rank themselves based on their power and their privilege. 

The San Diego Unified School District told white teachers that they are guilty of “spirit murdering” black children. 

California’s Department of Education is proposing to eliminate opportunities for accelerated math in the name of “equity.” That means discouraging algebra for eighth graders and calculus for high schoolers. 

Most recently, the University of California system decided to scrap the SAT and the ACT on the argument that the tests themselves are biased against low-income applicants of color.

Those are just a handful of examples from California, where I’m currently living. I could pull similar headlines from other public school systems in other states. And this is to say nothing of the country’s private schools: The more elite the school, the more in thrall they are to this ideology, for reasons I explain in depth here.

If you are reading this, I suspect you are disturbed by an ideology that segregates people by race; that insists on a racial hierarchy in which entire racial groups are monolithically good or bad; that does away with race-blind tests in the name of progress; and that insists that any inequality of outcome is evidence of systemic discrimination.

Those are bad ideas at odds with our most foundational American values. On Friday, Andrew Sullivan published an essay arguing that CRT removes the “bedrock of liberalism.” I agree.

The question is: What should be done about it?

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/29/ignoring-the-albino-dhimmi-elephant-in-the-room/

Prior to being shot in the head this week by four brothers in a melee at a wild party, Sasha Johnson, of the British chapter of Black Lives Matter, had big plans for whites. 

Johnson had been “calling for a ‘racial offenders register’ that would see those guilty of ‘microaggressions’ banned from living in multicultural communities and prevented from working in certain industries.”

“If you live in a majority-colored neighborhood you shouldn’t reside there because you’re a risk to those people—just like if a sex offender lived next to a school he would be a risk to those children,” she fulminated.

Johnson’s call for a “racial offenders register” for whites is a perfectly pragmatic application of the critical race theory rot. 

And while critical race theory (CRT) was made-in-America—it has, like many a destructive American creed, been energetically exported around the world. British agitators are certainly improving upon the plans hatched for whites by their brothers-in-arms stateside.  

To wit, Johnson had once pinned a tweet to her profile which read, “The white man will not be our equal, but our slave. History is changing. No justice, no peace #BLM.” 

Believe Johnson and her ilk, for they are deadly serious—and deadly. 

Stateside, there have been some gains in working to outlaw the CRT poison percolating throughout American schools. Tennessee has led the way. Other states have introduced measures to ban or curb anti-white propaganda peddled by the nation’s eager pedagogues. 

Alas, the intellectual means of production remain firmly under the control of progressives. As part of the lucrative “racial-industrial-complex” (a Jack Kerwick coinage), critical race theory enjoys muscular advocates.

Its adversaries, however, are weak and flaccid.

I’ve watched scores on Fox News “argue” against the critical race theory agitprop in education. There’s nothing but humbug from the channel’s holy men and women. Their arguments against the CRT scourge are characterized by a white-out of whites.

Nobody will utter the words “anti-white,” or articulate the “anti-white” essence of critical race theory. CRT is always euphemized as things other than a hatred of whites and a resolve to blacken them. Always.

Weatherize the Kids from Anti-Whiteness

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/princeton-removes-greek-latin-requirement-for-classics-majors-to-combat-systemic-racism/

Classics majors at Princeton University will no longer be required to learn Greek or Latin in a push to create a more inclusive and equitable program, an effort that was given “new urgency” by the “events around race that occurred last summer.”

Last month, faculty members approved changes to the Classics department, including eliminating the “classics” track, which required an intermediate proficiency in Greek or Latin to enter the concentration, according to Princeton Alumni Weekly. The requirement for students to take Greek or Latin was also removed.

Josh Billings, director of undergraduate studies and professor of classics, said the changes, which were approved by faculty last month, will give students more opportunities to major in classics.  

Billings said the changes had been floated before university president Christopher Eisgruber called for addressing systemic racism at the university, but the curriculum shift resurfaced as a priority after the president’s call to action and the “events around race that occurred last summer.”

“We think that having new perspectives in the field will make the field better,” he said. “Having people who come in who might not have studied classics in high school and might not have had a previous exposure to Greek and Latin, we think that having those students in the department will make it a more vibrant intellectual community.” 

Billings said students will still be encouraged to take either language if it is relevant to their interests in the department and that the course offerings remain the same.

A diversity and equity statement on the department’s site says that the “history of our own department bears witness to the place of Classics in the long arc of systemic racism.”

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/05/30/the_civic-education_battles_145849.html

Civic education has emerged as a major front in the bitter clash spilling over into many domains between left and right in America. Since the civic-education battles revolve around the nation’s core principles and fundamental character, they may prove the decisive front.

Education in general and civic education in particular shape students’ understandings of themselves, fellow citizens, the nation, and other nations and peoples. Consequently, the outcome of the raging debate about the content and goal of civic education is bound to have a major effect on America’s ability to secure freedom and protect equality under law, provide economic opportunity and spur growth, revitalize civil society, and defend the free and open international order against antidemocratic and unfree regimes’ ambitions to bend it toward authoritarianism.

Civic education is an old idea. According to the classical tradition rooted in Plato and Aristotle, the whole of education should aim at forming the soul by cultivating the virtues. Education, in this view, involves both the training of the body through disciplined physical exertion and the formation of the mind through study of science and the humanities — not least the principles of one’s own nation’s political order. For the classical tradition, education is civic education.

To a significant extent, the modern tradition of freedom agreed, with the crucial proviso that education’s principal goal was to prepare students for the rights and responsibilities of freedom. Accordingly, liberal education puts study of the principles of a free society at the core of the curriculum. At the same time, liberal education places a good deal more emphasis than did classical education on introducing students to the diversity of views on the great moral, economic, legal, political, philosophical, and religious questions, and on equipping students to think for themselves. Such study — concentrating on great works of literature, history, philosophy, and theology — is part and parcel of civic education well understood because it cultivates the virtues of reasoned inquiry, tolerance, and civility, all of which contribute to good citizenship in a liberal democracy.

Civic education as Americans tend to think of it today involves telltale innovations. Contemporary American educators treat civic education as a specialized undertaking, walling it off from other subjects. They increasingly ascribe to it a participatory component, believing correctly that engagement in political affairs and the life of the community is an important part of citizenship in a free and democratic society while supposing dubiously that schools are well-suited to direct outside-the-classroom action. And for some time now, a large swath of American educators has treated the proposition that the United States is “systemically racist” as civic education’s indisputable premise.