An anti-white video at a pricey private school set off a firestorm By Andrea Widburg
If there’s a silver lining to the COVID madness that swept America, savaged the economy, and allowed Democrats to put Joe Biden in the White House, it’s that a combination of distance learning and leftist hubris meant that the cultural Marxism in America’s classrooms hit home – and nowhere with greater impact than in New York, when upper-middle-class, White leftists discovered that the schools to which they’re paying huge sums annually are dedicated to teaching anti-White racism. The latest example was pricey Spence School, a staple for New York society girls. While the story broke three weeks ago, it’s heated up all over again because furious mothers have rejected the school head’s mealy-mouthed non-apology.
The story first exploded when Gabriela Baron, a first-generation American of Cuban descent, wrote a scorching letter to Spence School explaining why she was pulling her daughter out of the school. As the New York Post explained when the story first came to light,
Hispanic tech exec Gabriela Baron fired off a scorched-earth letter to the prestigious Upper East Side institution last week seething that the video — shown to her eighth-grade daughter and classmates on graduation day — “openly derides, humiliates and ridicules white women.
“They sat there in their graduation dresses while the white mothers of the white students – many of whom volunteer, donate, call, email and do whatever the school asks of them – were tarred and feathered in a video their teacher showed them. While their white female teachers were mocked,” Baron raged in the missive, a copy of which was obtained by The Post.
“Mocked” is an understatement. The “comedian” in the video shown to the class called white women “annoying,” asked white feminists “What percentage of white women do you hate,” adding that “there is a right answer.” She invited four white women named “Karen” on the stage, making sure they and her audience knew that a Karen is “obnoxious, angry and entitled, often racist, white women.” You can read Baron’s entire letter here, where the Daily Mail has screen shots.
Had the school truly apologized, the matter might have ended there. However, the head of the school, Bodie Brizendine, made matters worse by sending a non-apology “apology.” In the first paragraph, Brizendine updated the “Spence Community” about the fact that a parent sent a letter to the Board and other parents “to voice her strong objection a video [sic] shown to 15 students in her daughter’s Grade 8 history class on the last day of school.”
So far so good. It was the second paragraph, which had a non-apology apology and an attempt to downplay a racist video as “satire” that has kept the matter in the spotlight:
This video is not part of the Spence curriculum. Our teacher and the School acknowledge that showing a satirical video that made fun of white women was a significant mistake. We take this seriously. It is never acceptable to ridicule anyone at any time, and this is contrary to everything we know about or mission. We fully trust the professionalism of our dedicated faculty, and we will be strengthening faculty protocols.
We are sorry for any harm this has caused to anyone in our community.
Faced with that letter, more parents than Baron are angry. Instead, a group of them has explicitly rejected Brizendine’s letter:
A furious group of parents at the exclusive Spence School in Manhattan have rejected an apology from embattled Principal Bodie Brizendine over a video shown to students that mocked white women — and are now targeting its board, too.
“While I was upset after hearing what happened at Spence, the email from Bodie that followed really pushed me over the edge,” says a letter recently sent by a parent to the principal and school board — and widely backed by other parents, sources said.
“Further, that the board has not weighed in on this matter gives the impression that the board shares the opinion that racism is indeed acceptable as long as it fits within the climate of the times,” the letter raged.
[snip]
“Choosing to label the video as ‘satirical’ and that it ‘made fun of’ and ‘ridicules’ is a gross understatement,” the parent wrote. “That you ‘fully trust the professionalism of your dedicated faculty and will be strengthening protocols’ is not an acceptable response.”
Nobody is more aggressive in defense of her young than an upper-middle-class woman who feels that a school has failed in its duties. These parents will happily go along with a school’s assurances that it is doing wonderful things for the children in its care. Once that’s shown to be a lie, though, if there’s a betting pool for who will win the battle, I’m putting my money on the angry moms every time.
It’s these moms who need to put the pressure on out-of-control schools and force them back into the understanding of race that dominated in American schools for 50 years: We are not defined by race; we are defined by our character and our actions. End of story.
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